Knox, the one man able to stand up against Queen Mary, was no amateur statesman or ecclesiastic. Besides his education in the University of Glasgow and the regular training in the priesthood, he had spent five years as preacher, pastor, and pioneer of English Puritanism in England,--at Berwick, at Newcastle, and in London,--where he married Marjorie Bowes and by her had two sons. He was elected one of the six chaplains of Edward VI and was consulted about the Anglican Articles of Religion, and the Revision of the Liturgy. The king offered him the bishopric of Rochester, but he declined for reasons of conscience, not only because he was opposed to the secular business of such offices, but chiefly because in his heart he believed, like the Independents, in what our own Rufus Choate called “a church without a bishop and a state without a king.” When the English Queen called “Bloody Mary” came to the throne and the Reformation seemed like a sinking ship, Knox was the last to leave the deck, yielding only to the urgency of his friends. Except more than half a year in Scotland, he spent five years on the Continent. In Geneva, while sitting at the feet of John Calvin,--that great champion of democracy and of republican government, and the real father of the public school system,--he became pastor of a church of English exiles there, and had a hand in making the Geneva version of the Bible. He who, whether of the old faith or the new, or an adherent of any church or religion, whether Jewish, Mahometan, Buddhist, or Christian, looks only on that side which agrees or disagrees with his own opinions and cannot see beyond, misses most of the lessons of history. Whether we love or hate John Knox, we cannot shut our eyes to what he did, both for popular education and to give Great Britain linguistic unity. He made English the language of literary and scholarly Scotland. It was his thorough knowledge of the English language and his choice and use of it that regulated Scottish speech and paved the way for the oblivion of the Gaelic. In both the written and the spoken form of the English language, he followed the best standards. When Queen Elizabeth came to the throne, she refused Knox passage through her dominions. He had already published his “First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women,” which was aimed at the misgovernment of two females, Bloody Mary of England and Mary Queen of Scots. For this, Elizabeth never forgave him. Those who insist, according to notions that have been set forth in literary form, that Elizabeth was only a male creature, a mere man in disguise, may perhaps find their contention weakened by the treatment of Knox by Queen Bess.