stroke of sword' on the field of Corrichie) was afterwards, thus vividly recalled. 'Have ye not seen one greater than any of you sitting where presently ye sit, pick his nails, and pull down his bonnet over his eyes, when idolatry, witchcraft, murder, oppression, and such vices were rebuked? Was not his common talk, When the knaves have railed their fill, then will they hold their peace?'[118] Or, again, it was the French Ambassador, Le Croc, sitting in state on the first Sunday after the news of St Bartholomew, who heard the preacher denounce his master, King Charles, as a 'murderer,' from whom and from whose posterity the vengeance of God would refuse to depart. But these were incidents dramatic and political. And noble as a political calling may be, there have always been some to believe that drawing men and women up to a higher moral life, especially when that life is fed from an immortal hope, is nobler still. But Knox, let us remember, was throughout his early ministry the witness of a still more fascinating and indeed unexampled spectacle--a whole generation suddenly confronted with the moral call of primitive Christianity, and striving to respond to it, no longer in dependence on Church tradition, but by each man moulding himself directly upon Christian facts and Christian promises in the very form in which these were originally delivered by the apostolic age. He was witness of it; and more than witness, for beyond any other man in Scotland Knox was its guide. And while the guidance of the great theological leaders of that generation tended naturally--and quite apart from their usurped statutory ascendency--to press too heavily upon the recovered freedom of Scotland, that danger was but little felt in those early days of enthusiasm in the High Church of Edinburgh. * * * * * What like was the man who was seen, almost every day during all those years, pacing up and down between the Netherbow and St Giles?