He told his fellow-prisoners, in this darkest time, to be of courage; the cause they had was a true one, and must and would prosper; the whole world could not put it down. Reality is of God’s making; it is alone strong. How many _pented bredds_, pretending to be real, are fitter to swim than to be worshiped! This Knox can not live but by fact: he clings to reality as the shipwrecked sailor to the cliff. He is an instance to us how a man by sincerity itself becomes heroic; it is the grand gift he has. We find in Knox a good, honest, intellectual talent, no transcendent one; a narrow, inconsiderable man as compared with Luther, but in heartfelt, instinctive adherence to truth, in _sincerity_, as we say, he has no superior; nay, one might ask, What equal he has? The heart of him is of the true prophet cast. “He lies there,” said the Earl of Morton at his grave, “who never feared the face of man.” He resembles, more than any of the moderns, an old Hebrew prophet. The same inflexibility, intolerance, rigid, narrow-looking adherence to God’s truth, stern rebuke in the name of God to all that forsake truth; an old Hebrew prophet in the guise of an Edinburgh minister of the sixteenth century. We are to take him for that; not require him to be other. Knox’s conduct to Queen Mary, the harsh visits he used to make in her own palace to reprove her there, have been much commented upon. Such cruelty, such coarseness fill us with indifference. On reading the actual narrative of the business, what Knox said and what Knox meant, I must say one’s tragic feeling is rather disappointed. They are not so coarse, these speeches; they seem to me about as fine as the circumstances would permit. Knox was not there to do the courtier; he came on another errand. Whoever, reading these colloquies of his with the queen, thinks they are vulgar insolences of a plebeian priest to a delicate high lady, mistakes the purport and essence of them altogether. It was unfortunately not possible to be polite with the Queen of Scotland, unless one proved untrue to the nation and cause of Scotland.