the large, simple divisions of society: a strong and positive
spirit robustly virtuous, who has chosen a better part

coarsely, and holds to it steadfastly, with all its
consequences of pain to himself and others; as one who should

go straight before him on a journey, neither tempted by
wayside flowers nor very scrupulous of small lives under

foot. It was in virtue of this latter disposition that Knox
was capable of those intimacies with women that embellished

his life; and we find him preserved for us in old letters as
a man of many women friends; a man of some expansion toward

the other sex; a man ever ready to comfort weeping women, and
to weep along with them.

Of such scraps and fragments of evidence as to his private
life and more intimate thoughts as have survived to us from

all the perils that environ written paper, an astonishingly
large proportion is in the shape of letters to women of his

familiarity. He was twice married, but that is not greatly
to the purpose; for the Turk, who thinks even more meanly of

women than John Knox, is none the less given to marrying.
What is really significant is quite apart from marriage. For

the man Knox was a true man, and woman, the EWIG-WEIBLICHE,
was as necessary to him, in spite of all low theories, as

ever she was to Goethe. He came to her in a certain halo of
his own, as the minister of truth, just as Goethe came to her

in a glory of art; he made himself necessary to troubled
hearts and minds exercised in the painful complications that

naturally result from all changes in the world's way of
thinking; and those whom he had thus helped became dear to

him, and were made the chosen companions of his leisure if
they were at hand, or encouraged and comforted by letter if

they were afar.
It must not be forgotten that Knox had been a presbyter of

the old Church, and that the many women whom we shall see
gathering around him, as he goes through life, had probably

been accustomed, while still in the communion of Rome, to
rely much upon some chosen spiritualdirector, so that the

intimacies of which I propose to offer some account, while
testifying to a good heart in the Reformer, testify also to a

certain survival of the spirit of the confessional in the
Reformed Church, and are not properly to be judged without

this idea. There is no friendship so noble, but it is the
product of the time; and a world of little finical

observances, and little frail proprieties and fashions of the
hour, go to make or to mar, to stint or to perfect, the union

of spirits the most loving and the most intolerant of such
interference. The trick of the country and the age steps in

even between the mother and her child, counts out their
caresses upon niggardly fingers, and says, in the voice of

authority, that this one thing shall be a matter of
confidence between them, and this other thing shall not. And

thus it is that we must take into reckoningwhatever tended
to modify the social atmosphere in which Knox and his women

friends met, and loved and trusted each other. To the man
who had been their priest and was now their minister, women

would be able to speak with a confidence quite impossible in
these latter days; the women would be able to speak, and the

man to hear. It was a beaten road just then; and I daresay
we should be no less scandalised at their plain speech than

they, if they could come back to earth, would be offended at
our waltzes and worldly fashions. This, then, was the

footing on which Knox stood with his many women friends. The
reader will see, as he goes on, how much of warmth, of

interest, and of that happy mutualdependence which is the
very gist of friendship, he contrived to ingraft upon this

somewhat dry relationship of penitent and confessor.
It must be understood that we know nothing of his intercourse

with women (as indeed we know little at all about his life)
until he came to Berwick in 1549, when he was already in the

forty-fifth year of his age. At the same time it is just
possible that some of a little group at Edinburgh, with whom

he corresponded during his last absence, may have been
friends of an older standing. Certainly they were, of all

his female correspondents, the least personallyfavoured. He
treats them throughout in a comprehensive sort of spirit that

must at times have been a little wounding. Thus, he remits
one of them to his former letters, "which I trust be common

betwixt you and the rest of our sisters, for to me ye are all
equal in Christ." (1) Another letter is a gem in this way.

"Albeit" it begins, "albeit I have no particular matter to
write unto you, beloved sister, yet I could not refrain to

write these few lines to you in declaration of my remembrance
of you. True it is that I have many whom I bear in equal

remembrance before God with you, to whom at present I write
nothing, either for that I esteem them stronger than you, and

therefore they need the less my rude labours, or else because
they have not provoked me by their writing to recompense

their remembrance." (2) His "sisters in Edinburgh" had
evidently to "provoke his attention pretty constantly; nearly

all his letters are, on the face of them, answers to
questions, and the answers are given with a certain crudity

that I do not find repeated when he writes to those he really
cares for. So when they consult him about women's apparel (a

subject on which his opinion may be pretty correctly imagined
by the ingenious reader for himself) he takes occasion to

anticipate some of the most offensive matter of the "First
Blast" in a style of real brutality. (3) It is not merely

that he tells them "the garments of women do declare their
weakness and inability to execute the office of man," though

that in itself is neither very wise nor very opportune in
such a correspondence one would think; but if the reader will

take the trouble to wade through the long, tedioussermon for
himself, he will see proof enough that Knox neither loved,

nor very deeply respected, the women he was then addressing.
In very truth, I believe these Edinburgh sisters simply bored

him. He had a certain interest in them as his children in
the Lord; they were continually "provoking him by their

writing;" and, if they handed his letters about, writing to
them was as good a form of publication as was then open to

him in Scotland. There is one letter, however, in this
budget, addressed to the wife of Clerk-Register Mackgil,

which is worthy of some further mention. The Clerk-Register
had not opened his heart, it would appear, to the preaching

of the Gospel, and Mrs. Mackgil has written, seeking the
Reformer's prayers in his behalf. "Your husband," he

answers, "is dear to me for that he is a man indued with some
good gifts, but more dear for that he is your husband.

Charity moveth me to thirst his illumination, both for his
comfort and for the trouble which you sustain by his

coldness, which justly may be called infidelity." He wishes
her, however, not to hope too much; he can promise that his

prayers will be earnest, but not that they will be effectual;
it is possible that this is to be her "cross" in life; that

"her head, appointed by God for her comfort, should be her
enemy." And if this be so, well, there is nothing for it;

"with patience she must abide God's mercifuldeliverance,"
taking heed only that she does not "obey manifest iniquity

for the pleasure of any mortal man." (4) I conceive this
epistle would have given a very modified sort of pleasure to

the Clerk-Register, had it chanced to fall into his hands.
Compare its tenor - the dry resignation not without a hope of

mercifuldeliverancetherein recommended - with these words
from another letter, written but the year before to two

married women of London: "Call first for grace by Jesus, and
thereafter communicate with your faithful husbands, and then

shall God, I doubt not, conduct your footsteps, and direct
your counsels to His glory." (5) Here the husbands are put