'Shall Christ, the author of peace, concord, and quietness, be preached where war is proclaimed, sedition engendered, and tumults appear to rise? Shall not His Evangel be accused as the cause of all calamity which is like to follow? What comfort canst thou have to see the one-half of the people rise up against the other; yea, to jeopard the one to murder and destroy the other? But above all, what joy shall it be to thy heart to behold with thine eyes thy native country betrayed into the hands of strangers, which to no man's judgment can be avoided, because they who ought to defend it and the liberties thereof are so blind, dull, and obstinate that they will not see their own destruction?'--'Works,' iv. 251. [18] The two sources which, next to his own report of this sermon, best indicate his earliest standpoint, are (1) the (second) _Basel Confession_--better known as the First Confession of Helvetia--which Wishart had brought with him from the Continent, and before his death had translated into English, and which Knox, therefore, must have known and may have used; and (2) the treatise of his friend, the layman and lawyer, Balnaves, written two years later, and which Knox then sent from Rouen to St Andrews with his own approval and abridgement. The former is distinctly 'Reformed' and Puritan, and lays down that all ceremonies, other than the two instituted sacraments and preaching, 'as vessels, garments, wax-lights, altars,' are unprofitable, and 'serve to subvert the true religion'; while Balnaves repeats the more fundamental principle of Knox's sermon (that all religion which is 'not commanded,' or which is 'invented' with the best motives, is wrong). And both treatises shew that Knox must have had also before him from the first the thorny question of the relation of the Church and the private Christian to the civil magistrate--for both solve it, like Knox himself (but unlike Luther in his original Confession of Augsburg), by giving the Magistrate sweeping and intolerant powers of reforming alike the religion and the Church. [19] 'Lectures on Heroes: The Hero as Priest. [20] Carlyle, as above. [21] Lindsay of Pitscottie.