05 The Rulers of Peoples: Savonarola, Calvin and John Knox

LECTURE V THE RULERS OF PEOPLES: SAVONAROLA, CALVIN AND JOHN KNOX

IT should never be forgotten that the preacher’s message has a timeless and a timely element in it. Clearly, the historical facts on which our faith is built cannot be one thing in one generation and another in another; though our interpretations of the facts may and will change, and our applications of the teachings they convey will change also. It is written in the book of Psalms, in what I have often felt was an inspired mistranslation, "Because they have no changes, therefore they fear not God." The meaning of that seemingly cryptic saying would appear to be that we cannot really be reverent of God’s law of life and progress, the law of growth, unless we are prepared for new formulas and new forms under which the Truth may find expression. Whenever a Christian preacher and the church to which he ministers are unprogressive, the interest taken by the outside public in their existence becomes mainly an antiquarian one. They are no longer reckoned among those living forces that mould our thought, shape our institutions, and inspire our ideals. We hear a great deal about our historic faith, and much stress is laid upon the fact that we have nearly two thousand years of eventful history behind us. But that is an argument that clearly has no weight against the devotees of religions which are indefinitely more ancient. I hope it is not straining a point to say, that the charm of Christianity is not in its antiquity but in its novelty; not in the fact that it is aged and reverend, but in the fact that it is eternally young. I say nothing of those strange souls, who are so profoundly uneasy in the life of today, and who ever turn their wistful eyes backwards to the paradise of the Middle Ages. They are not of their century, and the century does not belong to them. But the real Church of God ever walks the world with the tireless step, the eyes forward—gazing eyes, and the mobile receptive spirit of youth. If ever the disciples of Christ were to become a society in which the ennui’s and dubiety’s of the world were to eat like acid into its enthusiasms and its faiths, it is quite clear that Christianity would be at the end of its conquests. What all other religions, societies and institutions envy us, is the magic of rejuvenation. So far from transformations and renaissance’s having any terror for us we know that with us they belong to the nature of things. History has in this respect a heartening tale to tell. Christendom has again and again, if I may use the apostolic language, been "transformed by the renewal of the mind."

Great and beneficent changes of doctrine have swept over Europe. New truths have arisen whose evangelists have forsaken everything, yea life itself, to make them the permanent heritage of Christ’s people. And with these renewals of the faith and thought of Christendom there has gone equally radical reconstruction of her institutions. All this means that Christianity has possessed to a supreme degree that power of adaptation to changing needs and conditions which is the accepted scientific law of life and growth. When the great apostle declared, "I am be-comb all things to all men if by any means I may save some," he laid down the principle of Christian opportunism. He was not leaving out of account the unchangeable and timeless element in his ministry, but he was taking count of the timely element. He boasted, as you remember, of his own versatility. He could become as a Greek to the Greek, as a Roman to the Roman, as a Jew to the Jew. He made it his business to understand his audiences, to meet them on their own ground, and to appreciate different points of view. Especially in dealing with his avowed antagonists, he was resolved to know their beliefs, their prejudices, their passions, so that in the science of "parry and thrust" he should not find himself "beating the air." That was why Paul did not hesitate to withstand Peter to his face, in defense of freedom, and over against the theory that it is the business of Christianity to impose uniformity of custom and ceremony upon men and women of diverse races and manners of life. It was the common sense of the apostle Paul, and the tenacity with which he clung to the principle of opportunism that saved Christendom, and made a world wide evangelism possible. Again and again, the largest interests of the kingdom have been safeguarded by those heroic preachers who had the soul of romance in them, and who would not be bound hand and foot by ecclesiastical red-tape. The great merit of Paul’s audacious policy was, that he was a strategist who thought out his strategy on the actual field of war, and not in some remote Jerusalem war-office where parchment and sealing wax were more plentiful than experience and foresight. The most fatal of all the Church’s dreams has been the dream of uniformity. Even Paul’s splendid courage and example were not equal to ridding the Church of this dangerous delusion. But this we can say: all those spiritual leaders, in whom the fires of the Gospel have manifestly burned, even when they have been most reverent of authority, have found some way out of the fetters and manacles that chafed their limbs and limited their activity. Thus Xavier and St. Francis could not be restrained from transgressing the strict order of the Church of Rome; nor Wesley and Whitefield abandon their inspired errand because its fulfillment meant the violation of those supposed decencies and proprieties which had made the Anglicanism of their day so prim and safe, so dull and dead. To the apostles of uniformity everything is regulated by unchangeable routine. There is no room for surprises. All departures from precedent are extravagances. The spirit of God is carefully restricted to well-defined functions, and within a limited area. Hence the spiritual life of the people of God must not overflow the appointed channels.

