of which he spent in carefully scrutinising and balancing theological controversies, and examining the whole situation--Buchanan followed the lines of Erasmus, used the cult of the Roman Esculapius to go on with, pending eventualities. But when the termination of the Guisian tyranny in Scotland made it safe for him to return, he had to make up his mind whether he was to side with the cause of oppression as advocated by the Church in which he had been born and lived up to now, or that in which, though unfortunately with certain drawbacks, a battle was being fought for liberty to express opinions different from those taught by the Church. Nobody who knew Buchanan could doubt what his choice would be. The transition would be all the easier that in his new quarters he would find much less to offend his philosophic reason than in his old ones; but would there not be an occasional bird to be sacrificed still? He had been doing it all his Catholic life. Was it completely over now? That is not likely. But, however that may be, Buchanan was the least dogmatic and the most tolerant of all the theologically instructed men who helped to give Protestantism its place in Scotland. He might have preached had he chosen, but as he shrank from priest’s orders in the Catholic Church, so he shrank in the Protestant from a position in which he would be bound to dogmatise. He did not frown upon Mary’s private Mass, while Knox denounced it as worse than ten thousand armed opponents. When he narrates the hanging of a priest, according to statute, for saying Mass a third time, he does not exult, as was no doubt done by the men of the ‘Congregation,’ and possibly by Knox himself, when they heard of the happy event. There is nothing about him of the zeal of the renegade, who often out-Herods Herod in championing his new faith--a tendency from which Knox was by no means free. In his _History_ he evidently tries to hold the balance fair between Catholic and Protestant, and is as just to Mary of Guise as to Moray. His whole religious career points to a man who thought profoundly and inquired anxiously after truth, and was careful to give expression to his feeling of reverence for the mystery of being by outward conformity with a creed and ritual to which he could more or less reconcile his reason. Well might James Melville (Rev., not Sir) describe him not only as a ‘maist learned and wyse,’ but also as a ‘maist godlie’ man, although he himself might have preferred ‘spiritual’ as a more comprehensive epithet.