But if the art of prophecy is common to all Bible-reading mankind, all mankind, being prophets, may promulgate treason, which Knox perhaps would not have admitted.  He thought himself more specially a seer, and in his prayer after the failure of his friends, the murderers of Riccio, he congratulates himself on being favoured above the common sort of his brethren, and privileged to “forespeak” things, in an unique degree.

“I dare not deny . . . but that God hath revealed unto me secrets unknown to the world,” he writes {18b}; and these claims soar high above mere deductions from Scripture.  His biographer, Dr. M’Crie, doubts whether we can dismiss, as necessarily baseless, all stories of “extraordinary premonitions since the completion of the canon of inspiration.” {19} Indeed, there appears to be no reason why we should draw the line at a given date, and “limit the operations of divine Providence.”  I would be the last to do so, but then Knox’s premonitions are sometimes, or usually, without documentary and contemporary corroboration; once he certainly prophesied after the event (as we shall see), and he never troubles himself about his predictions which were unfulfilled, as against Queen Elizabeth.

He supplied the Kirk with the tradition of supernormal premonitions in preachers—­second-sight and clairvoyance—­as in the case of Mr. Peden and other saints of the Covenant.  But just as good cases of clairvoyance as any of Mr. Peden’s are attributed to Catherine de Medici, who was not a saint, by her daughter, La Reine Margot, and others.  In Knox, at all events, there is no trace of visual or auditory hallucinations, so common in religious experiences, whatever the creed of the percipient.  He was not a visionary.  More than this we cannot safely say about his prophetic vein.

The enthusiasm which induced a priest, notary, and teacher like Knox to carry a claymore in defence of a beloved teacher, Wishart, seems more appropriate to a man of about thirty than a man of forty, and, so far, supports the opinion that, in 1545, Knox was only thirty years of age.  In that case, his study of the debates between the Church and the new opinions must have been relatively brief.  Yet, in 1547, he already reckoned himself, not incorrectly, as a skilled disputant in favour of ideas with which he cannot have been very long familiar.

Wishart was taken, was tried, was condemned; was strangled, and his dead body was burned at St. Andrews on March 1, 1546.  It is highly improbable that Knox could venture, as a marked man, to be present at the trial.  He cites the account of it in his “History” from the contemporary Scottish narrative used by Foxe in his “Martyrs,” and Laing, Knox’s editor, thinks that Foxe “may possibly have been indebted for some” of the Scottish accounts “to the Scottish Reformer.”  It seems, if there be anything in evidence of tone and style, that what Knox quotes from Foxe in 1561-66 is what