Such is the theory of ecclesiasticism. But the prophet is the one man who upsets the calculations of the prelate. He is the man of soul with a genius for the unexpected and the unprecedented. He is a spiritual Samson who is never happier in mind than when he is bound with the futile withes of the Philistines. And I make bold to say that the greatest fact in Christian history is not the authority of the priest but the authority of the prophet. I do not underrate the prodigious power of ecclesiasticism. It has often been cruelly and mercilessly exercised, and the measure of external conformity that it has enforced has been very great. But the prophet has wielded a mightier power; for he has swayed the inner world of men’s consciences, intellects and souls. He has governed and guided motives. He has inspired ideals of life and service. And in that way, without the mailed arm of material force, he has set in motion beneficent reformations and even revolutions, and has more profoundly influenced and affected the world-movements which make human history what it is, than all the power of the ecclesiastical machine.

It is my intention in this lecture, to invite your consideration to three outstanding examples of Christian preachers who veritably became the conscience of the communities where they labored, and the people for whose souls they watched as those that must give account. Each of these preachers dominated the light of a commonwealth. Each of them in his day of power reduced all other figures in the land to insignificance, and ruled the life of the people from the pulpit as from a throne. The three of whom I propose to speak are Savonarola of Florence, John Calvin of Geneva, and John Knox of Scotland. And first, of the martyr of Florence. I have little to do with Savonarola’s wonderful life-story save as it concerns the man as preacher. But it may be said that three great facts determined the form of his ministry—the shameless corruption in the Church, the open profligacy and sinful luxury of the ruling classes, and the renaissance of art and learning. Savonarola’s sensitive temperament was profoundly affected by all these signs of the times. It was his cross to live and bear witness in days when the princes of the Church out-vied, in greed and lust and passion, the princes of the State. He was one of many who fled to the cloister as to a sanctuary to escape the contagion of the plague of immorality. He was driven across the Apennines to Florence by the scourge of war wielded by the merciless hand of an arrogant and ambitious "Vicar of Christ," who actually died of grief and rage because of the conclusion of peace. From Sixtus IV to the dissolute Innocent VIII and the infamous Alexander VI, it was Savonarola’s melancholy fate to live through the period when the apostle’s lurid description of the adversaries of the true faith was most perfectly fulfilled--" world-rulers of this darkness, and spiritual hosts of wickedness in heavenly places." Little wonder that the monasteries were filled by those who were driven there by despair, or that Savonarola was one of them. Neither did the new culture at first affect the pulpit for good. It bred affectation of learning. It had its fruit in the scholastic temper and speech. It enriched the artificial orations of windy rhetoricians with obscure and sometimes even obscene illustrations from the classics. The pulpiteer with a thin veneer of scholarship became the plague of the Church; and when you have a whole generation of preachers who care more for prettinesses of composition than for the cure of souls, religion ceases to be a spiritual force, and is regarded only with pity and contempt. Students of the dark age through which Savonarola prophesied, are moved to wonder that seemingly there were no real tears in the soul of any priest in the land, save in Savonarola’s alone. The realization of the sin and shame of Church and State alike affected him with horror and anguish. But it is worth our while to remember, that the one man who really cared for the well being of Florence and of Italy, was the man there was least eagerness to hear. Savonarola had the bitter and humiliating experience of seeing his congregation diminish almost to vanishing point, and to hear the complaint under which many a thoughtful earnest preacher has suffered, that he did not cultivate the necessary arts and graces that can alone commend him to a congregation. He saw the masters of a histrionic style who tickled the ears of their hearers with their shallow artifices, addressing crowds of hearers who were well pleased with an entertainment that made no demand upon intellect or conscience. But he who sought to bring the light of Holy Writ to bear on the burdens and miseries of humanity, to plead for purity and freedom, and to reason of judgment to come was advised to practice more graces of speech. To Savonarola it was as if a land was being devastated by man-devouring dragons, while the anointed St. Georges rained polished epigrams, and clever jests at the monsters, instead of girding on a sword of stout steel, and making at them in the name of God. Not that Savonarola was unaffected by the new learning. It helped him to see to the heart of the Scriptures. It loosened his obstinate attachment to the traditions of the Church. It compelled him to face many problems of thought which he would otherwise have evaded. If he never reached a very consistent position as a theologian, it was because his powers were mortgaged to other purposes; and in his desperate fight for moral and social righteousness he had little leisure to examine whither his intellectual independence was leading him. But one thing is certain. Savonarola’s ultimate triumph as a preacher is the triumph of naturalism in the pulpit. He scorned the tricks and sophisms of those who won a cheap and fleeting popularity, but who exercised no lasting influence. He set himself to reach and stimulate the withered, wizened conscience of the multitude; and to do it he relied on the instrument of plain, searching, passionate speech. To quote his own words which are worthy of your attention, "These verbal elegance’s and ornaments will have to give way to sound doctrine simply preached." Do not misunderstand him. The idolatry of simplicity may be carried too far. The great moving discourses which swept all Florence subsequently into the cathedral to sit at Savonarola’s feet, were surprisingly simple and direct and scriptural, but the passion of the preacher expressed itself in the irresistible rush of his flaming sentences which no soul could face and remain unscathed.

