On August 24, the practical consequences of the Confession were set forth
in an Act, by which all hearers or celebrants of the Mass are doomed, for
the first offence, to mere confiscation of all their goods and to
corporal punishment: exile rewards a repetition of the offence: the third
is punished by death. "Freedom from a persecuting spirit is one of the
noblest features of Knox's character," says Laing; "neither led away by
enthusiasm nor party feelings nor success, to retaliate the oppressions
and atrocities that disgraced the adherents of popery." {174c} This is
an amazing remark! Though we do not know that Knox was ever "accessory
to the death of a single individual for his religious opinions," we do
know that he had not the chance; the Government, at most, and years
later, put one priest to death. But Knox always insisted, vainly, that
idolaters "must die the death."

To the carnal mind these rules appear to savour of harshness. The carnal
mind would not gather exactly what the new penal laws were, if it
confined its study to the learned Dr. M'Crie's Life of Knox. This
erudite man, a pillar of the early Free Kirk, mildly remarks, "The
Parliament . . . prohibited, under certain penalties, the celebration of
the Mass." He leaves his readers to discover, in the Acts of Parliament
and in Knox, what the "certain penalties" were. {175} The Act seems, as
Knox says about the decrees of massacre in Deuteronomy, "rather to be
written in a rage" than in a spirit of wisdom. The majority of the human
beings then in Scotland probably never had the dispute between the old
and new faiths placed before them lucidly and impartially. Very many of
them had never heard the ideas of Geneva stated at all. "So late as
1596," writes Dr. Hay Fleming, "there were above four hundred parishes,
not reckoning Argyll and the Isles, which still lacked ministers." "The
rarity of learned and godly men" of his own persuasion, is regretted by