Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 9.djvu/269

 1 5 70. ] EXCOMMUNICA T1ON OF ELIZABE TH. 255 effect upon him. He was too thorough a man of the world to view with anything but dislike the assumptions of the rising Kirk. ' To the philosopher/ says Gibbon, are equally useful/ But the statesman makes it a con- dition of his patronage that the clergy shall confine themselves to their own province as moral and spiritual teachers. If they become aggressive ; if they meddle with government, pretending to be interpreters of the will of God ; above all, if they have power to make themselves practically troublesome, the complaisance of the statesman is rapidly converted into enmity. Nothing but accident could at any time have brought together men so essentially different as Knox and Maitland. They represented the very opposite poles of Scottish character. ' The will of God,' was to Knox the supreme and solitary guide. To Maitland it seemed, from words which he let fall in his confidential hours, that God was ' ane Bogill of the nursery/ Each crossed the other's path at a thousand turns. When he could knead the other ministers like clay, Maitland had ever found Knox inflexible. He could not deceive him, for Knox with mere earthly eyes could see as far or farther than Maitland, and Maitland who, if heaven was empty, acknowledged the divinity of intellect, came soon to detest what he could not afford to despise. These, or something like them, were the keys to the conduct of this remarkable man. His health was gone, his body was half paralyzed, but his wit remained as keen as ever ; and from this time till his death he be-
 * all religions are equally false ; ' 'to the statesman all