Savonarola is an easily vulnerable person to the armchair critic. His philosophy is unconvincing, his visions often took the place of argument, his ecclesiastical position was to the end ambiguous. The censor of the pulpit finds many of his most powerful and famous sermons turgid, and complains that there is too little light and shade. I am not attempting an apology for Savonarola; but I may be allowed to point out that the test of a good sermon is not that it satisfies certain canons of style, but that it achieves certain moral and spiritual ends; and I may also be allowed to doubt whether his latter-day critics would have done better than he in rousing Florence from her turpitude and stagnancy, and recreating the ancient civic spirit, His power lay in the realization of the magnitude of the struggle, and that only by the uttermost devotion could Christ’s victory be won. He urged every believer to seek "that Christ’s doctrine might be a living thing in him," and that he might "desire to suffer His martyrdom, and mystically hang with Him on the same cross." If ever any man knew the meaning of "resisting unto blood, striving against sin," it was Savonarola.

Judged by the test that a great sermon is to make its hearers ready to fight and die for the faith, Savonarola was a supreme preacher. Moreover he is an illustration of my opening remarks in that he was a "timely" preacher, "a Christian opportunist" in the Pauline sense. His was an adaptable message, in the sense that he was not so inflexible in his views as not to modify his position under the stress of a consciousness of Divine coercion. This is, of course, most strikingly exemplified in his reluctant descent into the arena of politics; and his gradual perception, against all his prejudices, that a free Florence could only be won, and a Christian Florence could only be created, as the authority of the Word was acknowledged in the government of the city as well as in the administration of the Church. It is worth your while to notice for how long a time Savonarola’s one ideal for the Church was that she should excel in charity. It was reluctantly forced upon him, as it were, that she must show herself the appointed guardian of freedom and justice; and that to quote his words, "It is the Lord’s will that ye should renew all things, that ye should wipe away the past; so that nought may be left of the old evil customs, evil laws, evil government." It was then that he cried out in St. Mark’s that he would not enter on affairs of state "did I not deem it necessary for the salvation of souls." "That by all means I may save some," as Paul had expressed it. He had come to see that any mundane reformation needs a higher inspiration than motives of expediency. He challenged the contemptuous dictum "that states cannot be governed by Paternosters"; for the Lord’s Prayer is a fountain of all wisdom, social and spiritual, and the men who have that prayer in their hearts, are most likely to reform the commonwealth to good purpose. With his spirit newly enkindled for the great task, and his horizon of service widened, he laid down, and enforced it out of the Christian documents, that all power is derivative from the people; to use his own words, "that no man may receive any benefit save by the will of the whole people, who must have the sole right of creating magistrates and enacting laws." It was the new conviction in his soul that Divine sanction can be claimed for this political proposition, and that here lay the final safeguard against arbitrary power, and the ultimate guarantee of good citizenship, that changed the course of Savonarola’s ministry, and clothed him for a while with the authority of social as well as moral leadership in Florence I cannot take you through the details of what is, in the main, a glorious record of constitution building, the abolition of unjust and arbitrary taxation, the levying of taxes only on real property, the establishment of courts of appeal, and above all the creation through the new order of government of a citizen unity, which, but for the revival of the base spirit of faction, would have saved Florence, and might have saved Italy, from many a disastrous chapter of history. Let any one whose artistic soul is wounded by the puritanical fanaticism that had vent in "the burning of the vanities," or any one whose calm modern mind shrinks from the recognition of weird visions as inspired leadership, or any one who reads something of cowardice into the awful decisions of the last fateful months, recognize if they can the astonishing practical sagacity of Savonarola’s statesmanship, and his ultimate devotion to his ideals even through the bitterness of the stake and the cord, and the unspeakable moral anguish of being betrayed by the people of his love.

