Protestantism in Scotland - James Aitken Wylie

view of the drama now in progress in his native
land, and could form a juster estimate of its
connection with the rest of Christendom, and the
immense issues that hung upon the Reformation of
Scotland as regarded the Reformation of other
countries. Here he saw deeper into the cunningly
contrived plots and the wide-spread combinations
then forming among the Popish princes of the age -
- a race of rulers who will remain renowned
through all time for their unparalleled cruelty and
their unfathomable treachery. These lessons Knox
learned abroad, and they were worth all the years
of exile and wandering and all the hope deferred
which they cost him; and of how much advantage
they were to him we shall by-and-by see, when we
come to narrate his supreme efforts for his native
land.
Nor could it be other than advantageous to
come into contact with the chiefs of the movement,
and especially with him who towered above them
all. To see Calvin, to stand beside the source of that
mighty energy that pervaded the whole field of
action to its farthest extremities, must have been
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