SOURCE: "The End," in John Knox: Portrait of a Calvinist, The Viking Press, 1929, pp. 291-302.

In the following excerpt, Muir considers Knox's personal strengths and weaknesses.

…[Knox was] a man who, for almost a generation, had amazed everybody, princes, statesmen, divines, burghers, students and common people alike, by three magnificent qualities: his vehemence, his persistence, and his incorruptibility. The first of these was his distinguishing quality; the others only served to emphasise it. Other great men of action have been vehement and placable, capable of both devouring ardour and repose; what distinguished Knox was the uniformity of his vehemence, his perpetual possession of an extreme ardour. To him the excessive was the normal. He was not, even to his contemporaries, so much a great natural force, like Luther, as a terrible and inexplicable natural portent. It was this that gave his denunciations, drawn appropriately from the terrible arsenal...