Occasional addresses and sermons

Front matter

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.

G%t>t. jijl Jfa

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Preface

This volume is published in compliance with the repeated and earnest requests of students, friends, and admirers of the author ; its immediate occasion being the desire expressed to one of the editors at a meeting of the alumni of the Western Theological Seminary, at Saratoga, last May.

In the following selections from the writings of Professor Wilson are presented specimens of his biographical and historical addresses, patriotic speeches, and sermons. Some of these have been printed before in fugitive form ; but it was the wish of many that they be collected into one volume, together with additional material from manuscript.

It is due to the author to state that several of the sermons are little more than generous outlines. In his later life he was largely an extemporal preacher, usually committing to paper less than one-half of his discourse. The great body of his work lies untouched.

The editors gratefully acknowledge the courtesy of the Presbyterian Board of Publication and the Presbyterian Journal Company, in granting the use of the copyright of " John Knox," " Presbyterianism in the United States from the Adoption of the Form of

VI PREFACE.

Government to the Present Time," and " The Distinctive Principles of Presbyterianism/'

They are especially indebted to Professor Jeffers for his service of love in the preparation of a Memoir so careful and comprehensive.

M. E. W.

C. D. W.

December, 1894.

Contents

PAGE

Memoir, . ix

Tributes, xli

I. John Knox

i.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century Scotland was wrapped in the densest gloom of intellectual and moral darkness. Feudalism, ignorance, superstition, licentiousness, and tyranny — the worst elements of the Middle Ages — held brutal sway throughout her borders. The bishops and abbots, with half of the wealth of the realm in their coffers, outranking princes and nobles both in dignity and power, and setting at defiance alike the laws of God and man, outraged every principle of virtue and every dictate of decency. Priests and friars, bestial in their stolid sensualness, filled the land like the frogs of Egypt. There were friars white and friars black and friars gray — friars of every hue and habit and description, and friars everywhere.

Monasteries and nunneries were counted by the

hundred, and each several one of them w T as a leprous

plague-spot. The investigation into the condition of

monasteries in England which was ordered by Henry

VIII. disclosed a corruption as festering and loathsome

as that upon which fire and brimstone were rained in

*At the tercentenary celebration, Philadelphia, November 20. 1872.

Sodom. The state of morals in the Scottish monasteries was, if possible, worse.

The people had these bishops, abbots, priests, and friars for their teachers, leaders, and examples in holy living. " The priest's lips no longer kept knowledge ; " and when immortal souls " sought the law at his mouth," they were tantalized with dead forms in a dead language, which were as destitute of the spirit and grace of the gospel as a mummy of the Pyramids, wrapped in cerecloth, is destitute of warm, pulsing blood and stirring passions. The Bible was almost as unknown as one of the lost Sibylline books. The pulpit was obsolete. Instead of the sermon were substituted gossip, scandal, ribald jest, and obscene comedy. By means of excommunication, anathema, and interdict — the most terrific ecclesiastical machinery ever invented — the clergy tyrannized relentlessly over the souls and bodies of men. Priests ground the faces of the poor as systematically and as sedulously as though they had been called of God and ordained of men for this specific service. The Church, which should have been the friend and helper and teacher and lifter-upof the people — which should have been quick to discern their wants and swift to avenge their wrongs — used all its power to keep them in ignorance, to foster their superstitions, and to add to the bitterness of their burdens.

This apostate Church, winking at every species of vice, and tolerant of all forms of iniquity, " breathed out threatenings and slaughter " against all who ventured to question her authority or dared to seek for light and truth. For all such she had the ready argument of tyrants, fire and sword. Men were burned at the stake for having the New Testament in a language in which they could read and understand it. Yet this vast despotism, with ail its elaborate machinery of oppression, was impotent to arrest the progress of the truth. It could burn men with balls of brass in their mouths to keep them from preaching the Gospel in the flames, but it could not destroy or paralyze the truth for which these men died.

