April 28th, 2007

"When Knox was dying he asked his wife to read aloud the seventeenth chapter of St. John's Gospel, and said: 'Go read where I cast my first anchor.' "
- Jasper Ridley "John Knox" (p 24), originally quoted from Bannatyne "Memorials"

"Few Scotsmen have been less nationalistic in the narrow sense, and more cosmopolitan than Knox; but though he had learned to adopt himself well to English politics, his roots were in the revolutionary Protestantism of Scotland, not in the authoritarian Protestantism of England. He was not prepared to sever those roots for the sake of a mitre."
- Jasper Ridley "John Knox" (p 118)

"Externally, I commit no idolatry; but my wicked heart loveth the self, and cannot be refrained from vain imaginations, yea, not from such as were the fountain of all idolatry. I am no man-killer with my hands; but I help not my needy brother so liberally as I may and aught. I steal not horse, money, nor clothes from my neighbor; but that small portion of worldly substance I bestow not so rightly as His holy law requireth. I bear no false witness against my neighbor in judgement, or otherwise before men; but I speak not the truth of God so boldly as it becometh His true messenger to do. And thus in conclusion, there is no vice repugning to God's holy will, expressed in His law, wherewith my heart is not infected."
- John Knox in a letter to his mother-in-law Mrs. Bowes - June 23, 1553 (Letter I, Works, iii. 338-9)