But even here Knox was preparing for Scotland, and facing the difficulties of the future, theoretical as well as practical. In his first year abroad he consulted Calvin and Bullinger as to the right of the civil "authority" to prescribe religion to his subjects— in particular, whether the godly should obey "a magistrate who enforces idolatry and condemns true religion," and whom should they join "in the case of a religious nobility resisting an idolatrous sovereign." In August 1555 he visited his native country and found the queen-mother, Mary of Lorraine, acting as regent in place of Mary, queen of Scots, now being brought up at the court of France. Knox was allowed to preach privately for six months throughout the south of Scotland, and was listened to with an enthusiasm which made him break out, "0 sweet were the death which should follow such forty days in Edinburgh as here I have had three!" Before leaving he even addressed a letter to the regent, urging her to favour the Evangel. She accepted it jocu larly as a "pasquil," and Knox on his departure was condemned and burned in effigy. But he left behind him a "Wholesome Coun sel" to Scottish heads of families, reminding them that within their own houses they were "bishop and kings," and recommend ing the institution of something like the early apostolic worship in private congregations. Knox, though in exile, seems to have been henceforward the chief adviser of the Protestant lords ; and before the end of 1557 they, under the name of the "Lords of the Congregation," had entered into the first of the religious "bands" or "covenants" afterwards famous. In 1558 he pub lished his "Appellation" to the nobles, estates and commonalty against the sentence of death recently pronounced upon him, and along with it a stirring appeal "To his beloved brethren, the Commonalty of Scotland." urging that the care of religion fell to them also as being "God's creatures, created and formed in His own image," and having a right to defend their conscience against persecution. About this time, indeed, the regent showed a remarkable degree of toleration, but next year she forbade the reformed preaching in Scotland. A rupture ensued at once, and Knox appeared in Edinburgh on May 2, 1559 "even in the brunt of the battle." He was promptly "blown to the horn" at the Cross there as an outlaw, but escaped to Dundee, and commenced public preaching in the chief towns of central Scotland. At Perth and at St. Andrews his sermons were followed by the destruction of the monasteries. But while he notes that in Perth the act was that of "the rascal multitude," he was glad to claim in St. An drews the support of the civic "authority." Edinburgh was still doubtful, and the queen regent held the castle ; but a truce between her and the lords for six months to Jan. 1, 156o was arranged on the footing that every man there "may have freedom to use his own conscience to the day f oresaid"—a freedom interpreted to let Knox and his brethren preach publicly and incessantly.
Scotland, like its capital, was divided. Both parties lapsed from the freedom-of-conscience solution to which each when un successful appealed ; both betook themselves to arms ; and the immediate future of the little kingdom was to be decided by its external alliances. Knox now took a leading part in the transac tion by which the friendship of France was exchanged for that of England. He had one serious difficulty. Before Elizabeth's accession to the English crown, and after the queen mother in Scotland had disappointed his hopes, he had published a treatise against what he called "The Monstrous Regiment (regimen or government) of Women." Elizabeth never forgave him ; but Cecil corresponded with the Scottish lords, and their answer in July 1559, in Knox's handwriting, assures England not only of their own constancy, but of "a charge and commandment to our posterity, that the amity and league between you and us, con tracted and begun in Christ Jesus, may by them be kept invio lated for ever." The league was promised by England ; but the army of France was first in the field, and towards the end of the year drove the forces of the "congregation" from Leith into Edinburgh, and then out of it in a midnight rout to Stirling— "that dark and dolorous night," as Knox long afterwards said, "wherein all ye, my lords, with shame and fear left this town," and from which only a memorable sermon by their great preacher roused the despairing multitude into new hope. Their leaders renounced allegiance to the regent ; she died in the castle of Edinburgh ; the English troops, after the usual Elizabethan delays and evasions, joined their Scots allies ; and the French embarked from Leith. On July 6, i56o, a treaty was at last made, nominally between Elizabeth and the queen of France and Scotland; while Cecil instructed his mistress's plenipotentiaries to agree "that the government of Scotland be granted to the nation of the land." The revolution was in the meantime complete. Knox, who takes credit for having done much to end the enmity with Eng land which was so long thought necessary for Scotland's inde pendence, was destined, beyond all other men, to leave the stamp of a more inward independence upon his country and its history.