But the day of Scotland's redemption was drawing nigh. The echo of the voices of Wickliffe and Huss sounded faintly along her shores. By and by she caught glimpses of the light which had been kindled in Germany, Switzerland, and France.

A youth of twenty, with the blood of earls and dukes in his veins, invested with a high ecclesiastical dignity from his childhood, and with a long and brilliant line of promotion open before him, began to feel the stirrings of the new spirit that was abroad among the nations ; went to Germany, sat at the feet of Luther and Melanchthon at Wittenberg, caught the enthusiasm of the eloquent converted Franciscan monk, Francis Lambert, at Marburg, and returned to Scotland all aflame with zeal to preach the gospel. One afternoon a fire was prepared in front of the old college in St. Andrews, and this young man — only three-and-twenty years old — died at the stake as only one of God's heroes can die, and then history wrote, in ineffaceable characters, the name of the proto-martyr of the Scottish Reformation — Patrick Hamilton.

As had been predicted, " the reik of Patrick Hamilton infected as many as it blew upon." From his ashes sprung men armed with the panoply of the Gospel. The hierarchy could burn men, but these very burnings kindled a light which could not be put out. A learned and eloquent evangelist arose in the person of George Wishart. When he preached, crowds hung upon his lips, spellbound, by the hour. If churches were shut against him, he preached in the streets, on dikes, or from city gates. His voice rang like a trumpet through Scotland. It was one of the few truly brave and grand voices that have been heard in this world, but it was soon quenched in fire. On the gentle slope in front of the castle of St. Andrews, the sea sounding his requiem, George Wishart gloriously sealed his testimony with his blood. His persecutors, fearing that eloquent, clarion voice even in the flames, stopped his utterance by tightening a cord around his neck. Through the tapestried window of the castle, reclining on luxurious cushions, Cardinal Beaton witnessed the martyrdom, glutting his lecherous eyes with the agonies of this illustrious witness of the truth.

The hierarchy, wielding the tremendous power which had been won for it by Hildebrand and Innocent III., bearing two swords, the temporal as well as the spiritual, insolently lording it over prince, priests, and people, and setting its face like a flint against all enlightenment of the intellect or soul, exercised a most cruel and heartless despotism. Its spirit was devilish. So long as its magnates could roll in wealth, so long as they could pamper their lazy bodies on the hard earnings of the poor, so long as without restraint or let or hindrance they could indulge their brutal lusts and passions, they were content ; but rather than lose an iota of their ill-gotten and ill-used power, rather than have the people read the Word of God for themselves, they would see Scotland lighted from one end to the other with blazing stakes and fagots. They had the power, and they used it savagely. Their inquisition for those who dared to preach Christ was as keen and unerring as the scent of the bloodhound. Every voice that was raised in behalf of truth and righteousness was stifled in fire. Every kindling of light was trodden out in blood. To have the love of Christ in the heart, and to dare proclaim it, was swift and sure destruction.

Whence, then, can deliverance come ? Where can be found a man strong enough and brave enough to grapple with this gigantic despotism, whose mighty power has been the steady growth of ages? Has God in his quiver one such arrow ? Has he, in all his kingdom, one such champion hero ?

A tutor in the family of Douglass of Langniddrie, who had been a teacher of philosophy at St. Andrews, until, becoming disgusted with the jargon of scholasticism and the corruptions of papacy, he abandoned the one and renounced the other, became the devoted follower and chivalrous sword-bearer of George Wishart. When Wishart was arrested, he advised the tutor to return to " his bairns," as he could no longer be of any service to him. Very reluctantly, and only after earnest remonstrances, the tutor followed this advice. Besides teaching the classics, he exercised his pupils daily in the Holy Scriptures and indoctrinated them theologically by catechetical instruction, and at stated intervals these catechisings were public.

