It is clear, therefore, that his sufferings were severe, and while he endured them with a fortitude that was sustained by his faith in God, he was careful also to maintain always a conscience void of offence. He tells us that those who were in the galleys "were threatened with torments if they would not give reverence to the mass, but they could never make the poorest of that company to give reverence to that idol." He adds the following narrative, and from the ironic humour that plays about his style as he recites it, we cannot doubt that he was himself the hero of the story. "Soon after the arrival at Nantes, their great salve was sung, and a glorious (gaudy) painted board was brought in to be kissed, and amongst others was presented to one of the Scotchmen then chained. He gently said, 'Trouble me not; such an idol is accursed, and therefore I will not touch it.' The patron and the arguesyn (_i.e._ sergeant who commanded the forçats) with two officers, having the chief charge of all such matters, said, 'Thou shalt handle it,' and so they violently thrust it to his face, and put it betwixt his hands, who seeing the extremity, taking the {26} idol, and advisedly looking about, he cast it into the river, and said, 'Let our lady now save herself; she is light enough; let her learn to swim.' After that was no Scotchman urged with that idolatry." But sorely bestead as he was in his captivity, he would not sanction any attempt to escape which should savour of violence. Though himself innocent of all complicity in Beaton's murder, he had seen the cause which he had at heart so greatly hindered by the consequences of that evil deed, and he was withal so utterly opposed to everything which he believed that God had forbidden, that he would be no party to doing evil that good might come. Accordingly when Kirkcaldy and two other friends who were confined with him at Mount St. Michael wrote to him to inquire whether they might with safe conscience break their prison, he replied, that if without the shedding of any blood they could set themselves at liberty, they might do so without sin, but that he would never consent to their slaying of others in order to obtain deliverance. He added the expression of his own assurance that God Himself would work out their enlargement in such a way that "the praise thereof should redound to His glory alone." Nor was that with him a mere temporary or intermittent sentiment. It was the settled conviction of his soul; for from the very beginning of his captivity when one of his fellow-prisoners would often ask him if he thought that they should ever be delivered, his invariable answer was that "God would deliver them from that bondage {27} to His glory, even in this life." Nor did he falter, even when his own strength seemed ebbing out, for when the galleys had returned to Scotland in the summer of 1548, and were lying between Dundee and St. Andrews, while he himself