Knox, John, approximately 1514-1572; Reformation -- Scotland
There was an inchoate plan for a new Order. That failed; and Knox, with
others, consulted Calvin, giving him a sketch of the nature of the
English service. They drew his attention to the surplice; the Litany,
"devised by Pope Gregory," whereby "we use a certain conjuring of God";
the kneeling at the Communion; the use of the cross in baptism, and of
the ring in marriage, clearly a thing of human, if not of diabolical
invention, and the "imposition of hands" in confirmation. The churching
of women, they said, is both Pagan and Jewish. "Other things not so much
shame itself as a certain kind of pity compelleth us to keep close."
"The tone of the letter throughout was expressly calculated to prejudice
Calvin on the point submitted to him," says Professor Hume Brown. {56}
Calvin replied that the quarrel might be all very well if the exiles were
happy and at ease in their circumstances, though in the Liturgy, as
described, there were "tolerable (endurable) follies." On the whole he
sided with the Knoxian party. The English Liturgy is not pure enough;
and the English exiles, not at Frankfort, merely like it because they are
accustomed to it. Some are partial to "popish dregs."
To the extreme Reformers no break with the past could be too abrupt and
precipitous: the framers of the English Liturgy had rather adopted the
principle of evolution than of development by catastrophe, and had wedded
what was noblest in old Latin forms and prayers to music of the choicest
English speech. To this service, for which their fellow-religionists in
England were dying at the stake, the non-Frankfortian exiles were
attached. They were Englishmen; their service, they said, should bear
"an English face": so Knox avers, who could as yet have no patriotic love
of any religious form as exclusively and essentially Scottish.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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