all in murder, all in one and the same iniquity,” except the actual Marian martyrs; those who “abstained from idolatry;” and those who “avoided the realm” or ran away.  He had set one of the earliest examples of running away:  to do so was easier for him than for family men and others who had “a stake in the country,” for which Knox had no relish.  He is hardly generous in blaming all the persons who felt no more “ripe” for martyrdom than he did, yet stayed in England, where the majority were, and continued to be, Catholics.

Having asserted his very contestable superiority and uttered pages of biblical threatenings, Knox says that the repentance of England “requireth two things,” first, the expulsion of “all dregs of Popery” and the treading under foot of all “glistering beauty of vain ceremonies.”  Religious services must be reduced, in short, to his own bare standard.  Next, the Genevan and Knoxian “kirk discipline” must be introduced.  No “power or liberty (must) be permitted to any, of what estate, degree, or authority they be, either to live without the yoke of discipline by God’s word commanded,” or “to alter . . . one jot in religion which from God’s mouth thou hast received. . . .  If prince, king, or emperor would enterprise to change or disannul the same, that he be of thee reputed enemy to God,” while a prince who erects idolatry . . . “must be adjudged to death.”

Each bishopric is to be divided into ten.  The Founder of the Church and the Apostles “all command us to preach, to preach.”  A brief sketch of what The Book of Discipline later set forth for the edification of Scotland is recommended to England, and is followed by more threatenings in the familiar style.

England did not follow the advice of Knox:  her whole population was not puritan, many of her martyrs had died for the prayer book which Knox would have destroyed.  His tract cannot have added to the affection which Elizabeth bore to the author of “The First Blast.”  In after years, as we shall see, Knox spoke in a tone much more moderate in addressing the early English nonconformist secessionists (1568).  Indeed, it is as easy almost to prove, by isolated passages in Knox’s writings, that he was a sensible, moderate man, loathing and condemning active resistance in religion, as to prove him to be a senselessly violent man.  All depends on the occasion and opportunity.  He speaks with two voices.  He was very impetuous; in the death of Mary Tudor he suddenly saw the chance of bringing English religion up, or down, to the Genevan level, and so he wrote this letter of vehement rebuke and inopportune advice.