motives which impel whole masses of the community are commonly different from the motives of those reformers who urge the community to revolt; and their fervent denunciations of injustice bring to their side thousands of men who, perhaps unconsciously to themselves, only desire a chance to be unjust. The annals of all emancipations, revolutions, and reformations are disfigured by this fact. Better than what they supplant, their good is still relative, not absolute. In the history of religious reforms, few men better illustrate this hard moral manliness, as distinguished from the highest moral heroism, than the sturdy Scotch reformer, John Knox. Tenacious, pugnacious, thoroughly honest and thoroughly earnest, superior to all physical and moral fear, destitute equally of fine sentiments and weak emotions, blurting out unwelcome opinions to queens as readily as to peasants, and in words which hit and hurt like knocks with the fist, he is one of those large, but somewhat coarse-grained natures, that influence rude populations by having so much in common with them, and in which the piety of the Christian, the thought of the Protestant, and the zeal of the martyr are curiously blended with the ferocity of the demagogue. Jenny Geddes, at the time when Archbishop Laud attempted to force Episcopacy upon Scotland, is a fair specimen of the kind of character which the teachings and the practice of such a man would tend to produce in a nation. This rustic heroine was present when the new bishop, hateful to Presbyterian eyes, began the service, with the smooth saying, "Let us read the Collect of the Day." Jenny rose in wrath, and cried out to the surpliced official of the Lord,--"Thou foul thief, wilt thou say mass at my lug?" and hurled her stool at his head. Then rose cries of "A Pope! a Pope! Stone him!" And "the worship of the Lord in Episcopal decency and order" was ignominiously stopped. And in the next reign, when the same thing was attempted, the Covenanters, the true spiritual descendants of Knox, opposed to the most brutal persecution a fierce, morose heroism, strangely compounded of barbaric passion and Christian fortitude. They were the most perfect specimens of pure moral grit the world has ever seen. In the great theological humorist of the nineteenth century, the Reverend Sydney Smith, the legitimate intellectual successor of the Reverend Rabelais and the Reverend Swift and the Reverend Sterne, their sullen intrepidity excites a mingled feeling, in which fun strives with admiration. In arguing against all intolerance, the intolerance of the church to which he belonged as well as the intolerance of the churches to which he was opposed, he said that persecution and bloodshed had no effect in preventing the Scotch, "that metaphysical people, from going to heaven in their true way instead of our true way"; and then comes the humorous sally,--"With a little oatmeal for food and a little sulphur