The times were now fraught with momentous issues, and events big with the destinies of peoples crowded thick upon each other. A few months only after the day upon which Cardinal Beaton, lounging on his velvet cushions, had witnessed from his window in the castle, with undisguised satisfaction, the burning of Wishart, his own lifeless body, covered with the gaping wounds of assassins' daggers, was hung as a public spectacle from that identical window.

The tutor of Douglass, together with his pupils, took refuge in the castle of St. Andrews, which was then held by the enemies of the late cardinal. Here he was soon recognized as one who was eminently fitted to become the teacher and leader of men and of princes, rather than to be the tutor of boys. When the judgment of his friends in this regard was solemnly announced to him, and he was adjured to undertake the work of the ministry, he burst into a flood of tears, shut himself in his chamber, and for days was overwhelmed with the profoundest grief. Through the importunity of friends, and partly through the impertinence of a certain champion of the papacy, he was at length constrained to enter the pulpit in defence of the truth. It was a memorable day in Scottish history when he first preached in the parish church at St. Andrews. Brave men held their breath as they listened to his bold and sweeping utterances. Such preaching had not been heard in Scotland for ages. " Others hewed the branches 6f the papistry, but he struck at the root." Some rejoiced and took courage, some doubted, some hoped, some feared, many were furious, but all felt that there was a new power in the world, while a few chosen spirits recognized John Knox as the ordained champion and leader of the revolution then beginning in Scotland.

By the aid of French forces the castle of St. Andrews was reduced, Knox was taken prisoner, was loaded with chains and confined as a galley-slave. Through hardship, exposure, and sickness his body was reduced to a skeleton, but his spirit remained invincible. Once the galley on which he was confined came in sight of St. Andrews, and the spires of the city being pointed out to him, he was asked if he knew the place. With kindling eye he replied : " Yes, I know it well, for I see the steeple of that place where God first opened my mouth in public to his glory, and I am fully persuaded, how weak soever I now appear, that I shall not depart this life till that my tongue shall glorify his godly name in the same place." We admire the indomitable spirit of Julius Caesar, who threatened to their faces to crucify the pirates who held him in their power as a prisoner ; but these words of Knox, in the condition in which he then was, breathe a grander courage than that of Julius Caesar.

Released from the galleys, he spent five years in England as an asylum from persecution, and as a preacher in Berwick and New Castle he was " mighty in word"; as Chaplain to Edward VI. he " stood before kings"; as a court preacher he was as plain and fearless and searching as Latimer ; as a theologian he was consulted in regard to the Book of Common Prayer and the Articles of Religion ; as a divine a brilliant line of promotion was open before him in the Anglican Church. Edward VI. proffered him a bishopric, and any dignity in the English Church was within his easy reach ; but he could accept none of these without the sacrifice of honest and well-

IO OCCASIONAL ADDRESSES AND SERMONS.

grounded convictions, and he therefore relinquished them all " for conscience' sake," and remained loyally and heroically true to these convictions in spite of gold and glory. He remained poor and untitled ; but is there a title on earth that would add any dignity to the simple name John Knox?

When that " idolatrous Jezebel, mischievous Mary of the Spaniard's blood," came to the throne, Knox was compelled to flee from England. He went first to France, thence to Switzerland, and thence to Germany. His exile on the Continent forms an important segment of his life, for it threw him into contact with other Reformers from all parts of the world, and afforded him time for study and mature reflection. In the matter of the church at Frankfort, he had an opportunity of testifying publicly against the false and pernicious principles upon which the English Reformation was conducted, and, in consequence, he again proudly accepted exile rather than sacrifice or compromise a jot or tittle of his honest convictions. But the most important feature of this part of his life was his intercourse with John Calvin at Geneva. These two great men, whose influence has struck deeper into the currents of history than that of any other two men then living, entertained the most ardent esteem and friendship for teach other. Although Knox at this time was fifty years old, he pursued his studies at Geneva as diligently and enthusiastically as the merest tyro. This seems to have been the sunniest part of his stormy life. He was engaged in congenial studies and he was surrounded with congenial companions, yet he relinquished these studies and the society of congenial spirits in Switzerland, and re-

JOHN KNOX. II

turned to Scotland just so soon as he felt that he could be of service there.

