The great body of his countrymen, however, continued long to entertain a just sense of the many obligations which they were under to Knox. After the government of the church of Scotland was conformed to the English model, the Scottish prelates still professed to look back to their national Reformer with sentiments of gratitude and veneration; and archbishop Spotswood describes him as “a man endued with rare gifts, and a chief instrument that God used for the work of those times.”[317] For a considerable {245} time after the revolution, the presbyterians of Scotland treated with deserved contempt the libels which English writers had published against him; and blushed not to avow their admiration of a man to whose labours they were indebted for an ecclesiastical establishment, more scriptural and more liberal than that of which their neighbours could boast. The Union first produced a change in our national feelings on this subject. The shortlived jealousy of English predominance, felt by many of our countrymen on that occasion, was succeeded by a passion for conformity to our southern neighbours; and so fond did we become of their good opinion, and so eager to secure it, that we were disposed to sacrifice to their taste and their prejudices, sentiments which truth as well as national honour required us to retain and cherish. Our most popular writers are not exempt from this charge; and even in works professing to be executed by the united talents of our literati, the misrepresentations and gross blunders of which English writers had been guilty in their accounts of our reformation, and the false and scandalous accusations which they had brought against our reformers, have been generally adopted and widely circulated, instead of meeting with the exposure and reprobation which they so justly merited.