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A tiny minority of some twenty-seven ministers clings to what it considers to be the Knoxian ideal, and is rewarded by all the wealth bestowed on the Free Kirk by pious benefactors during sixty years.
"Other things not so much shame itself as a certain kind of pity compelleth us to keep close." "The tone of the letter throughout was expressly calculated to prejudice Calvin on the point submitted to him," says Professor Hume Brown. On the whole he sided with the Knoxian party.
I have never found these facts fully stated by any historian or by any biographer of Knox, except by the Reformer himself, partly in his History, partly in his letters to a lady of his acquaintance. The mystery of the Kirks turns on the Knoxian conception of the 'lawful minister, and his claim to absolutism.
In 1847 the hitherto separated synods of various dissenting bodies came together as United Presbyterians, and in 1902 they united with the Free Church as "the United Free Church," while a small minority, mainly Highland, of the former Free Church, now retains that title, and apparently represents Knoxian ideals.
Next, the Genevan and Knoxian "kirk discipline" must be introduced. Each bishopric is to be divided into ten. The Founder of the Church and the Apostles "all command us to preach, to preach." England did not follow the advice of Knox: her whole population was not puritan, many of her martyrs had died for the prayer book which Knox would have destroyed.
It may be urged that here Spottiswoode had the support of the reminiscences of his father, a Superintendent in the Knoxian church. In the writer's opinion several of Knox's accusations of perfidy against the Regent, in 1559, are not proved, and the attempts to prove them are of a nature which need not be qualified.
The pamphlet is full of violent language about "the bloody, butcherly brood" of persecutors, and Knox spoke of what might have occurred had the Queen "been sent to hell before these days." The piece presents nothing, perhaps, so plain spoken about the prophet's right to preach treason as a passage in the manuscript of an earlier Knoxian epistle of May 1554 to the Faithful.
The question of lay patronage of livings had passed through many phases since Knox wrote, "It pertaineth to the people, and to every several congregation, to elect their minister." In 1833, immediately after the passing of the Reform Bill, the return to the primitive Knoxian rule was advocated by the "Evangelical" or "High Flying" opponents of the Moderates.
If alive in 1843, he would probably have remained in the Establishment, and worked for that abolition of 'patronage' which was secured, from within, in 1874. If this conjecture is right the Free Kirk was more Knoxian than John Knox, and departed from his standard. He was capable of sacrificing a good deal of 'spiritual independence' rather than break with the State.
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