The account of our Reformer’s publications has been partly anticipated in the course of the preceding narrative. Though his writings were of great utility, it was not by them, but by his personal exertions, that he chiefly advanced the Reformation, and transmitted his name to posterity. He did not view this as the field in which he was called to labour. “That I did not in writing communicate my judgment upon the scriptures,” says he, “I have ever thought myself to have most just reason. For, considering myself rather called of my God to instruct the ignorant, comfort the sorrowful, confirm the weak, and rebuke the proud, by tongue and lively {276} voice, in these most corrupt days, than to compose books for the age to come, (seeing that so much is written, and by men of most singular erudition, and yet so little well observed,) I decreed to contain myself within the bounds of that vocation whereunto I found myself especially called.”[346] This resolution was most judiciously formed. His situation was very different from that of the first protestant reformers. They found the whole world in ignorance of the doctrines of Christianity. Men were either destitute of books, or such as they possessed were calculated only to mislead. The oral instructions of a few individuals could extend but a small way; it was principally by means of their writings, which circulated with amazing rapidity, that they benefited mankind, and became not merely the instructors of the particular cities and countries where they resided and preached, but the reformers of Europe. By the time that Knox appeared on the field, their translations of scripture, their judicious commentaries on its different books, and their able defences of its doctrines, were laid open to the English reader.[347] What was more immediately required of him was to use {277} the peculiar talent in which he excelled, and, “by tongue and lively voice,” to imprint the doctrines of the Bible upon the hearts of his countrymen. When he was deprived of an opportunity of doing this during his exile, there could not be a more proper substitute than that which he adopted, by publishing familiar epistles, exhortations, and admonitions, in which he briefly reminded them of the truths which they had embraced, and warned them to flee from the abominations of popery. These could be circulated and read with far more ease, and to a far greater extent, than large treatises.