Knox and she from the very first seem to have singled each other out for a conflict hand to hand. He saw that everything which he counted dear depended on the manner in which she was dealt with; and she perceived that he was the moving spirit in that religious revolt which it was her mission to put down. He feared the effect of her blandishments upon others, and she recognised the magnitude of his influence upon the people. He saw that if she could be baffled in her efforts to re-establish popery in the land, the victory would be finally won; and she felt that so long as he had the opportunity of swaying the multitude by the fervour of his eloquence, there was no hope of gaining the end on which her heart was fixed. He was afraid of the effect of what his friend Campbell of Kingzeancleugh called "the sprinkling of the holy water of the court" upon the less reliable of his adherents; and she feared the fervour of {159} his prayers to God, and the power of his appeals to his fellow-men. So there came to be for some time a kind of duel between them, and the issue was at last a victory for Knox. We need not approve unqualifiedly of everything which he did or said in the course of the struggle, yet we must rejoice in the result, for Knox "builded better than he knew," and secured, not immediately but ultimately, the triumph of a larger liberty than that which he at the time believed in; while she was the representative of absolute power, and of a feudalism which looked upon the common people as existing for her convenience and aggrandisement rather than upon herself as the servant of the state. "What are you in this commonwealth?" was her haughty question to him on one occasion. "A subject born within the same," was his ever-memorable answer, and the outcome of it has been that now in the land he loved the sovereign is for the subjects, and not the subjects for the sovereign; it is a little difference verbally, but in reality the gulf between the two is that which divides freedom from slavery.