To estimate the share he had in the foundations of that modern Scotland which has so increased and thriven since his day, is perhaps more hard now than it was even eighty years ago, when his biography was written by Dr. M'Crie to the great interest and enthusiasm of the country. The laws of historical judgment are subject to perpetual change, and the general estimate of the great personages of the past has undergone various modifications since that time. Perhaps even the Church is less sure of her share in the record, less certain of the doom once so unhesitatingly denounced against "the Paip that Pagan fu' of pride"; less confident of her own superiority to all other developments of Christianity. The least enlightened are no longer able to feel with a good conscience, as our best instructed fathers did, that an important part of religious liberty was freedom to curse and pull down every tenet other than their own. No belief has been more obstinate or is more time-honoured: but in theory at least it has been much subdued in recent times, so that few of us are able to hold by our own side with the perfect confidence which once we felt. And in these changing views, and in the impulse towards a greater catholicity of feeling which has sprung up in Scotland, the influence of that uncompromising teacher to whom reform was everything, who had no prepossession in favour of what was old and venerable, but desired with all the fervour of his fiery soul to make everything new, has doubtless waned, save to that sacred simplicity of ignorance which forms no judgment. But nothing can obliterate the person and strenuous being of John Knox, or make him a less interesting figure on the crowded and tragic stage of that epoch which he dominated and chronicled. And nothing can unlink the associations which make him ever present and living in Edinburgh, which was the capital and centre of his kingdom as much as of any king who ever breathed.