John Knox

There were contemporaries, however, especially in the Roman communion, who saw no discernible dividing-line between the two. They read back the worst of the conditions of their own day into the Reformation struggle itself; and represented it as the wrong-headed wranglings of a set of disputatious spirits who, in their pride, perversely propagated their own novelties against the accumulated wisdom of the Christian past. And of them all, the most reprehensible, alike in programme as in temper, was John Knox.

When Carlyle wrote, almost a generation had passed since the scholarship of Thomas McCrie had, by its detailed and faithful reconstruction of the reformer's environment and problems, removed the roots of the old misunderstandings, setting, to quote his own words, John Knox's 'character in a more just light than that in which it has been generally represented, and correcting the erroneous views of it that have long been prevalent.'

It is no matter for wonder therefore that when, at Easter, three lads from East Lothian , accompanied by their tutor, John Knox, a young man of 32, entered the gates it made no ripple on the already troubled waters. The tutor lost no time in resuming the interrupted studies of his charges. In addition to the regular subjects of secondary education there were two separate periods of religious instruction. One was the exposition of the New Testament (whether based on the Vulgate or the English Version we do not know), in which the class had reached the Gospel of John, and Knox resumed this in the chapel of the castle. The other was a Catechism, in which he exercised them in the Parish Church .

Now this raises a question. What was this Catechism? Was it one of John Knox's own construction? Or was it one already in existence? Had it been his own handiwork, the probability is that it would have survived in some amended form as one of the documents of the Scottish Reformation. It could hardly have been Calvin's Genevan Catechism, later to be prescribed in the First Book of Discipline for use in the Scottish Church , for its publication had been too recent.

But it has been too lightly assumed that it was George Wishart who had set John Knox's feet on the road of reformation, and determined his direction. Of Thomas Williams of Athelstaneford who, according to Calderwood, was the first to give John Knox 'any taste of the truth,' we know too little to dogmatise about the precise nature of that truth. But the outspoken joy with which John Knox chronicles the permission to read a vernacular Bible, together with his obvious mastery of it from his earliest days as a preacher, points to the conclusion that his assurance had been drawn directly from its pages. And the close acquaintance with the works of Martin Luther, especially his great commentary on the Galatians, demonstrated in the volume on Justification, which Balnaves and he had produced in their French imprisonment, indicates a mind already kindled by the German Reformation before George Wishart introduced him to the Swiss. The Catechism, therefore, may have been Luther's own, or one of the many published in various parts of Germany by Luther's express wish.

Faced at times with points beyond his power to answer, he had been furnished with written answers from John Knox, which drove Dean Annand to his last refuge, the authority of the Church 'which authority [said he] damned all Lutherans and heretics; and, therefore, he needeth no further disputation.' At this point Knox, being present, raised his voice for the first time in the controversy, denying authority to a Church so corrupt as that synagogue of Satan in which the Dean held office, and thus concluding, 'I offer myself, by word or writ, to prove the Roman Church this day further degenerate from the purity which was in the days of the Apostles, than was the Church of the Jews from the ordinance given by Moses, when they consented to the innocent death of Jesus Christ.'