to him, and were made the chosen companions of
his leisure if they were at hand, or encouraged and comforted by letter
if they were afar.

It must not be forgotten that Knox had been a presbyter of the old
Church, and that the many women whom we shall see gathering around him,
as he goes through life, had probably been accustomed, while still in
the communion of Rome, to rely much upon some chosen spiritual director,
so that the intimacies of which I propose to offer some account, while
testifying to a good heart in the Reformer, testify also to a certain
survival of the spirit of the confessional in the Reformed Church, and
are not properly to be judged without this idea. There is no friendship
so noble, but it is the product of the time; and a world of little
finical observances, and little frail proprieties and fashions of the
hour, go to make or to mar, to stint or to perfect, the union of
spirits the most loving and the most intolerant of such interference.
The trick of the country and the age steps in even between the mother
and her child, counts out their caresses upon niggardly fingers, and
says, in the voice of authority, that this one thing shall be a matter
of confidence between them, and this other thing shall not. And thus it
is that we must take into reckoning whatever tended to modify the social
atmosphere in which Knox and his women friends met, and loved and
trusted each other. To the man who had been their priest, and was now
their minister, women would be able to speak with a confidence quite
impossible in these latter days; the women would be able to speak, and
the man to hear. It was a beaten road just then; and I daresay we should
be no less scandalised at their plain speech than they, if they could
come back to earth, would be offended at our waltzes and worldly
fashions. This, then, was the footing on which Knox stood with his many
women friends. The reader will see, as he goes on, how much of warmth,
of interest, and of that happy mutual dependence which is the very gist
of friendship, he contrived to ingraft upon this somewhat dry
relationship of penitent and confessor.

It must be understood that we know nothing of his intercourse with women
(as indeed we know little at all about his life) until he came to
Berwick in 1549, when he was already in the forty-fifth year of his age.
At the same time it is just possible that some of a little group at
Edinburgh, with whom he corresponded during his