It is astonishing how much alike William the Silent, John Knox, and Abraham Lincoln were in putting confidence in the plain people. William of Orange, the great moderate man of the sixteenth century, found that kings and princes were as reeds to lean upon, nobles were selfish and factious, but that the common people, when you put confidence in them, could be trusted. John Knox walked in the footsteps of William of Orange. Lincoln followed Knox. Yet Knox was not the founder of the Scottish Reformation, which had begun before he had left the old Church; he was its nurse, not its parent. At first the Reformation in Scotland, as in some parts of Europe, was a political, not a religious movement. In the beginning the Scotch nobles hoped to be enriched from the Church lands, as their peers in England had been; but among the Scottish people there were gradually formed circles in which education of mind and heart went on. Apart from the court and nobles, the people wanted a change for the better. This general intelligence among “the commonalty” had already so undermined the structure of the old political Church in Scotland that when Knox blew his bugle blast, this semi-political edifice came tumbling down. In two hundred years Scotland made more progress than any other country in the world. Her people, in proportion to their numbers, have probably done more for the general advancement of the race than those of any other modern nation. Yet the foundation of Scotland’s prosperity was laid by John Knox and his successors. Hamerton, who wrote that charming book, “A Painter’s Camp in the Highlands,” said in one of his works that, in proportion to their small numbers, the Scots are the most distinguished little people since the days of the ancient Athenians, and the most educated of the modern races. “All the industrial arts are at home in Glasgow, all the fine arts in Edinburgh, and as for literature it is everywhere.” Twice the Scots signally nullified the ambition of kings. Edward I, whom the English count one of their greatest kings, conquered Wales and made it a permanent part of the British Empire. He thought he had done the same thing with Scotland, but there he met a different foe, and twenty years later, Scottish valor at Bannockburn gave Scotland her independence forever. How strange that this same reign saw the death of Roger Bacon, the culmination of Christian architecture, and the expulsion of Jews from England!