last absence, may have
been friends of an older standing. Certainly they were, of all his
female correspondents, the least personally favoured. He treats them
throughout in a comprehensive sort of spirit that must at times have
been a little wounding. Thus, he remits one of them to his former
letters, "which I trust be common betwixt you and the rest of our
sisters, for to me ye are all equal in Christ."[82] Another letter is a
gem in this way. "Albeit," it begins, "albeit I have no particular
matter to write unto you, beloved sister, yet I could not refrain to
write these few lines to you in declaration of my remembrance of you.
True it is that I have many whom I bear in equal remembrance before God
with you, to whom at present I write nothing, either for that I esteem
them stronger than you, and therefore they need the less my rude
labours, or else because they have not provoked me by their writing to
recompense their remembrance."[83] His "sisters in Edinburgh" had
evidently to "provoke" his attention pretty constantly; nearly all his
letters are, on the face of them, answers to questions, and the answers
are given with a certain crudity that I do not find repeated when he
writes to those he really cares for. So when they consult him about
women's apparel (a subject on which his opinion may be pretty correctly
imagined by the ingenious reader for himself) he takes occasion to
anticipate some of the most offensive matter of the "First Blast" in a
style of real brutality.[84] It is not merely that he tells them "the
garments of women do declare their weakness and inability to execute the
office of man," though that in itself is neither very wise nor very
opportune in such a correspondence, one would think; but if the reader
will take the trouble to wade through the long, tedious sermon for
himself, he will see proof enough that Knox neither loved, nor very
deeply respected, the women he was then addressing. In very truth, I
believe these Edinburgh sisters simply bored him. He had a certain
interest in them as his children in the Lord; they were continually
"provoking him by their writing"; and, if they handed his letters about,
writing to them was as good a form of publication as was then open to
him in Scotland. There is one letter, however, in this budget, addressed
to the wife of Clerk-Register Mackgil, which is worthy of some further
mention. The Clerk-Register had not opened his heart, it would appear,
to the preac