The gentle Congregation saith that, if the clergy "proceed in their
cruelty," they shall be "apprehended as murderers." "We shall begin that
same war which God commanded Israel to execute against the Canaanites . . . "
This they promise in the names of God, Christ, and the Gospel. Any
one can recognise the style of Knox in this composition. David Hume
remarks: "With these outrageous symptoms commenced in Scotland that
hypocrisy and fanaticism which long infested that kingdom, and which,
though now mollified by the lenity of the civil power, is still ready to
break out on all occasions." Hume was wrong, there was no touch of
hypocrisy in Knox; he believed as firmly in the "message" which he
delivered as in the reality of the sensible universe.

A passage in the message to the nobility displays the intense ardour of
the convictions that were to be potent in the later history of the Kirk.
That priests, by the prescription of fifteen centuries, should have
persuaded themselves of their own power to damn men's souls to hell, cut
them off from the Christian community, and hand them over to the devil,
is a painful circumstance. But Knox, from Perth, asserts that the same
awful privilege is vested in the six or seven preachers of the nascent
Kirk with the fire-new doctrine! Addressing the signers of the godly
Band and other sympathisers who have not yet come in, he (if he wrote
these fiery appeals) observes, that if they do _not_ come in, "ye shall
be _excommunicated_ from our Society, and from all participation with us
in the administration of the Sacraments . . . Doubt we nothing but that
our church, _and the true ministers of the same_, have the power which
our Master, Jesus Christ, granted to His apostles in these words, 'Whose
sins ye shall forgive, shall be forgiven, and whose sins ye shall retain,
shall be retained' . . . " Men were to be finally judged by Omnipotence
on the faith of what Willock, Knox, Harlaw, poor Paul Methuen, and the
apostate Friar Christison, "trew ministeris," thought good to decide!