John Knox and the Reformation. Lang Andrew

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СКАЧАТЬ put down, a blow to true religion. We have no evidence that Knox stimulated the rising, but he alludes once to his exertions in favour of the Princess Elizabeth. The details are unknown.

      In July, apparently, Knox printed his “Faithful Admonition to the Professors of God’s Truth in England,” and two editions of the tract were published in that country. The pamphlet is full of violent language about “the bloody, butcherly brood” of persecutors, and Knox spoke of what might have occurred had the Queen “been sent to hell before these days.” The piece presents nothing, perhaps, so plain spoken about the prophet’s right to preach treason as a passage in the manuscript of an earlier Knoxian epistle of May 1554 to the Faithful. “The prophets of God sometimes may teach treason against kings, and yet neither he, nor such as obey the word spoken in the Lord’s name by him, offends God.” 52 That sentence contains doctrine not submitted to Bullinger by Knox. He could not very well announce himself to Bullinger as a “prophet of God.” But the sentence, which occurs in manuscript copies of the letter of May 1554, does not appear in the black letter printed edition. Either Knox or the publisher thought it too risky.

      In the published “Admonition,” however, of July 1554, we find Knox exclaiming: “God, for His great mercy’s sake, stir up some Phineas, Helias, or Jehu, that the blood of abominable idolaters may pacify God’s wrath, that it consume not the whole multitude. Amen.” 53 This is a direct appeal to the assassin. If anybody will play the part of Phinehas against “idolaters” – that is the Queen of England and Philip of Spain – God’s anger will be pacified. “Delay not thy vengeance, O Lord, but let death devour them in haste.. For there is no hope of their amendment… He shall send Jehu to execute his just judgments against idolaters. Jezebel herself shall not escape the vengeance and plagues that are prepared for her portion.” 54 These passages are essential. Professor Hume Brown expresses our own sentiments when he remarks: “In casting such a pamphlet into England at the time he did, Knox indulged his indignation, in itself so natural under the circumstances, at no personal risk, while he seriously compromised those who had the strongest claims on his most generous consideration.” This is plain truth, and when some of Knox’s English brethren later behaved to him in a manner which we must wholly condemn, their conduct, they said, had for a motive the mischief done to Protestants in England by his fiery “Admonition,” and their desire to separate themselves from the author of such a pamphlet.

      Knox did not, it will be observed, here call all or any of the faithful to a general massacre of their Catholic fellow-subjects. He went to that length later, as we shall show. In an epistle of 1554 he only writes: “Some shall demand, ‘What then, shall we go and slay all idolaters?’ That were the office, dear brethren, of every civil magistrate within his realm… The slaying of idolaters appertains not to every particular man.” 55

      This means that every Protestant king should massacre all his inconvertible Catholic subjects! This was indeed a counsel of perfection; but it could never be executed, owing to the carnal policy of worldly men.

      In writing about “the office of the civil magistrate,” Knox, a Border Scot of the age of the blood feud, seems to have forgotten, first, that the Old Testament prophets of the period were not unanimous in their applause of Jehu’s massacre of the royal family; next, that between the sixteenth century A.D. and Jehu, had intervened the Christian revelation. Our Lord had given no word of warrant to murder or massacre! No persecuted apostle had dealt in appeals to the dagger. As for Jehu, a prophet had condemned his conduct. Hosea writes that the Lord said unto him, “Yet a little while, and I will avenge the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu,” but doubtless Knox would have argued that Hosea was temporarily uninspired, as he argued about St. Paul and St. James later.

      However this delicate point may be settled, the appeal for a Phinehas is certainly unchristian. The idolaters, the unreformed, might rejoice, with the Nuncio of 1583, that the Duc de Guise had a plan for murdering Elizabeth, though it was not to be communicated to the Vicar of God, who should have no such dealings against “that wicked woman.” To some Catholics, Elizabeth: to Knox, Mary was as Jezebel, and might laudably be assassinated. In idolaters nothing can surprise us; when persecuted they, in their unchristian fashion, may retort with the dagger or the bowl. But that Knox should have frequently maintained the doctrine of death to religious opponents is a strange and deplorable circumstance. In reforming the Church of Christ he omitted some elements of Christianity.

      Suppose, for a moment, that in deference to the teaching of the Gospel, Knox had never called for a Jehu, but had ever denounced, by voice and pen, those murderous deeds of his own party which he celebrates as “godly facts,” he would have raised Protestantism to a moral pre-eminence. Dark pages of Scottish history might never have been written: the consciences of men might have been touched, and the cruelties of the religious conflict might have been abated. Many of them sprang from the fear of assassination.

      But Knox in some of his writings identified his cause with the palace revolutions of an ancient Oriental people. Not that he was a man of blood; when in France he dissuaded Kirkcaldy of Grange and others from stabbing the gaolers in making their escape from prison. Where idolaters in official position were concerned, and with a pen in his hand, he had no such scruples. He was a child of the old pre-Christian scriptures; of the earlier, not of the later prophets.

      CHAPTER VI: KNOX IN THE ENGLISH PURITAN TROUBLES AT FRANKFORT: 1554-1555

      The consequences of the “Admonition” came home to Knox when English refugees in Frankfort, impeded by him and others in the use of their Liturgy, accused him of high treason against Philip and Mary, and the Emperor, whom he had compared to Nero as an enemy of Christ.

      The affair of “The Troubles at Frankfort” brought into view the great gulf for ever fixed between Puritanism and the Church of England. It was made plain that Knox and the Anglican community were of incompatible temperaments, ideas, and, we may almost say, instincts. To Anglicans like Cranmer, Knox, from the first, was as antipathetic as they were to him. “We can assure you,” wrote some English exiles for religion’s sake to Calvin, “that that outrageous pamphlet of Knox’s” (his “Admonition”) “added much oil to the flame of persecution in England. For before the publication of that book not one of our brethren had suffered death; but as soon as it came forth we doubt not but you are well aware of the number of excellent men who have perished in the flames; to say nothing of how many other godly men have been exposed to the risk of all their property, and even life itself, on the sole ground of either having had this book in their possession or having read it.”

      Such were the charges brought against Knox by these English Protestant exiles, fleeing from the persecution that followed the “Admonition,” and, they say, took fresh ferocity from that tract.

      The quarrel between Knox and them definitely marks the beginning of the rupture between the fathers of the Church of England and the fathers of Puritanism, Scottish Presbyterianism, and Dissent. The representatives of Puritans and of Anglicans were now alike exiled, poor, homeless, without any abiding city. That they should instantly quarrel with each other over their prayer book (that which Knox had helped to correct) was, as Calvin told them, “extremely absurd.” Each faction probably foresaw – certainly Knox’s party foresaw – that, in the English congregation at Frankfort, a little flock barely tolerated, was to be settled the character of Protestantism in England, if ever England returned to Protestantism. “This evil” (the acceptance of the English Second Book of Prayer of Edward VI.) “shall in time be established.. and never be redressed, neither shall there for ever be an end of this controversy in England,” wrote Knox’s party to the Senate of Frankfort. The religious disruption in England was, in fact, incurable, but so it would have been had the Knoxians prevailed in Frankfort. The difference between the Churchman and the Dissenter goes to the root of the English character; no temporary triumph of either side СКАЧАТЬ