titlepage
THE HISTORY
OF THE
REFORMATION OF RELIGION
IN SCOTLAND
BY
JOHN KNOX
WITH WHICH ARE INCLUDED
KNOX'S CONFESSION AND
THE BOOK OF DISCIPLINE
A Twentieth Century Edition
REVISED AND EDITED BY
CUTHBERT LENNOX
LONDON:
ANDREW MELROSE
16 Pilgrim Street, E.C.
MCMV
"It is really a loss to English and even to universal literature that Knox's hasty and strangely interesting, impressive, and peculiar Book, called The History of the Reformation in Scotland, has not been rendered far more extensively legible to serious mankind at large than is hitherto the case. There is in it, ... a really singular degree of clearness, sharp just insight and perspicacity, now and then of picturesqueness and visuality, as if the thing was set before your eyes; and everywhere a feeling of the most perfect credibility and veracity: that is to say altogether, of Knox's high qualities as an observer and narrator.... This man, you can discern, has seized the essential elements of the phenomenon, and done a right portrait of it; a man with an actually seeing eye....
"Besides this perfect clearness, naÏvetÉ, and almost unintentional picturesqueness, there are to be found in Knox's swift flowing History many other kinds of 'geniality,' and indeed of far higher excellences than are wont to be included under that designation. The grand Italian Dante is not more in earnest about this inscrutable Immensity than Knox is. There is in Knox throughout the spirit of an old Hebrew Prophet, such as may have been in Moses in the Desert at sight of the Burning Bush; spirit almost altogether unique among modern men; and along with all this, in singular neighbourhood to it, a sympathy, a veiled tenderness of heart, veiled, but deep and of piercing vehemence, and withal even an inward gaiety of soul, alive to the ridicule that dwells in whatever is ridiculous, in fact a fine vein of humour, which is wanting in Dante....
"The story of this great epoch is nowhere to be found so impressively narrated as in this Book of Knox's; a hasty loose production, but grounded on the completest knowledge, and with visible intention of setting down faithfully both the imperfections of poor fallible men, and the unspeakable mercies of God to this poor realm of Scotland."
Carlyle.