At the first meeting of the Estates, in August 156o, the Protes tants were invited to present a confession of their faith. Knox
and three others drafted it, and were present when it was offered and read to the parliament, by whom it was approved. The Scots confession, Calvinist rather than Lutheran, remained for two centuries the authorized Scottish creed, though in the first in stance the faith of only a fragment of the people. Yet its approval became the basis for three acts passed a week later; the first abolishing the pope's authority and jurisdiction in Scotland; the second, rescinding old statutes which had established and enforced that and other Catholic tenets; the third, inflicting heavy penalties, with death on a third conviction, on those who should celebrate mass or even be present at it. The reformer and his friends could no longer be described as, in Knox's words, "requiring nothing but the liberty of conscience, and our religion and fact to be tried by the word of God." Already "in our towns and places reformed," as the Confession puts it, there were local or "particular kirks," and these grew and spread and were provincially united, till, in the last month of this memorable year, the first General Assembly of their repre sentatives met, and became the "universal kirk," or "the whole church convened." It had before it the plan for church govern ment and maintenance, drafted in August at the same time with the Confession, under the name of The Book of Discipline, and by the same framers. Knox was even more clearly in this case the chief author, and he had by this time come to desire a much more rigid Presbyterianism than he had sketched in his "Whole some Counsel" of 1555. In planning it he seems to have used his acquaintance with the "Ordonnances" of the Genevan Church under Calvin, and with the "Forma" of the German Church in ' London under John Laski (or A. Lasco). Starting with "truth" contained in Scripture as the church's foundation, and the Word and Sacraments as means of building it up, it provides ministers and elders to be elected by the congregations, with a subordinate class of "readers," and by their means sermons and prayers each "Sunday" in every parish. In large towns these were to be also on other days, with a weekly meeting for conference or "prophesy ing." The "plantation" of new churches is to go on everywhere under the guidance of higher church officers called superintend ents. All are to help their brethren, "for no man may be per mitted to live as best pleaseth him within the Church of God." And above all things the young and the ignorant are to be instructed, the former by a regular gradation or ladder of parish or elementary schools, secondary schools and universities. Even the poor were to be fed by the Church's hands; and behind its moral influence, and a discipline over both poor and rich, was to be not only the coercive authority of the civil power but its money. Knox had from the first proclaimed that "the teinds (tithes of yearly fruits) by God's law do not appertain of neces sity to the kirkmen." And this book now demands that out of them "must not only the ministers be sustained, but also the poor and schools." But Knox broadens his plan so as to claim also the property which had been really gifted to the Church by princes and nobles—given by them indeed, as he held, without any moral right and to the injury of the people, yet so as to be Church patrimony. From all such property, whether land or the sheaves and fruits of land, and also from the personal prop erty of burghers in the towns, Knox now held that the state should authorize the kirk to claim the salaries of the ministers, and the salaries of teachers in the schools and universities, but above all, the relief of the poor—not only of the absolutely "indigent" but of "your poor brethren, the labourers and handworkers of the ground." For the danger now was that some gentlemen were already cruel in exactions of their tenants, "requiring of them whatever before they paid to the Church, so that the papistical tyranny shall only be changed into the tyranny of the lords or of the laird." The danger foreseen alike to the new Church, and to the com monalty and poor, began to be fulfilled a month later, when the lords, some of whom had already acquired, as others were about to acquire, much of the Church property, declined to make any of it over for Knox's magnificent scheme. It was, they said, "a devout imagination." Seven years afterwards, however, when the contest with the Crown was ended, the kirk was expressly acknowledged as the only Church in Scotland, and jurisdiction given it over all who should attempt to be outsiders ; while the preaching of the Evangel and the planting of congregations went on in all the accessible parts of Scotland. Gradually too stipends for most Scottish parishes were assigned to the ministers out of the yearly teinds; and the Church received—what it re tained even down to recent times—the administration both of the public schools and of the Poor Law of Scotland. But the victorious rush of 156o was already somewhat stayed, and the very next year raised the question whether the transfer of intoler ance to the side of the new faith was as wise as it had at first seemed to be successful.