Knox's gifts and qualities were already well known; he had been a devoted friend and follower of Wishart, the martyr whose memory was still fresh in the minds of all men; and these public examinations of the three boys, and the expositions he addressed to them, but which many of mature age also gathered to hear, had given the many competent judges then assembled in the beleaguered city a practical knowledge of his gifts and endowments. And Rough, who filled the post of preacher in St. Andrews, was not a man of learning, and in consequence would seem to have been troubled by disputatious members of the priesthood, eager, not unnaturally, to defend their own tenets, and with all the authorities at their fingers' ends. In this strait John Knox was entreated to accept the charge of the congregation, but in vain. Perhaps the memory of Wishart's charge to him, "Return to your bairns," was still in his ears; perhaps the reluctance and hesitation of a man who felt himself incompetent for so great a responsibility--though it is strange to associate any idea of shrinking from responsibility with such a dauntless spirit, and he was by this time a man of forty-two, with a matured mind and some experience of life. At all events he "utterlie refused": he "would not run where God had not called him." This being so, there was no alternative but to take him by surprise and force him into the position which all desired him to assume. And this was the step which was accordingly taken by the assembly of the Reformers in St. Andrews, an assembly in which were many well-known and distinguished men, so illustrious a councillor as Sir David Lindsay, the poet and Lyon-King of Scotland, being one of the gentlemen and commoners who decided upon this dramatic and picturesque call.