Let them remember, as I prefer to do, for final memory, the triumphant day when first the children of Florence were led from the folly and indecency of the Carnival into the great Church that they too might acknowledge and magnify the Theocracy which he believed was established as the government of the city. "Florence I Behold I" he cried to the vast multitude, as he lifted up the crucifix. "This is the lord of the universe, and would fain be thine. Wilt thou have him for thy King?" Thereupon all asserted in a loud voice, and many with tears, crying, "Long live Christ our King." No man has ever failed in the Christian ministry who has inspired a whole people, even for an hour, to aspire to be subject to the sovereignty of Christ. From Savonarola to Calvin is only a few years as we count time, but in the course of a single generation Luther had arisen, and with one great phrase—Justification by Faith –had changed the politics of the greater part of Europe. Luther is a fascinating personality and belongs, if ever man did, to the romance of preaching. One may cherish unlimited admiration for his war against a soulless and corrupt ecclesiasticism, while lamenting the fact that in the terrible period of the Peasants’ Revolt he did not see his way clearly, and apply his Gospel principles with equal consistency to secure freedom and justice for those from whose ranks he himself had sprung. It is the more to be wondered at because Martin Luther was the most human of beings, full of the milk of human kindness, devoted to wife and children, overflowing with laughter and humor, genial, quick-tempered, shrewd and passionately fond of music. On many sides of his character he was far more attractive and humane than the preacher of Geneva whose intense intellectual ministry I shall invite you to consider now. John Calvin is usually spoken of as the typical dogmatist; yet it was he who was responsible for the trenchant saying, "He is a fool who never has a doubt." Walter Bagehot objected to Voltaire’s writings because, he said, nothing could possibly be quite so clear as Voltaire makes it. The man who does not realize the mystery of life and the universe explains nothing, and cannot really be an intellectual leader. We live in a queer world, but logic is not the key that unlocks the mystery of it. Calvin would have governed the world of the spirit by rule of logic, and the world of affairs by rule of thumb.

Neither experiment was a complete success. That he did such extraordinary things in the course of a life broken by ill health and environed with every kind of danger and trial, is due to the fact that he himself was so much greater than his system. Let it be remembered that he completed the "Institutes" when he was twenty-four or twenty-five years of age, and probably began the task when he was not more than twenty-three. We are very wise at twenty-three, and see things much more clearly and definitely then than we do when we are twice the age. But I am one of Calvin’s warmest admirers who believe with Mark Pattison that "his great merit lies in his comparative neglect of dogma," though I confess I sometimes gaze at the fifty-three octavo volumes of the Edinburgh edition of his collected theological works and vaguely wonder, if these represent a "comparative neglect of dogma," what would have happened to us if he had not neglected it. Let me, however, strike the key-note of Calvin’s life and ministry by quoting Pattison’s pregnant words: "Calvin seized the idea of reformation as a real renovation of character." While the German reformers were scholastically engaged in remodeling abstract metaphysical statements, Calvin had embraced the lofty idea of the Church of Christ as a society of regenerate men. The moral purification of humanity as the original idea of Christianity is the guiding idea of his system. The Communion of Saints is held together by a moral, not by a metaphysical, still less by a sacramental bond! That statement, I think, cannot be overthrown; and it explains why John Calvin appears in Europe as a new apostle with a new message. To pass from Savonarola to Calvin is to pass from a volcano sending forth torrents of molten lava to a well-contained and well-controlled furnace, whose fires are more effective because they are more disciplined. The volcanic eruptions on the other hand are far more picturesque, sensational and awe-inspiring. Calvin knew none of the paroxysms of the monk of Florence; and in saying that I must not be understood to mean that the one type of ministry discredits the other; but only that once again inspiration is following a law of adaptation. From Savonarola to Calvin is from rhetoric to logic; and nobody can read with intelligence this epoch of world history without realizing that Protestantism needed at the moment not rhetoric but reason. Moreover Protestantism had yet to show the world that it stood, not only for a more rational theology, and a simpler worship, but for a purer ethics and a sounder morality.

