The Anabaptist whom Knox is discussing had been personally known to him,
and had lucid intervals. "Your chief Apollos," he had said, addressing
the Calvinists, "be persecutors, on whom the blood of Servetus crieth a
vengeance. . . . They have set forth books affirming it to be lawful to
persecute and put to death such as dissent from them in controversies of
religion. . . . Notwithstanding they, before they came to authority,
were of another judgment, and did both say and write that no man ought to
be persecuted for his conscience' sake. . . ." {102a} Knox replied that
Servetus was a blasphemer, and that Moses had been a more wholesale
persecutor than the Edwardian burners of Joan of Kent, and the Genevan
Church which roasted Servetus {102b} (October 1553). He incidentally
proves that he was better than his doctrine. In England an Anabaptist,
after asking for secrecy, showed him a manuscript of his own full of
blasphemies. "In me I confess there was great negligence, that neither
did retain his book nor present him to the magistrate" to burn. Knox
could not have done that, for the author "earnestly required of me
closeness and fidelity," which, probably, Knox promised. Indeed, one
fancies that his opinions and character would have been in conflict if a
chance of handing an idolater over to death had been offered to him.
{102c}

The death of Mary Tudor on November 17, 1558, does not appear to have
been anticipated by him. The tidings reached him before January 12,
1559, when he wrote from Geneva a singular "Brief Exhortation to England
for the Spedie Embrasing of Christ's Gospel heretofore by the Tyrannie of
Marie Suppressed and Banished."

The gospel to be embraced by England is, of course, not nearly so much
Christ's as John Knox's, in its most acute form and with its most