278 THE PORTRAITS OF JOHN KNOX. patient helpfulness in their sufferings and infirmities (see the Letters to his Mother-in-law and others) are beautifully conspicuous. For the rest his poor Book testifies to many high intellectual qualities in Knox, and especially to far more of learning than has ever been ascribed to him, or is anywhere traceable in his other writings. He proves his doctrine by extensive and various reference, — to Aristotle, Justin, the Pandects, the Digest, Tertullian, Ambrose, Augustin, Chrysostom, Basil : there, and nowhere else in his books, have we direct proof how studiously and profitably his early years, up to the age of forty, must have been spent.. A man of much varied, diligent and solid reading and enquiry, as we find him here ; a man of serious and continual meditation we might already have known him to be. By his sterling veracity, not of word only, but of mind and of character, by his sharp- ness of intellectual discernment, his power of expres- sion, and above all by his depth of conviction and honest burning zeal, one first clearly judges what a preacher to the then earnest populations in Scotland and England, thirsting for right knowledge, this Knox must have been.
