For, seeing that my Lord Bishops here present, who for their learning can, and for the zeal they should bear to the veritie would, I suppose, gainsay anything that directly repugns to the veritie of God, speaks nothing in the contraire of the doctrine proposed, I cannot but hold it to be the very truth of God." Even this speech moved the bishops to no reply. They sat silent, perhaps too much astonished at such an extraordinary revolution to say anything; perhaps alarmed at the strength of the party against them. It might be that there was little learning among them, though they had the credit of it; certainly the arguments which Knox reports on several occasions are inconceivably feeble on the side of the old faith. But whatever was the meaning there they sat dumb, and looked on bewildered, confounded, while the new Confession was voted paragraph by paragraph, and the whole scope of the Scottish constitution changed. [Illustration: KNOX'S HOUSE, HIGH STREET] The next step was the abolition of the mass, an act by which it was forbidden that any should either hear or say that office "or be present thereat, under the pain of confiscation of all their goods movable and immovable, and punishing of their bodies at the discretion of the Magistrates." Another edict followed abolishing the jurisdiction of the Pope under pain of "proscription, banishment, and never to brook honour, office, or dignity within this realm." "These and other things," says the Reformer, "were orderly done in lawful and free Parliament," with the bishops and all spiritual lords in their places sitting dumb and making no sign. The Queen was at liberty to say afterwards, as was done, that a Parliament where she was not represented in any way, either by viceroy or regent, where there was no exhibition of sceptre, sword, or crown, and in short where the monarch was left out altogether, was not a lawful Parliament. But the most remarkable feature of this strange assembly amid all the voting and "bruit" is the dramatic silence of the State ecclesiastical. It is curious that no fervent brother should have been found to maintain the cause of his faith. But probably it was better policy to refrain. The extraordinary absence of logic as well as toleration which made the Reformers unable to see what a lame conclusion this was after their own struggle for freedom, and that they were exactly following the example of their adversaries, need not be remarked. John Knox thought it a quite sufficient answer to say that the mass was idolatry and his own ways of thinking absolutely and certainly true; but so of course has the Roman Catholic Church done when the impulse of persecution was strongest in her. There is one only thing to be said in favour of the Reformers, and that is, that while a number of good men had been sacrificed at the stake for the Reformed doctrines, no one was burned for saying mass; the worst that happened, notwithstanding