The cause may be that I have rather need
of all, than that any have need of me._ However it (_that_) be, it
cannot be, as I say, the corporal absence of one year or two that can
quench in my heart that familiar acquaintance in Christ Jesus, which
half a year did engender, and almost two years did nourish and confirm. And therefore, whether I write or no, be assuredly persuaded that I have
you in such memory as becometh the faithful to have of the
faithful. "[111] This is the truest touch of personal humility that I can
remember to have seen in all the five volumes of the Reformer's
collected works: It is no small honour to Mrs. Locke that his affection
for her should have brought home to him this unwonted feeling of
dependence upon others. Everything else in the course of the
correspondence testifies to a good, sound, downright sort of friendship
between the two, less ecstatic than it was at first, perhaps, but
serviceable and very equal. He gives her ample details as to the
progress of the work of reformation; sends her the sheets of the
"Confession of Faith," "in quairs," as he calls it; asks her to assist
him with her prayers, to collect money for the good cause in Scotland,
and to send him books for himself--books by Calvin especially, one on
Isaiah, and a new revised edition of the "Institutes." "I must be bold
on your liberality," he writes, "not only in that, but in greater things
as I shall need. "[112] On her part she applies to him for spiritual
advice, not after the manner of the drooping Mrs. Bowes, but in a more
positive spirit,--advice as to practical points, advice as to the Church
of England, for instance, whose ritual he condemns as a
"mingle-mangle. "[113] Just at the end she ceases to write, sends him "a
token, without writing." "I understand your impediment," he answers,
"and therefore I cannot complain. Yet if you understood the variety of
my temptations, I doubt not but you would have written somewhat. "[114]
One letter more, and then silence. And I think the best of the Reformer died out with that correspondence. It is after this, of course, that he wrote that ungenerous description
of his intercourse with Mrs. Bowes. It is after this, also, that we come
to the unlovely episode of his second marriage. He had been left a
widower at the age of fifty-five. Three years after, it occurred
apparently to yet another pious parent to sacrifice a child upon the
altar of his respect for the Reformer. In January, 1563, Randolph writes
to Cecil: "Your Honour will take it for a great wonder when I shall
write unto you that Mr. Knox shall marry a very near kinswoman of the
Duke's, a Lord's daughter, a young lass not above sixteen years of
age. "[115] He adds that he fears he will be laughed at for reporting so
mad a story. And yet it was true; and on Palm Sunday, 1564, Margaret
Stewart, daughter of Andrew Lord Stewart of Ochiltree, aged seventeen,
was duly united to John Knox, Minister of St. Giles's Kirk, Edinburgh,
aged fifty-nine,--to the great disgust of Queen Mary from family pride,
and I would fain hope of many others for more humane considerations. "In
this," as Randolph says, "I wish he had done otherwise." The Consistory
of Geneva, "that most perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth
since the days of the Apostles," were wont to forbid marriages on the
ground of too great a disproportion in age. I cannot help wondering
whether the old Reformer's conscience did not uneasily remind him, now
and again, of this good custom of his religious metropolis, as he
thought of the two-and-forty years that separated him from his poor
bride. Fitly enough, we hear nothing of the second Mrs. Knox until she
appears at her husband's deathbed, eight years after. She bore him three
daughters in the interval; and I suppose the poor child's martyrdom was
made as easy for her as might be. She was "extremely attentive to him"
at the end, we read; and he seems to have spoken to her with some
confidence. Moreover, and this is very characteristic, he had copied out
for her use a little volume of his own devotional letters to other
women. This is the end of the roll, unless we add to it Mrs. Adamson, who had
delighted much in his company "by reason that she had a troubled
conscience," and whose deathbed is commemorated at some length in the
pages of his history. [116]

And now, looking back, it cannot be said that Knox's intercourse with
women was quite of the highest sort. It is characteristic that we find
him more alarmed for his own reputation than for the reputation of the
women with whom he was familiar. There was a fatal preponderance of self
in all his intimacies: many women came to learn from him, but he never
condescended to become a learner in his turn. And so there is not
anything idyllic in these intimacies of his; and they were never so
renovating to his spirit as they might have been. But I believe they
were good enough for the women. I fancy the women knew what they were
about when so many of them followed after Knox. It is not simply because
a man is always fully persuaded that he knows the right from the wrong
and sees his way plainly through the maze of life, great qualities as
these are, that people will love and follow him, and write him letters
full of their "earnest desire for him" when he is absent. It is not over
a man, whose one characteristic is grim fixity of purpose, that the
hearts of women are "incensed and kindled with a special care," as it
were over their natural children. In the strong quiet patience of all
his letters to the weariful Mrs. Bowes, we may perhaps see one cause of
the fascination he possessed for these religious women. Here was one
whom you could besiege all the year round with inconsistent scruples and
complaints; you might write to him on Thursday that you were so elated
it was plain the devil was deceiving you, and again on Friday that you
were so depressed it was plain God had cast you off for ever; and he
would read all this patiently and sympathetically, and give you an
answer in the most reassuring polysyllables, and all divided into
heads--who knows?--like a treatise on divinity. And then, those easy
tears of his. There are some women who like to see men crying; and here
was this great-voiced, bearded man of God, who might be seen beating the
solid pulpit every Sunday, and casting abroad his clamorous
denunciations to the terror of all, and who on the Monday would sit in
their parlours by the hour, and weep with them over their manifold
trials and temptations. Nowadays, he would have to drink a dish of tea
with all these penitents.... It sounds a little vulgar, as the past will
do, if we look into it too closely. We could not let these great folk of
old into our drawing-rooms. Queen Elizabeth would positively not be
eligible for a housemaid.