And as his voice had something of the trumpet's hardness, it
had something also of the trumpet's warlike inspiration. So
Randolph, possibly fresh from the sound of the Reformer's
preaching, writes of him to Cecil:- "Where your honour
exhorteth us to stoutness, I assure you the voice of one man
is able, in an hour, to put more life in us than six hundred
trumpets continually blustering in our ears." (1)
(1) M'Crie's LIFE OF KNOX, ii. 41.
Thus was the proclamation made. Nor was it long in wakening
all the echoes of Europe. What success might have attended
it, had the question decided been a purely abstract question,
it is difficult to say. As it was, it was to stand or fall,
not by logic, but by political needs and sympathies. Thus,
in France, his doctrine was to have some future, because
Protestants suffered there under the feeble and treacherous
regency of Catherine de Medici; and thus it was to have no
future anywhere else, because the Protestant interest was
bound up with the prosperity of Queen Elizabeth. This
stumbling-block lay at the very threshold of the matter; and
Knox, in the text of the "First Blast," had set everybody the
wrong example and gone to the ground himself. He finds
occasion to regret "the blood of innocent Lady Jane Dudley."
But Lady Jane Dudley, or Lady Jane Grey, as we call her, was
a would-be traitoress and rebel against God, to use his own
expressions.
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