[Sidenote: 1558] Before doing so he published his "Appellation" [Sidenote: May 2, 1559] to the nobles, estates and commonalty against the sentence of death recently passed on him.

When he did arrive in Edinburgh, his preaching was like a match set to kindling wood.

Wherever he went burst forth the flame of iconoclasm.

Images were broken and monasteries stormed not, as he himself wrote, by gentlemen or by "earnest professors of Christ," but by "the rascal multitude." In reckoning the forces of revolution, the joy of the mob in looting must not be forgotten.

[Sidenote: May 11] From Perth Knox wrote: "The places of idolatry were made equal with the ground; all monuments of idolatry that could be apprehended, consumed with fire; and priests commanded, under pain of death, to desist from their blasphemous mass." Similar outbursts occurred at St.Andrews, and when Knox returned to Edinburgh, civil war seemed imminent.
Pamphlets of the time, like _The Beggars' Warning_, [Sidenote: 1559] distinctly made the threat of social revolution.
{361} But as a matter of fact the change came as the most bloodless in Europe.