about with their illegal families and dower their daughters out of the revenues of the Church.  The monks, too, have bloated wealth, while churches are allowed to fall into decay.  “The only hope is in the Holy Father,” who should appoint an episcopal commission of visitation.  For about forty years prelates have been alienating Church lands illegally, and churches and monasteries, by the avarice of those placed in charge, are crumbling to decay.  Bishops are the chief dealers in cattle, fish, and hides, though we have, in fact, good evidence that their dealings were very limited, “sma’ sums.”

Not only the clergy, but the nobles and people were lawless.  “They are more difficult to manage than ever,” writes Mary of Guise (Jan. 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.  To Knox’s opponent in controversy, Quentin Kennedy, the mass was “the blessed Sacrament of the Altar . . . which is one of the chief Sacraments whereby our Saviour, for the salvation of mankind, has appointed the fruit of His death and passion to be daily renewed and applied.”  In this traditional view there is nothing unedifying, nothing injurious to the Christian life.  But to Knox the wafer is an idol, a god “of water and meal,” “but a feeble and miserable god,” that can be destroyed “by a bold and puissant mouse.”  “Rats and mice will desire no better dinner than white round gods enough.” {10}

The Reformer and the Catholic take up the question “by different handles”; and the Catholic grounds his defence on a text about Melchizedek!  To Knox the mass is the symbol of all that he justly detested in the degraded Church as she then was in Scotland, “that horrible harlot with her filthiness.”  To Kennedy it was what we have seen.