THE ECLECTIC MAGAZINE OF FOREIGN LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART. SEPTEMBER TO DECEMBER, 1853. W. H. BIDWELL, EDITOR AND PROPRIETOR. NEW-YORK: PUBLISHED AT 120 NASSAU STREET. THE Scotch Reformation in the sixteenth | dead to the root, a mass of falsehood and century is remarkable for an almost complete corruption; and, having been endured to the absence of the dubious and questionable last extremity, the one thing to be done with. features by which violent revolutions are so it, when endurance was no longer possible, often disfigured. Less happy than the Eng- was to take it utterly away. lish, the Protestants of Scotland had no alternative between an armed resistance to the Government, and the destruction of them. selves and their religion; and no body of people who have been driven to such resistance, were ever more temperate in the conduct of it, or more moderate in their use of victory. The problem which they had to solve was a simple one: it was to deliver themselves of a system which, when judged by the fruits of it, was evil throughout, and with which no good man was found any more to sympathize. Elsewhere in Europe there was some life left in Catholicism; it was a real faith, by which sincere and earnest men were able to direct themselves, and whose consciences it was painful or perilous to wound by oversweeping measures. In Scotland, it was So great a work was never executed with slighter loss of human life, or smaller injury to a country. It was achieved by the will of one man, who was the representative of whatever was best and noblest in the people to whom he belonged; and as in itself it was simple and straightforward, so of all great men in history there is not one whose character is more simple and intelligible than that of John Knox. A plain but massive understanding, a courage which nothing could shake, a warm, honest heart, and an intense hatred and scorn of sin; these are the qualities which appear in him; these, and only these. There may have been others, but the occasion did not require them, they were not called into play. The evil which was to be overcome had no strong intellectual defences; it was a tyrannical falsehood, upheld by force; and force of character, rather than breadth or subtlety of thought, was needed cope with it. to 1 |