the right use of the Lord's Table, so do eat the body and drink the blood
of the Lord Jesus that He remains in them and they in Him . . . in such
conjunction with Christ Jesus as the natural man cannot comprehend."

This is a highly sacramental and confessedly mystical doctrine, not less
unintelligible to "the natural man" than the Catholic theory which Knox
so strongly reprobated. Alas, that men called Christian have shed seas
of blood over the precise sense of that touching command of our Lord,
which, though admitted to be incomprehensible, they have yet endeavoured
to comprehend and define!

A serious task for Knox was to draw up, with others, a "Book of the
Policy and Discipline of the Kirk," a task entrusted to them in April
1560. In politics, till January 1561, the Lords hoped that they might
induce Elizabeth (then entangled with Leicester, as Knox knew) to marry
Arran, but whether "Glycerium" (as Bishop Jewel calls her) had already
detected in "the saucy youth" "a half crazy fool," as Mr. Froude says, or
not, she firmly refused. She much preferred Lord Robert Dudley, whose
wife had just then broken her neck. The unfortunate Arran had fought
resolutely, Knox tells us, by the side of Lord James, in the winter of
1559, but he already, in 1560, showed strange moods, and later fell into
sheer lunacy. In December died "the young King of France, husband to our
Jezebel--unhappy Francis . . . he suddenly perished of a rotten ear . . .
in that deaf ear that never would hear the truth of God" (December 5,
1560). We have little of Knox's poetry, but he probably composed a
translation, in verse, of a Latin poem indited by one of "the godly in
France," whence he borrowed his phrase "a rotten ear" (aure putrefacta
corruit).

"Last Francis, that unhappy child,