All this mediæval, dramatic variety, so strongly set in contrast to the simplicity of worship to-day, did, in a certain sense, correspond to the contemporaneous glory of civil and military splendor of feudal days. Then the pageant of the titled knight, in shining steel upon his proud steed, leading his clansmen in their brilliant tartans, with claymore and target,--with a rich background of the visible splendor of castles, lords and ladies, in that feudal life which Scott has idealized, glorified, yes, even transfigured in his poetry and romances,--was matched by outward ecclesiastical magnificence; both systems making irresistible appeal to the senses and both being equally far removed from the primitive simplicity of the Master and his disciples. In a word, Christianity in Scotland wore the garments of the civilization of the age during which it took on its material forms, changing its outward habiliments as its growing spirit entered more deeply into the old, unchangeable truth. In the case of certain young nations, having characteristics that respond to what is first offered them, and in which native traits can make subtle harmony with the imported religion, history marks out but one course--the standards of religion and civilization usually run in parallel lines. CHAPTER XXIII JOHN KNOX: SCOTLAND’S MIGHTIEST SON Scotland began the active and aggressive Protestantism of Europe. The people, taught by John Knox, led the nations in taking radical measures to apply the principles of democracy, developed by George Buchanan, to the government of the Christian Church. In a word, the Scottish people, and not their kings or nobles, reformed religion and were leaders in social reconstruction. John Knox would not have been a Scotsman if he had not, when his mind had been changed through the study of the Bible and the writings of Augustine and Jerome, gone at once to the extreme of opposition. He preached first to the soldiers in the garrisons of St. Andrews. Taken prisoner by the French fleet, he spent nineteen months as a galley slave, often in irons and treated cruelly. Meanwhile Providence shaped events that were to influence America and her future. It seems strange to us of to-day to think that any one in colonial America should ever have had a fear of sharing a fate like that of John Knox in the French galleys; yet from the time of the first colonies of French Huguenots in Florida, down to the assertion, by Jacob Leisler, of the people’s rights in New York, there were tens of thousands among the several nationalities that made up the American people who felt this danger, from the Bourbons of France or Spain, as a quite possible reality. History makes strange somersaults. In seeking our American freedom in the Revolution, we were militarily aided by the former country and were in alliance with the latter.