Back once more in his dear native land, he preached day and night, almost incessantly, and the "word grew mightily." No part of his life was more fruitful of great results than this brief sojourn in Scotland at this time. His clear vision pierced through all disguises, shams, and compromises. His sharp, incisive judgment penetrated to the very core of the issue. To him all compliance with papal ceremonies was treason to the cause of truth. With a steady hand, that never missed its aim, he at one blow cut the last tie that bound the hesitating Reformers to the papacy. Thus early in the struggle he settled at once and forever the policy of the Reformation in Scotland. There were to be no compromises, no temporizing expediences. The work was to be genuine and thorough. At this time, when almost totally hidden from the world and unknown to it, he laid deep and immovable the foundations of the Scottish Reformation. His glowing earnestness fused the floating, incoherent elements of Reform into consistency, symmetry, and strength. A master-hand was on the helm, and the noble ship, responding to his touch, assumed that course which she held triumphantly to the end. All ecclesiastical history since that day is a vindication of Knox's policy of the Reformation. It is the only true policy.

Called to the pastorate of the English church in Geneva in 1556, Knox returned to Switzerland, where he remained for two years. While there his time was occupied in preaching, in pastoral labor, in working upon the Geneva Bible, and in uttering his terrible

" Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women."

In the meantime the queen regent of Scotland, " crafty, dissimulate, and false," having thrown off her cunningly woven disguises, took the first step toward the total extirpation of the Reformation in Scotland by summoning the Protestant preachers to stand their trials at Stirling. The queen regent, Hamilton, archbishop of St. Andrews, and Beaton, archbishop of Glasgow, notwithstanding bitter and rankling jealousies among themselves, had joined hands for the purpose of crushing out Protestantism utterly. The plans were all matured. The plot was ripe. The mine was about to be sprung. At this supreme crisis the man whom God had been preparing, by a long and severe discipline, to be one of his ordained instruments in great achievements, steps suddenly upon the scene. Elijah was kept hidden in obscurity until he was to confront Ahab. Moses had a forty years' discipline in the wilderness, and came from the deserts of Midian to stand before Pharaoh. Moses and Elijah were no more really chosen, ordained, and prepared ministers of God to act in great crises of the Church than was John Knox. In slavery and in exile his nature was seasoned and toughened to the texture of true heroism. In his public catechisings at Langniddrie, he first trained to popular speaking that voice which afterward shook thrones and dashed to pieces the schemes and policies of kings, queens, princes, and nobles.

On the invitation of certain noblemen he returned to Scotland " in the brunt of the battle." His appearance at Edinburgh, as sudden and as unexpected as the appearance of Elijah at Samaria, created among his enemies as great a panic as though it had been the invasion of a hostile army. A good man in earnest, and with a good cause, is as " the chariots of Israel and the horsemen thereof/' mightier than armies and navies. Although under sentence of outlawry and liable at any hour to be arrested and executed, Knox resolved to stand with his brethren at Stirling and share their dangers and their fate, " by life, by death, or else by both, to glorify God." But from this threatened danger the Lord preserved both him and them.

Amidst the throes of incipient civil war, and in verification of his own prediction while a galley-slave, he returned to St. Andrews. The archbishop peremptorily forbade his preaching in the cathedral, and threatened that in case he should dare to do so he would be shot down in the pulpit by the soldiers. In defiance of the archbishop's threat, and in spite of the remonstrances of his friends, he yet preached.

This was the very crisis and pivot of the struggle. At Augsburg the princes saved the Lutheran Reformation, when the theologians would have compromised or surrendered. Knox, by his splendid intrepidity, saved the cause in Scotland, when nobles as brave as the bravest would have yielded to the demands of the archbishop. John Knox at St. Andrews is a figure as grand and towering as Martin Luther before the diet of Worms.

