successive days without interruption, and with such effect, that the magistrates and the inhabitants agreed to set up the reformed worship in their town; the monasteries were destroyed, and the churches stripped of images and pictures. Both parties now rose in arms. During the contest which ensued, Knox was a chief agent in conducting the correspondence between Elizabeth and the Lords of the Congregation. The task suited neither his profession nor his character, and he rejoiced when he was relieved from it. In July, 1560, a treaty was concluded with the King and Queen of France, by which the administration of the Queen Regent was terminated; and in August a parliament was convoked, which abolished the papal jurisdiction, prohibited the celebration of mass, and rescinded the laws enacted against Protestant worship. From the persecuted and endangered teacher of a proscribed religion, Knox had now become, not indeed the head, but a leader and venerated father of an Established Church. He was at once appointed the Protestant minister of Edinburgh, and his influence ceased not to be felt from this time forward in all things connected with the Church, and in many particulars of civil policy. Still his anxieties were far from an end. Many things threatened and impeded the infant Church. Far from acquiescing in the recent acts of the parliament, the young King and Queen of France were bent on putting down the rebellion, as they termed it, in Scotland by force of arms. The death of Francis put an end to that danger; but another, no less serious, was opened by the arrival of Mary in August, 1561, to assume her paternal sovereignty, with a fixed determination of reviving the supremacy of the religion in which she had been brought up, and to which she was devotedly attached. There were also two subjects upon which Knox felt peculiarly anxious, and in which he was thwarted by the lukewarmness, as he considered it, of the legislature,—the establishment of a strict and efficacious system of church discipline, and the entire devotion of the wealth of the Catholic priesthood to the promotion of education, and the maintenance of the true religion. In both these points he was thwarted by the indifference or interestedness of the nobility, who had possessed themselves, to a large amount, of the lands and tithes formerly enjoyed by monasteries.