John Knox and the Reformation | Page 5

last Scottish Provincial Council. Though three of the four
Scottish universities were founded by Catholics, and the fourth,
Edinburgh, had an endowment bequeathed by a Catholic, the clerical
ignorance, in Knox's time, was such that many priests could hardly
read.
If more evidence is needed as to the debauched estate of the Scottish
clergy, we obtain it from Mary of Guise, widow of James V., the
Regent then governing Scotland for her child, Mary Stuart. The Queen,
in December 1555, begged Pius IV. to permit her to levy a tax on her
clergy, and to listen to what Cardinal Sermoneta would tell him about
their need of reformation. The Cardinal drew a terrible sketch of the
nefarious lives of "every kind of religious women" in Scotland. They
go about with their illegal families and dower their daughters out of the
revenues of the Church. The monks, too, have bloated wealth, while
churches are allowed to fall into decay. "The only hope is in the Holy
Father," who should appoint an episcopal commission of visitation. For
about forty years prelates have been alienating Church lands illegally,
and churches and monasteries, by the avarice of those placed in charge,
are crumbling to decay. Bishops are the chief dealers in cattle, fish, and
hides, though we have, in fact, good evidence that their dealings were
very limited, "sma' sums."
Not only the clergy, but the nobles and people were lawless. "They are

more difficult to manage than ever," writes Mary of Guise (Jan. 13,
1557). They are recalcitrant against law and order; every attempt at
introducing these is denounced as an attack on their old laws: not that
their laws are bad, but that they are badly administered. {9} Scotland,
in brief, had always been lawless, and for centuries had never been
godly. She was untouched by the first fervour of the Franciscan and
other religious revivals. Knox could not fail to see what was so patent:
many books of the German reformers may have come in his way; no
more was wanted than the preaching of George Wishart in 1543-45, to
make him an irreconcilable foe of the doctrine as well as the discipline
of his Church.
Knox had a sincerely religious nature, and a conviction that he was,
more than most men, though a sinner, in close touch with Him "in
whom we live and move and have our being." We ask ourselves, had
Knox, as "a priest of the altar," never known the deep emotions, which
tongue may not utter, that the ceremonies and services of his Church so
naturally awaken in the soul of the believer? These emotions, if they
were in his experience, he never remembered tenderly, he flung them
from him without regret; not regarding them even as dreams, beautiful
and dear, but misleading, that came through the Ivory Gate. To Knox's
opponent in controversy, Quentin Kennedy, the mass was "the blessed
Sacrament of the Altar . . . which is one of the chief Sacraments
whereby our Saviour, for the salvation of mankind, has appointed the
fruit of His death and passion to be daily renewed and applied." In this
traditional view there is nothing unedifying, nothing injurious to the
Christian life. But to Knox the wafer is an idol, a god "of water and
meal," "but a feeble and miserable god," that can be destroyed "by a
bold and puissant mouse." "Rats and mice will desire no better dinner
than white round gods enough." {10}
The Reformer and the Catholic take up the question "by different
handles"; and the Catholic grounds his defence on a text about
Melchizedek! To Knox the mass is the symbol of all that he justly
detested in the degraded Church as she then was in Scotland, "that
horrible harlot with her filthiness." To Kennedy it was what we have
seen.

Knox speaks of having been in "the puddle of papistry." He loathes
what he has left behind him, and it is natural to guess that, in his first
years of priesthood, his religious nature slept; that he became a priest
and notary merely that he "might eat a morsel of bread"; and that real
"conviction" never was his till his studies of Protestant controversialists,
and also of St. Augustine and the Bible, and the teaching of Wishart,
raised him from a mundane life. Then he awoke to a passionate horror
and hatred of his old routine of "mumbled masses," of "rites of human
invention," whereof he had never known the poetry and the mystic
charm. Had he known them, he could not have so denied and detested
them. On the other hand, when once he had embraced the new ideas,
Knox's faith in them, or in his own form of them, was firm as the round
world, made so fast that it