John Knox and the Reformation

Excerpt

In this brief Life of Knox I have tried, as much as I may, to get behind Tradition, which has so deeply affected even modern histories of the Scottish Reformation, and even recent Biographies of the Reformer.  The tradition is based, to a great extent, on Knox’s own “History,” which I am therefore obliged to criticise as carefully as I can.  In his valuable John Knox, a Biography, Professor Hume Brown says that in the “History” “we have convincing proof alike of the writer’s good faith, and of his perception of the conditions of historic truth.”  My reasons for dissenting from this favourable view will be found in the following pages.  If I am right, if Knox, both as a politician and an historian, resembled Charles I. in “sailing as near the wind” as he could, the circumstance (as another of his biographers remarks) “only makes him more human and interesting.”