John Calvin went to Geneva to make a great experiment. He believed that a preacher of the Evangel might create and inspire a church, which should in turn become the instrument of freedom and righteousness in the civic life of the city. He had it in view throughout, to make Geneva central to the whole Protestant movement; and its citizenship so compact, united and resolved that the city would stand secure against all enemies. I would that every preacher setting out upon his life-work could have within him John Calvin’s sense of destiny. Everybody knows how he resisted the call to Geneva, believing that his own work was in the study rather than in the market-place, and how Farel stood over him and with prophetic vehemence denounced a curse upon his studies if he came not to the help of the Lord in Geneva. Calvin yielded to a resistless conviction of destiny and always felt that the Almighty had shut him into Geneva and locked the gates behind him. Even when at first the Genevans, alarmed at his moral strictness, drove him forth from their midst, with violence of hatred which shook Calvin’s sensitive soul to its center, the Will and the Sovereignty which were to become the foundation of his creed appointed his return, and elected him to be the mouthpiece of God to the city where, in the main, he ruled and taught until his death at the age of fifty-four, and lies buried in a grave which by his own wish is marked by no stone, and is as unknown today as the grave of Moses upon Nebo.

I am often compelled to contrast the sense of destiny, or what we speak of as our" call," as it affected these fathers of ours and as it affects ourselves. We speak almost invariably of a call to a church; they spoke of a call to a city. We are told all the circumstances that make a particular church a desirable sphere of settlement; its income, its position, its social amenities, its agreeable office-bearers and pewholders. Our responsibility is to a special flock, whose sheep are known by name, and duly enrolled as such on the church books. But the destiny of our forefathers was to the population of a whole community. Their message was for a city. Their responsibility was for the souls of all people within the city gates, or the borders of the township. They were conscious of a pastoral relation between themselves and the most obscure citizen of the poorest court in the city. It was this fact that interested them so keenly in the city problems--how their community, little or large, was governed; the conditions of life that prevailed; the temptations to vice, luxury and crime that lowered the standard of morals. They, the preachers, were to take the field for public righteousness as well as for religious truth. I ask you to reflect what must be the effect on preaching of this wider and deeper sense of responsibility to one’s fellows. I would give anything in my power to get it back again for the modern ministry. A sense of responsibility to a church may be a very noble feeling; but a sense of destiny to a city, a town or a village is a far greater thing. Remember we are not Christ’s ministers because we are called by a church; we are ministers of the people because we are called by Christ. It is the call of God we need to be conscious of in our hearts and in our ears. A minister in England or in America will talk about his call to the First Congregational Church, or to such and such a meeting house; while the missionary more wisely inspired, or more greatly daring, will speak about his call to China or to Africa. It is the greatest thing in life when you can hear not only Christian voices calling you, but voices of those whose souls are dark or dead within them but who need all the more the message and the ministry that by God’s grace you are able to give. John Calvin will achieve his greatest modern triumph, when he thus deepens and greatens the preacher’s sense of destiny.

Students of Calvin’s sermons and writings will see for themselves how admirably the instrument he employed was adapted to the kind of constructive work he set out to do. Members of congregations will note with relief that he evidently believed in short sermons; indeed he had no patience, as he said, with a prolix style. Men have called him by almost every depreciatory epithet, but, those fifty-three octavo volumes notwithstanding, nobody will truthfully call him "wordy." Seldom will you read anywhere, discourses with less of illustration or ornamentation which are yet more penetrating and pertinent. There are no chasing on the blade of his sword. It is plain, keen steel, and with what an edge I Calvin’s style of address was, we are told, somewhat slow and measured. For one thing he was a martyr to asthma, and often breathless in the pulpit and before the council. It can be said of him, as it can be said of very few, that he spoke literature. Strong, stately, lucid, nervous, his sentences carry you forward from point to point of his argument. Little wonder that the French school books of today should point to Calvin as one of the supreme masters and even makers of the French language, and should describe his style as an "admirable instrument of discourse and of affairs."

