Knox, it must be remembered, did not discourage the belief that he could predict the future and had a good deal of the ‘second-sight’ in him. He had a powerful political instinct, and he and his chief associates knew that if they went ‘too far’ in their destructions, the alarm would be taken, and the life and death struggle in which they were engaged would for them be lost for ever; and every man of any depth of thought or feeling is aware that the ‘doctrines of grace,’ in their inner, perhaps mystical, interpretation, and apart altogether from the stupendous metaphysical and historical setting assigned them in systems of Christian dogma, have a consoling, strengthening, and guiding influence on that vast body of serious, simple, if often practically powerful natures, to whom Criticism is neither a necessity nor a possibility. Such a union of accommodation and exaggeration need not be construed as of set purpose propositional in form, and deliberate in execution. In the transition from authority to private judgment initiated by Humanism and the Renaissance generally, special Reformation exigencies may be conceived as leading to such a union, so that in thought and action it was only semi-conscious and instinctive, and there was little time for the minutiæ of introspective scrutiny. On the ethical side, however, there was no Renaissance loosening among the mass of the leading Reformers. The value of the controversial mendacities propagated about the morals of Knox may be judged of by the fact that the coryphæus of the revilers maintained that he won his second wife by magic! As a rule they kept the ten commandments, and especially the seventh, rigidly. They failed a good deal on the new one of Charity. They preached the ‘Gospel’ with technical accuracy, but they mostly practised the ‘Law,’ and if Paul had returned among them, he would probably have re-edited his Epistle to the Romans, with up-to-date applications, as indeed he might have to do still. CHAPTER V BUCHANAN AND CALVINISM