Chapter 4

KNOX IN ENGLAND: THE BLACK RUBRIC: EXILE: 1549-1554

Knox at once appeared in England in a character revolting to the later Presbyterian conscience, which he helped to educate. The State permitted no cleric to preach without a Royal license, and Knox was now a State licensed preacher at Berwick, one of many "State officials with a specified mission." He was an agent of the English administration, then engaged in forcing a detested religion on the majority of the English people. But he candidly took his own line, indifferent to the compromises of the rulers in that chaos of shifting opinions. For example, the Prayer Book of Edward VI. at that time took for granted kneeling as the appropriate attitude for communicants. Knox, at Berwick, on the other hand, bade his congregation sit, as he conceived that to have been the usage at the first institution of the rite. Possibly the Apostles, in fact, supped in a recumbent attitude, as Cranmer justly remarked later (John xiii. 25), but Knox supposed them to have sat. In a letter to his Berwick flock, he reminds them of his practice on this point; but he would not dissent from kneeling if "magistrates make known, as that they" (would?) "have done if ministers were willing to do their duties, that kneeling is not retained in the Lord's Supper for maintenance of any superstition," much less as "adoration of the Lord's Supper." This, "for a time," would content him: and this he obtained. {33a} Here Knox appears to make the civil authority--"the magistrates"--governors of the Church, while at the same time he does not in practice obey them unless they accept his conditions.

This letter to the Berwick flock must be prior to the autumn of 1552, in which, as we shall see, Knox obtained his terms as to kneeling. He went on, in his epistle to the Berwickians, to speak in "a tone of moderation and modesty," for which, says Dr. Lorimer, not many readers will be prepared. {33b} In this modest passage, Knox says that, as to "the chief points of religion," he, with God's help, "will give place to neither man nor angel teaching the contrary" of his preaching. Yet an angel might be supposed to be well informed on points of doctrine! "But as to ceremonies or rites, things of smaller weight, I was not minded to move contention. . . ." The one point which--"because I am but one, having in my contrary magistrates, common order, and judgments, and many learned"--he is prepared to yield, and that for a time, is the practice of kneeling, but only on three conditions. These being granted, "with patience will I bear that one thing, daily thirsting and calling unto God for reformation of that and others." {33c} But he did not bear that one thing; he would not kneel even after his terms were granted! This is the sum of Knox's "moderation and modesty"!

Though he is not