Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 10.djvu/198

 178 REIGN OF ELIZABETH. [CH. 58. barons. Their ministers were as ready with hand as tongue. Durie of Leith, a friend of Knox, was famous in the pulpit, but ' the gown na sooner off, and the Bible out of hand, when on gaed the corslet, and fangit was the hackbut and to the field/ 1 They had taken to the sea like the Protestants of the West, ' and their navy was so augmented as was a thing almost incredi- ble/ Killigrew noted the change, and gathered hopes from it for Scotland's future.' 7 On men like these the massacre of St Bartholomew told with tremendous effect, and for a time their indig- nant passion threatened to carry all before it. John Knox, to whose teaching they owed their national ex- istence, had been residing for the last years with failing health at St Andrews. He could no longer walk un- supported, but still Sunday after Sunday he dragged his frail body to the church, and there with keen political sagacity he interpreted out of the Bible the Scotland of his own day. 3 To him the government of the world by Almighty God was a living reality ; he considered that good men were placed in it to wage war not with shadowy doctrines, but with the incarnation of the evil spirit in wicked men and wicked deeds. He spoke of Mary Stuart he spoke of the Hamiltons, till he made 1 Diary of James Melville of St Andrews. 2 Killigrew to Burghley, Novem- ber u : MSS. Scotland. 3 i 1 saw him,' writes Melville, 4 every day of his doctrine gae hulie and fear, with a furring of marticks about his neck and a staff in his hand, and godly Richard Bannatyne his servant holding up the other oxter. He was lifted up into the pulpit, where he leaned at his first entry.'