One well-known figure embodied the moral strength of the new movement. In the king's boyhood, amidst the wild turmoil which followed on Murray's fall, an old man bent with years and toil might have been seen creeping with a secretary's aid to the pulpit of St. Giles. But age and toil were powerless over the spirit of John Knox. In the pulpit "he behoved to lean at his first entry: but ere he had done with his sermon he was so active and vigorous that he was like to ding the pulpit into blads and fly out of it." It was in vain that men strove to pen the fiery words of the great preacher. "In the opening up of his text," says a devout listener, "he was moderate; but when he entered into application he made me so grue and tremble that I could not hold a pen to write." What gave its grandeur to the doctrine of Knox was his resolute assertion of a Christian order before which the social and political forces of the world about him shrank into insignificance. The meanest peasant, once called of God, felt within him a strength that was stronger than the might of nobles, and a wisdom that was wiser than the statecraft of kings. In that mighty elevation of the masses which was embodied in the Calvinist doctrines of election and grace lay the germs of the modern principles of human equality. The fruits of such a teaching soon showed themselves in a new attitude of the people. "Here," said Morton, over the grave of John Knox, "here lies one who never feared nor flattered any flesh"; and if Scotland still reverences the memory of the reformer it is because at that grave her peasant and her trader learned to look in the face of nobles and kings and "not be ashamed." [Sidenote: The Kirk and the people.]