The effects and results of Knox's preaching at this time were marvellous. In the three days at St. Andrews — the primal see of Scotland — popery was utterly overthrown, the Reformed worship was set up, images and pictures were torn from the churches, and monasteries were demolished. Knox's doctrine was as fatal to popish superstition as the fire which ran along the ground in the plague of the hail was fatal to the vegetable gods of Egypt. Wheresoever that doctrine went — and it ran very swiftly — popish power and popish idolatry, with all the paraphernalia thereof, melted before it.

In less than a month after his triumphal appearance at St. Andrews, Knox's voice was ringing among the rafters of St. Giles's and of the Abbey church at Edinburgh. Chosen at once as pastor of St. Giles's, he entered upon his labors in that church which his name has made historic throughout the world, and where " his tongue was more than a match for Mary's sceptre," and where so often " his voice in an hour put more life into men than six hundred trumpets could."

During the trying vicissitudes of civil war, Knox was the one pillar of strength upon which Scotland leaned with her whole weight. Wise in counsel, utterly fearless in action, mighty in the resistless torrents of his eloquence, the nation turned to him instinctively as its God-given leader. With a price upon his head, with hired assassins waylaying his path, ever at the post of duty and of danger, " careless of his own carcass," thinking only of his dear Scotland, in the darkest extremities of perilous times waking the expiring courage of heroes with the trumpet peals of his eloquence, he fought the good fight bravely through, until within one year peace was proclaimed, popery was abolished by act of Parliament, and a confession prepared principally by himself was adopted. There never was a nobler fight or one that was more signal in its achievements. A complete revolution was accomplished, popery was abolished, the Reformed Church had a firm status and a complete Presbyterian organization. The battle was really gained. Henceforth the struggle was to maintain the ground which had been won.

A more dangerous power, however, than fire and sword was now to be encountered in the insidious influence of a brilliant court, which had as its centre the beautiful and fascinating Mary Stuart. The eagle eye of Knox perceived at once the point of danger, and Mary, on the other hand, as soon discovered the one power which stood in the way of the accomplishment of her designs. Knox was summoned to Holyrood, and in a long conference Mary tried her best to intimidate and awe him. She might as well have tried to shake Salisbury Crags with the breath of her nostrils.

When the news of the massacre of the Protestants at Vassy in France reached Holyrood, Mary had a grand ball to celebrate the event. On the next Sabbath, Knox thundered in St. Giles's against those who " were more exercised in fiddling and flinging than in reading or hearing God's most blessed Word, and those who danced as the Philistines their fathers danced, for the pleasure which they take in the displeasure of God's people." Mary sent for Knox the next day. He retracted nothing, but told the queen to her face that her uncles, the Guises of France, " were enemies to God, and spared not to spill the blood of many innocents," and then let her understand very distinctly that " it was not his vocation to stand at her chamber door and to have no further l6 OCCASIONAL ADDRESSES AND SERMONS.

liberty, but to whisper his mind in her Grace's ear." That voice was for Scotland and the world.

" He departed," as he tells us in his " Historic," " with a reasonable merry countenance." " He is not afraid ! " whispered the papists as he passed. Turning upon them, he replied, " Why should the pleasing countenance of a gentilwoman affray me ? I have luiked on the faces of many angry men, and yet have not been affrayed above measure." That man could not be frightened. Next, Mary plied all her exquisite art to flatter him, but in this she succeeded no better.

Times grew critical. Many of the nobles were proving recreant. Knox sacrificed some of his dearest and sweetest friendships rather than yield an inch or an iota to the growing encroachments of the papacy. In his estimation one mass was worse for Scotland than a hostile army. The nobles were ready and anxious to compromise. Parliament was pliable and plastic in the hands of Mary. Knox alone stood in her way. He, therefore, must be silenced or put out of her way somehow.

