Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 5, 1895 - Miscellanies, Volume II

MEN AND BOOKS
represented that passive obedience, that toleration
of injustice and absurdity, that holding back of the
hand from political aiFairs as from something unclean,
which lost France, if we are to believe M. Michelet,
for the Reformation ; a spirit necessarily fatal in the
long-run to the existence of any sect that may pro-
fess it ; a suicidal doctrine that survives among us
to this day in narrow views of personal duty, and
the low political morality of many virtuous men.
In Knox, on the other hand, we see foreshadowed
the whole Puritan Revolution and the scaffold of
Charles i.
There is little doubt in my mind that this inter-
view was what caused Knox to print his book
without a name.^ It was a dangerous thing to con-
tradict the Man of Geneva, and doubly so, surely,
when one had had the advantage of correction from
him in a private conversation ; and Knox had his
little flock of English refugees to consider. If they
had fallen into bad odour at Geneva, where else was
there left to flee to ? It was printed, as I said, in
1558 ; and, by a singular mal-a-p?^opos, in that same
year Mary died, and Elizabeth succeeded to the
throne of England. And just as the accession of
Catholic Queen Mary had condemned female rule
in the eyes of Knox, the accession of Protestant
Queen Elizabeth justified it in the eyes of his
colleagues. Female rule ceases to be an anomaly,
1 It was anonymously published, but no one seems to have been in
doubt about its authorship ; he might as well have set his name to it,
for all the good he got by holding it back.