capture her in Holyrood. Here were promises of tumults. There were also
signs of a renewed feud between the house of Hamilton and the Stewart
Earl of Lennox, the rival claimant of the crown. There seems, moreover,
to have been some tumultuary image-breaking. {78}

Knox may have been merely timid: he is not certain, but his delay passed
in consulting the learned, for the satisfaction of his conscience, and
his confessed doubts as to whether Christianity should be pushed by civil
war, seem to indicate that he was not always the prophet patron of modern
Jehus, that he did, occasionally, consult the Gospel as well as the
records of pre-Christian Israel.

The general result was that, from October 1557 to March 1558, Knox stayed
in Dieppe, preaching with great success, raising up a Protestant church,
and writing.

His condition of mind was unenviable. He had been brought all the way
across France, leaving his wife and family; he had, it seems, been met by
no letters from his noble friends, who may well have ceased to expect
him, so long was his delay. He was not at ease in his conscience, for,
to be plain, he was not sure that he was not afraid to risk himself in
Scotland, and he was not certain that his new scruples about the
justifiableness of a rising for religion were not the excuses suggested
by his own timidity. Perhaps they were just that, not whisperings either
of conscience or of Satan. Yet in this condition Knox was extremely
active. On December 1 and 17 he wrote, from Dieppe, a "Letter to His
Brethren in Scotland," and another to "The Lords and Others Professing
the Truth in Scotland." In the former he censures, as well he might,
"the dissolute life of (some) such as have professed Christ's holy
Evangel." That is no argument, he says, against Protestantism. Many