For the fifth time Knox was summoned to the palace. In a torrent of tears and a tempest of passion, Mary stormed and railed at him. Carried beyond all bounds of prudence, she at last spitefully exclaimed : " What are you in this commonwealth ? " Grandly Knox replied: "A subject born within the same, madam ; and, albeit I am neither earl, lord, nor baron within it, yet has God made me — how abject soever I am in your eyes — a profitable member within the same ; yea, madam, to me it appertains no less to forewarn of such things as may hurt it, if I foresee them, than it doth to any of the nobility."

There is not in history a nobler answer.

For writing a circular letter, which he was authorized to do by the General Assembly when any exigency demanded such a measure, he was arraigned and tried for treason. He made a brave and able defence, and to the bitter disappointment and chagrin of Mary he was acquitted. The queen had learned that Knox could not be intimidated, neither could he be flattered, or cajoled, or wheedled into compliance with her wishes. She had also discovered that she could not have him beheaded for treason in Scotland.

She next entered into a conspiracy by which, through a wholesale slaughter of the Protestants, she hoped to get rid of her enemy. A league had been formed between the Pope and the Guises, by which Protestantism in France was to be utterly rooted out by force. To this infernal bond Mary set her fair and jewelled hand, and that brought Scotland within the fatal scope of the league. But there is a wheel within a wheel. A jealousy between Mary and her husband, Darnley, and the consequent murder of Rizzio, turned the fierce currents of history into other channels, and Scotland was saved from the horrors of a massacre such as that of St. Bartholomew.

Under the regency of Murray the Church had peace, and the revolution of 1560 was ratified. There was still a strong and vicious papal party, but by firmness the regent kept down all insurrections until he was taken off by the hand of an assassin.

Under the regency of Lennox there was civil war. The castle of Edinburgh was held at this time by the queen's forces, and these forces were under the command of the apostate Kirkcaldy of Grange. Overl8 OCCASIONAL ADDRESSES AND SERMONS.

whelmed with grief on account of the death of his beloved Murray, Knox had been smitten with apoplexy, and was no longer able to walk to church or to ascend the pulpit without help. Yet he was as watchful and fearless as ever. Not liking the reports which he received of the preaching in St. Giles's, Grange came down to church one morning with a band of desperate men to intimidate the preacher. The old man rightly interpreted their presence as a threat, and, his infirmities forgotten for the time being, his wonted fires flamed forth again ; and leveling his thunders right at Grange, he made the very shingles on St. Giles's tremble.

His friends now feared for his life. The castle was full of Hamiltons, all thirsting for his blood. He was shot at through the window of his own house. But he was totally unconscious of fear. At length he was prevailed upon to leave Edinburgh, on the ground that his longer continuance there would involve the lives of his friends. He went to St. Andrews.

James Melville, who was then a student, has preserved for us in his diary a very graphic account of the habits and appearance of the great Reformer at this time. He brings the scenes vividly before us. We see the tottering old man walking and sitting in the yard at St. Salvator's College, calling the students around him, exhorting them to be diligent in their studies, to know God and his work in the country, and to stand by the " gutle cause." With his heart yet young, we find him encouraging the students by his presence at a play which was acted by them on the occasion of the marriage of one of their regents. We see him in his great weakness creeping to the kirk, "slowly and warily," with a " furring of martics about his neck/' a staff in one hand and his trusty servant supporting him on the other side. We see him lifted bodily by two men into the pulpit, and then leaning wearily upon it for support. We hear his tremulous, faltering, uncertain tones as he opens the text ; we listen as he " proceeds moderately for the space of half an hour "; and then entering upon his application, he warms and glows until he makes the students " grew and tremble so that they cannot hold their pens to write," and kindling with the rush and momentum of his thought, the spirit triumphing over the half dead body, we see the shrivelled limbs become instinct with life and energy, and the whole man " so active and vigorous that he is like to ding the pulpit in blads and flie out of it."

Providence opened up the way for his return to Edinburgh before he died. He returned according to an earnest invitation, and on the express and emphatic condition that he " should not temper his tongue or cease to speak against the men of the castle."