For July 28 {87b} four or five of the brethren were summoned to "a day of law," in Edinburgh; their allies assembled to back them, and they were released on bail to appear, if called on, within eight days. At this time the "idol" of St. Giles, patron of the city, was stolen, and a great riot occurred at the saint's fete, September 3. {87c} Knox describes the discomfiture of his foes in one of his merriest passages, frequently cited by admirers of "his vein of humour." The event, we know, was at once reported to him in Geneva, by letter. Some time after October, if we rightly construe Knox, {88a} a petition was delivered to the Regent, from the Reformers, by Sandilands of Calder. {88b} They asserted that they should have defended the preachers, or testified with them. The wisdom of the Regent herself sees the need of reform, spiritual and temporal, and has exhorted the clergy and nobles to employ care and diligence thereon, a fact corroborated by Mary of Guise herself, in a paper, soon to be quoted, of July 1559. {88c} They ask, as they have the reading of the Scriptures in the vernacular, for common prayers in the same. They wish for freedom to interpret and discuss the Bible "in our conventions," and that Baptism and the Communion may be done in Scots, and they demand the reform of the detestable lives of the prelates. {88d} Knox's account, in places, appears really to refer to the period of the Provincial Council of March 1559, though it does not quite fit that date either. The Regent is said on the occasion of Calder's petition, and after the unsatisfactory replies of the clergy (apparently at the Provincial Council, March 1559), to have made certain concessions, till Parliament established uniform order. But the Parliament was of November-December 1558. {89a} Before that Parliament, at all events (which was mainly concerned with procuring the "Crown Matrimonial" for the Dauphin, husband of Mary Stuart), the brethren offered a petition, in the first place shown to the Regent, asking for (1) the suspension of persecuting laws till after a General Council has "decided all controversies in religion"--that is, till the Greek Calends. (2) That prelates shall not be judges in cases of heresy, but only accusers before secular tribunals. (3) That all lawful defences be granted to persons accused. (4) That the accused be permitted to explain "his own mind and meaning." (5) That "none be condemned for heretics unless by the manifest Word of God they be convicted to have erred from the faith which the Holy Spirit witnesses to be necessary to salvation." According to Knox this petition the Regent put in her pocket, saying that the Churchmen would oppose it, and thwart her plan for getting the "Crown Matrimonial" given to her son-in- law, Francis II., and, in short, gave good words, and drove time. {89b}