It is remarkable that one who was so scholarly in all his tastes should be the determined champion of extempore preaching. Indeed he went so far as to declare that the power of God could only pour itself forth in extempore speech. His criticism of the Anglican Church, in his letter to Somerset, was, "There is too little of living preaching in your kingdom….You fear that levity and foolish imaginations might be the consequence of the introduction of a new system. But all this must yield to the command of Christ which orders the preaching of the Gospel." He never ceased to insist that out of the fullness of the heart the mouth must speak; and in one fine passage, with which I may perhaps conclude this part of my lecture, he uses these memorable words, "It is not said without reason that Jesus Christ ’ shall smite the earth with the rod of His mouth, and slay the wicked with the breath of His lips.’ This is the means by which the Lord will bind and destroy all His enemies, and hence the Gospel is called the Kingdom of God. Although the edicts and laws therefore of princes are good auxiliaries for the support of Christianity, God will make His dominion known by the spiritual sword of His Word, proclaimed by His ministers and preachers." Whatever their faults may have been these Reformation fathers believed absolutely in the power of the preached word.

Before I say a word of summary, let me detain you very briefly before the portrait of John Knox, who united to the statesmanship of Calvin the fiery eloquence of Savonarola. Perhaps I cannot introduce the man and his mission better than in the words of the greatest of Scottish historians. "The whole fabric," writes Robertson, "which ignorance and superstition had erected in times of darkness began to totter; and nothing was wanting to complete its ruin but a daring and active leader to direct the attack. Such was the famous John Knox, who with better qualifications of learning, and more extensive views than any of his predecessors in Scotland, possessed a natural intrepidity of mind which set him above fear." I agree with every word of that last sentence unless it be the word "natural." Knox insists that he was by nature a coward; and personally I have no difficulty in believing that "supernatural intrepidity" would be the more truthful phrase. It will interest you to observe that he too was driven into his eventful work against his own will and inclination. He, like Calvin, was an example of a man worsted in the fight against the Divine decree; wrestling against the good angel of his destiny and being prevailed over to the endless advantage of all subsequent generations.

After the martyrdom of the saintly Wishart, the Protestants in St. Andrews were resolved that Knox should take up the office of preacher. He refused again and again. Then John Rough, who afterwards perished at the stake at Smithfield, dealt as faithfully with Knox as Farel had done with Calvin, charging him "to refuse not this holy vocation… as you look to avoid heavy displeasure." Knox went out from the presence of John Rough to fight the battle out with his own soul, and "his countenance did sufficiently declare the grief and trouble of his heart." Finally he bowed to the declared Will, as a mighty tree bends before a mightier storm. Four months later the preacher of St. Andrews, the hope of the Reform movement in Scotland, was chained to a French galley, and for nineteen weary and desperate months tasted the French lash, laboring at the oar on the stormy north seas. But he had received his "call"; he had realized his "election," and no mutations of fortune could ever affect his sense of predestination to the task of delivering Scotland from superstition. It is just as well to meditate while we can, on the strength and stability which that old Calvinistic conception of God’s sovereign purpose gave to the preachers who saw their own destiny in the light of it.

Sometimes, when I realize what trifling infirmities we allow to interrupt our appointed work for the Master, I reflect on such men as Knox with wholesome shame. With what ardor and zeal he wore himself out in the arduous campaign I Listen to this, of a certain James Melville, who had the eye and ear of a born reporter. "Of all the benefits I had that year [1571] was the coming of that most notable prophet and apostle of our nation, Mister John Knox, to St. Andrews. I heard him teach there the prophecies of Daniel, that summer and winter following. I had my pen and little book and took away sic things as I could comprehend. In the opening of his text he was moderate the space of half an hour; but when he entered to application he made me so to tremble that I could not hold the pen to write." Mr. Melville goes on to tell us that at the time Knox was so ill and weak that he had to be assisted to the church and actually lifted into the pulpit, "where he behooved to lean at his first entree," "but ere he was done with his sermon he was so active and vigorous that he was like to ding [beat] the pulpit into blads [pieces], and fly out of it." Such was the victory of the spirit over the flesh. If only young preachers knew today the power of a "mighty application" of their sermons, and the supreme art of training all their guns upon actual temptations and tendencies, upon actual sins and selfishness of their hearers, we should not have as much cause as we have, to lament the decline of pulpit influence and authority.

