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.