what The Book of Discipline later set forth for the edification of
Scotland is recommended to England, and is followed by more threatenings
in the familiar style.

England did not follow the advice of Knox: her whole population was not
puritan, many of her martyrs had died for the prayer book which Knox
would have destroyed. His tract cannot have added to the affection which
Elizabeth bore to the author of "The First Blast." In after years, as we
shall see, Knox spoke in a tone much more moderate in addressing the
early English nonconformist secessionists (1568). Indeed, it is as easy
almost to prove, by isolated passages in Knox's writings, that he was a
sensible, moderate man, loathing and condemning active resistance in
religion, as to prove him to be a senselessly violent man. All depends
on the occasion and opportunity. He speaks with two voices. He was very
impetuous; in the death of Mary Tudor he suddenly saw the chance of
bringing English religion up, or down, to the Genevan level, and so he
wrote this letter of vehement rebuke and inopportune advice.

Knox must have given his biographers "medicines to make them love him."
The learned Dr. Lorimer finds in this epistle, one of the most fierce of
his writings, "a programme of what this Reformation reformed should be--a
programme which was honourable alike to Knox's zeal and his moderation."
The "moderation" apparently consists in not abolishing bishoprics, but
substituting "ten bishops of moderate income for one lordly prelate."
Despite this moderation of the epistle, "its intolerance is extreme,"
says Dr. Lorimer, and Knox's advice "cannot but excite astonishment."
{104} The party which agreed with him in England was the minority of a
minority; the Catholics, it is usually supposed, though we have no
statistics, were the majority of the English nation. Yet the only
chance, according to Knox, that England has of escaping the vengeance of