"It records the hope, once entertained by the writers, that God would make her the instrument of setting up and maintaining his Word and true worship, of defending his congregation, and of downputting all idolatry, abomination, and superstition in the realm; it expresses their grief on learning that she was determined to do the very opposite; it warns her against crossing the bounds of her own office, and usurping a power in Christ's kingdom which did not belong to her; it distinguishes clearly between the civil jurisdiction and the spiritual; it asks her to recall her letters inhibiting God's messengers; it insists that His message ought to be received even though the speaker should lack the ordinary vocation; it claims that the ministers who had been inhibited were sent by God, and were also called according to Scriptural order; it points out that her commands must be disobeyed if contrary to God's, and that the enemies were craftily inducing her to command unjust things so that the professors, when they disobeyed, might be condemned for sedition and rebellion; it pled with her to have pity on those who were seeking the glory of God and her true obedience; it declared that, by God's help, they would go forward in the way they had begun, that they would receive and assist His ministers and Word, and that they would never join themselves again to the abominations they had forsaken, though all the powers on earth should command them to do so; it conveyed their humble submission to her, in all obedience due to her in peace, in war, in body, in goods and in lands; and it closed with the prayer that the eternal God would instruct, strengthen, and lead her by His Spirit in the way that was acceptable to Him."[307] Then began a series of trials of strength in which the Regent had generally the better, because she was supplied with disciplined troops from France, which were more than a match for the feudal levies of the Lords of the Congregation. The uprising of the people against the Regent and the Prelates was characterised, as in France and the Low Countries, with an outbreak of iconoclasm which did no good to the Protestant cause. In the three countries the "raschall multitude" could not be restrained by the exhortation of the preachers nor by the commandment of the magistrates from destroying "the places of idolatrie."[308] From the beginning, Knox had seen that the Reformers had small hope of ultimate success unless they were aided from England; and he was encouraged to expect help because he knew that the salvation of Protestant England lay in its support of the Lords of the Congregation in Scotland.