The attempt, as was natural, failed completely. "Which letter," resumes Knox, "when she had read within a day or two she delivered it to the proud prelate, Beatoun, Bishop of Glasgow, and said in mockage, 'Please you, my lord, to read a pasquill?'" It is against the perfection of the prophet, but not the character of the man, that this scorn stung him as no persecution could have done. He made certain additions to the letter, and published it in Geneva on his return there. We are not told which part of the letter these additions are, but what he tells us seems to indicate that the threatening prophesies, of which he says in his _Historie_, "lett those very flatterers see what hath failed," had been added to the original text. We forgive him his ready wrath, and even the "threatenings" which he always considered himself at liberty to launch at those who, in his own language, "withstood the truth": but we could have wished that Knox had been more magnanimous, and could have forgotten the offence after the passage of years. Mary's careless speech would have been but "ane merry boord" had it been directed against one of his enemies. When Knox went back to Geneva after this winter's work to resume his pastorate there, he left the growing cause of Reform in Scotland with a constitution and organisation sanctified by the most sacred rites of religion, an advantage quite inestimable in the circumstances, and placing the cause as in an ark of safety. And when he returned to Edinburgh two years later, the scattered groups to whom in country houses and castles he had administered the Lord's Supper had become the Congregation, an army existing in all quarters of Scotland, ready to rally to the aid of any portion of the body, or eminent individual, who might be attacked: and headed by a phalanx of Scots nobility, Lords of the Congregation, the heads of a new party in the State, as well as of a new Church, an altogether novel development of national life. It would have been difficult to have spoken more boldly than Knox had done in his letter to the Queen Regent three years before, but the Congregation in its established position as a national party took stronger ground, and pressed their claims to a hearing with a force of petitioners too strong to be gainsaid. Knox had called upon Mary herself in her own person to hear the Word and abjure her errors, but the body of Reformers asked for measures more comprehensive and still more subversive of the established order of things. In their first address to Mary they upbraided themselves, with a manly penitence which must have been bewildering to royal ears, that they had permitted their brethren in the faith to be destroyed by "faggot fyre and sword" without resistance. "We acknowledge it," said these strange petitioners, "to have been our bounden duty before God either to have defended our brethren from those cruel murtherers (seeing we are a part of that power which God hath