John Knox | Page 9

it is made even more interesting
by the striking rubric with which the writer heads it.
JOHN KNOX, WITH DELIBERATE MIND, TO HIS GOD.
'Be merciful unto me, O Lord, and call not into judgment my manifold
sins; and chiefly those whereof the world is not able to accuse me. In
youth, mid age, and now after many battles, I find nothing in me but
vanity and corruption. For, in quietness I am negligent; in trouble
impatient, tending to desperation; and in the mean [middle] state I am
so carried away with vain fantasies, that alas! O Lord, they withdraw
me from the presence of thy Majesty. Pride and ambition assault me on
the one part, covetousness and malice trouble me on the other; briefly,
O Lord, the affections of the flesh do almost suppress the operation of
Thy Spirit. I take Thee, O Lord, who only knowest the secrets of hearts,
to record, that in none of the foresaid do I delight; but that with them I
am troubled, and that sore against the desire of my inward man, which
sobs for my corruption, and would repose in Thy mercy alone. To the
which I clame [cry] in the promise that Thou hast made to all penitent
sinners (of whose number I profess myself to be one), in the obedience
and death of my only Saviour, our Lord Jesus Christ. In whom, by Thy

mere grace, I doubt not myself to be elected to eternal salvation,
whereof Thou hast given unto me (unto me, O Lord, most wretched and
unthankful creature) most assured signs. For being drowned in
ignorance Thou hast given to me knowledge above the common sort of
my brethren; my tongue hast Thou used to set forth Thy glory, to
oppugne idolatry, errors, and false doctrine. Thou hast compelled me to
forespeak, as well deliverance to the afflicted, as destruction to certain
inobedient, the performance whereof, not I alone, but the very blind
world has already seen. But above all, O Lord, Thou, by the power of
Thy Holy Spirit, hast sealed unto my heart remission of my sins, which
I acknowledge and confess myself to have received by the precious
blood of Jesus Christ once shed; in whose perfect obedience I am
assured my manifold rebellions are defaced, my grievous sins purged,
and my soul made the tabernacle of Thy Godly Majesty--Thou, O
Father of mercies, Thy Son our Lord Jesus, my only Saviour, Mediator,
and Advocate, and Thy Holy Spirit, remaining in the same by true faith,
which is the only victory that overcometh the world.'[12]
This window into the heart of a great man is not less transparent
because it opens upwards. Its revelation of an inner life, with the
alternations proper to it of struggle and victory, will receive
confirmation as we go on. As we go on too we shall be arrested by the
intense personal sympathy which Knox showed in helping those around
him who were still weaker and more tempted than himself--a sympathy
in which many will find a surer proof of the existence of a life within,
than even in this record of his deliberate and devotional mind. What
this record now suggests to us is that the personal life which it reveals
had a foundation in some personal and moral crisis. The truth and light
came to him when he was 'drowned in ignorance,' and the change
cannot have originated in any fancy as to his own predestination, or in
any foresight by himself of his own public services. The foundation, as
it is put by Knox, was deeper, and was, in his view, common to him
with all Christian men. It is a transaction of the individual with the
Divine, in which the man comes to God by 'true faith.' And this faith is,
or ought to be, absolute and assured, simply because it is faith in the
offer and promise of God himself in his Evangel. This was the teaching
of Wishart, as it had been of Patrick Hamilton before him. It was the

teaching which Hamilton had derived from Luther, and Wishart from
both Luther and the Reformers of Switzerland. Later on, when the
minor differences between the two schools of Protestantism had
declared themselves, it might fairly be said that Knox, and with him
Scotland, founded their religion not so much (with Luther) on the
central doctrine of immediate access to God through his promise, as
(with Calvin) on the more general doctrine of the immediate authority
of God through his word. But the former--the Evangel--was the original
life and light of the Reformation everywhere, and its glow as of 'glad
confident morning' now flushed the whole sky of Western Europe.[13]
Knox himself always preached it, and on the day before his death he let