I have no time to dwell on the prowess of this heroic soul in holding out for God against a crafty hierarchy, a turbulent nobility, and the most dangerous Royalty in the world. The destiny of Scotland was in the scales; and under God, its freedom depended upon the fact that John Knox was no sentimental and effeminate champion of the new doctrine. Preachers have many temptations to be unfaithful to the truth; but John Knox had that to resist which had sapped the integrity, and compromised the virtue of some whom Scotland esteemed most loyal to the Evangelical faith. You remember Swinburne’s lines on Mary Queen of Scots:

"O diamond heart, unflawed and clear, The whole world’s gleaming jewel, Was ever heart so deadly dear, So cruel!"

Mary was the cleverest, as well as the most beautiful of Rome’s apologists. To the task of outmanoeuvring and routing Knox and his army of peasant Protestants, she dedicated all her wit and all her graces. She flattered, she threatened, she cajoled; she tried laughter, she tried tears. She could not believe that one man’s conscience--and he of simple stock--could be proof against the wiles and the charms of the fairest queen in Christendom. But the one man she could not with all her craft hoodwink or bamboozle, was the Edinburgh preacher who never mistook her character, or was deceived by her artifice. Well might Mary exclaim in that famous interview, "I perceive that my subjects shall obey you and not me." History has it on record, that as John Knox passed out from the royal presence, the whisper went round, "He is not afraid," whereupon he replied, "with a reasonably merry countenance," "Wherefore should the pleasing face of a gentlewoman affray me I have looked upon the faces of many angry men and yet have not been afraid beyond measure."

It is certain that the Christian minister who would be faithful to his trust, must yield neither to stern looks nor to soft speeches. Most of us can muster enough manhood, when we are put to it, to stand up against unworthy frowns. We have not always the courage that is proof against the seducing smiles of fashion, or wealth, or rank. Especially, we have not the insight of Knox, to whom external position was nothing, and the only reality that of the mind and soul. Good women are the most precious of all Heaven’s gifts to the Church. We may well thank God for all there are, who devote the unique genius of their womanliness to the interests of faith and virtue. But there is need of just such a story as the one Scotland cherishes, to teach us all, betimes, that everything is not necessarily angelic that looks like it; and that the most difficult, delicate and dangerous of all controversies is, when Truth finds itself in opposition to Error, Superstition and Vice arrayed in the most attractive and alluring guise, and when the whisper of siren voices may seduce even the best intentioned voyager, from the integrity of his course.

I have put these three preaching ministries together, because they are supreme examples of the power the man of the Gospel can exercise in shaping the civic and national life of free peoples. They were all preachers of a puritan spirit. It is probable they made mistakes, and ever since have been the objects of the slighting criticisms of those, who have made few mistakes because they have attempted few enterprises. What the world owes to the example of Savonarola, to the constructive thinking of Calvin, and to the statesmanship of Knox, can never be told. Thanks to them, and to others whom I cannot stay to commemorate, we have come to hold that the ideal State is as much a fruit of the Gospel as the ideal Church. Any errors they may have committed, are far more than compensated for, by the priceless witness which they bore to the sovereignty of Christ over all mundane affairs. Of course they were buffeted and bruised, as all must be who descend into the arena. Of course they tasted to the full the reproaches, calumnies, and cruelties of those who repudiate the authority of the Christian preacher, save in matters of abstract faith alone. But I do not imagine that if they had their lives to live over again, and knew quite well the sufferings and disappointments that awaited them, they would choose differently. For there is, as Carlyle said, no victory but by battle. There is no crown but by the cross. There is no triumph for the preacher save as he pledges himself to the kingdom of God, and makes himself the willing instrument of that resistless Will which shall yet, in obedience to our Master’s prayer, be done on earth as it is done in heaven.