John Knox, in point of culture and of pure intellect and reason, was a small man--a rash, daring, half-educated schoolboy, compared with Buchanan. Knowledge and reason are conservative forces, and Knox could not have been great had he not been a destroyer. His most indelible historical records are the ruins of cathedrals and other religious houses, ‘rooks’ nests’ requiring to be pulled down only in the judgment of blind superstition and rabid fanaticism. For the ignorance and savagery of the people of Scotland the Church of Rome was primarily to blame. That Church required reformation, moral and intellectual; but no spiritual entity, however corrupt, can be miraculously reformed by the destruction of Gothic or any other architecture which took its form under the sincere art and piety of buried generations. Cardinal Beaton’s mode of burning good true men to support and preserve the divine truth that had vitalised his Church for centuries was irrational and infernal; but it was not very much worse than the mad, destructive fury inspired by John Knox’s ‘excellent’ sermons, which, whatever their merits, can scarcely have emanated from a mind that had any clear comprehension of the processes by which spiritual truth makes its way and holds its power effectively among mankind. Beaton and Knox were both powerful in their age and characteristic of it, but they would have found no conspicuous function in an age that was not in the course of emerging from the mire of savagery, with all its tendencies to violence and to vice. Both alike were uncompromising enemies of individual freedom, and equally bent upon the suppression of all conscientious opinions that did not concur with their own. Both were patriots, and of signal service to Scotland; but the evil they did so nearly counterbalances all the good they did (which might, and would, in time have been done by less unscrupulous, ungentle instruments), that it might have been well had Scotland been liberated by Providence from the piebald burden of both of them.[9]