FROM THE YEAR 1556, WHEN HE RETURNED TO GENEVA, AFTER VISITING SCOTLAND, TO MAY 1559, WHEN HE RETURNED TO SCOTLAND FOR THE LAST TIME. KNOX reached Geneva before the end of harvest, and took upon him the charge of the English congregation there,[284] among whom he laboured during the two following years. This short period was the most quiet of his life. In the bosom of his own family, he experienced that soothing care to which he had hitherto been a stranger, and which his frequent bodily ailments now required. Two sons were borne to him in Geneva. The greatest affection to him, and cordiality among themselves, subsisted in the small flock under his charge. With his colleague, Christopher Goodman, he lived as a brother; and he was happy in the friendship of Calvin and the other pastors of Geneva. So much was he pleased with {195} the purity of religion established in that city, that he warmly recommended it to his religious acquaintances in England, as the best Christian asylum to which they could flee. “In my heart,” says he, in a letter to his friend Mr Locke, “I could have wished, yea, and cannot cease to wish, that it might please God to guide and conduct yourself to this place, where, I neither fear nor eshame to say, is the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in the earth since the days of the apostles. In other places I confess Christ to be truly preached; but manners and religion to be so sincerely reformed, I have not yet seen in any other place beside.”[285]