approval of persecution, then almost universal, except among the
Anabaptists (and any party out of power), he was not personally rancorous
where religion was not concerned. But concerned it usually was! He was
the subject of many anonymous pasquils and libels, we know, but he
entirely disregarded them. If he hated any mortal personally, and beyond
what true religion demands of a Christian, that mortal was the mother of
Mary Stuart, an amiable lady in an impossible position. Of jealousy
towards his brethren there is not a trace in Knox, and he told Queen Mary
that he could ill bear to correct his own boys, though the age was as
cruel to schoolboys as that of St. Augustine.

The faults of Knox arose not in his heart, but in his head; they sprung
from intellectual errors, and from the belief that he was always right.
He applied to his fellow-Christians--Catholics--the commands which early
Israel supposed to be divinely directed against foreign worshippers of
Chemosh and Moloch. He endeavoured to force his own theory of what the
discipline of the Primitive Apostolic Church had been upon a modern
nation, following the example of the little city state of Geneva, under
Calvin. He claimed for preachers chosen by local congregations the
privileges and powers of the apostolic companions of Christ, and in place
of "sweet reasonableness," he applied the methods, quite alien to the
Founder of Christianity, of the "Sons of Thunder." All controversialists
then relied on isolated and inappropriate scriptural texts, and Biblical
analogies which were not analogous; but Knox employed these things, with
perhaps unusual inconsistency, in varying circumstances. His "History"
is not more scrupulous than that of other partisans in an exciting
contest, and examples of his taste for personal scandal are not scarce.