John Knox | Page 3

even
in a man not naturally of a sympathetic temper. But Knox, as we shall
see, was a man of quick and tender nature, and had rather a passion for
sympathising with those who were not on the other side of the gulf he
thus fixed. And this one-sided incapacity for sympathy must certainly
be connected with his one-sided reticence as to the earlier half of his
own autobiography.
Incapacity to sympathise with persons entangled in a system is one
thing, and disapproval of that system, or even violent rejection of it, is
another. Knox, as is well known, broke absolutely with the church
system in which he was brought up. What was that system, and what
was Knox's individual outlook upon the Church--first, of Western
Europe, and secondly of Scotland?
We know at least that Knox, before breaking with the church system of
mediæval Europe, was for twenty years in close contact with it. And his
was no mere external contact such as Haddington, with its magnificent
churches and monasteries, supplied. It commenced with study, and with
study under the chief theological teacher of the land and the time.

Major was the last of the scholastics in our country. But the energy of
thought of scholasticism, marvellous as it often was, was built upon the
lines and contained within the limits of an already existing church
system. And that system was an authoritative one in every sense. The
hierarchy which governed the Church, and all but constituted it, was
sacerdotal; that is, it interposed its own mediation at the point where
the individual meets and deals with God. But it interposed
correspondingly at every other point of the belief and practice of the
private man, enforcing its doctrine upon the conscience, and its
direction upon the will, of every member of the church. Nor was the
system authoritative only over those who received or accepted it.
Originally, indeed, and even in the age when the faith was digested into
a creed by the first Council, the emperor, himself an ardent member of
the Church, left it free to all his subjects throughout the world to be its
members or not as they chose. But that great experiment of toleration
lasted less than a century. For much more than a thousand years the
same faith, slowly transformed into a church system under the central
administration of the Popes, had been made binding by imperial and
municipal law upon every human being in Europe.
Major, not only by his own earlier writings, but as the representative in
Scotland of the University of Paris, recalled to his countrymen the great
struggle of the Middle Age in favour of freedom--and especially of
church freedom against the Popes. That struggle indeed had Germany
rather than France for its original centre, and it was under the flag of
the Empire that the progressive despotism of Hildebrand and his
successors over the feudal world was chiefly resisted. The Empire,
however, was now a decaying force. Europe was being split into
nationalities; and national churches--a novelty in Christendom--were,
under various pretexts, coming into existence. For the last two centuries
France had thus been the chief national opponent of the centralising
influence of Rome, and the University of Paris was, during that time,
the greatest theological school in the world. As such it had maintained
the doctrine that the church universal could have no absolute monarch,
but was bound to maintain its own self-government, and that its proper
organ for this was a general council. And in the early part of the
fifteenth century, when the schism caused by rival Popes had thrown

back the Church upon its native powers, the University of Paris was the
great influence which led the Councils of Constance and of Basle, not
only to assert this doctrine, but to carry it into effect.
But Major, when Knox met him, represented in this matter a cause
already lost. Even in the previous century the decrees of the reforming
Councils were at once frustrated by the successors of the Popes whom
they deposed, and in this sixteenth century a Lateran Council had
already anticipated the Vatican of the nineteenth by declaring the Pope
to be supreme over Council and Church alike. Even the anti-Papal
Councils themselves, too, were exclusively hierarchical, and
accordingly they opposed any independent right on the part of the laity,
as well as all serious enquiries into the earlier practice and faith of the
Church. So at Constance the Chancellor of Paris, Doctor
Christianissimus as well as statesman and mystic, compensated for his
successful pressure upon Rome by helping to send to the stake,
notwithstanding the Emperor's safe-conduct, the pure-hearted Huss.
The result was that, even before the time of Major, the expectation, so
long cherished by Europe, of a great reform through