THOMAS CARLYLE
In the history of Scotland I can find properly but one epoch: we may
say, it contains nothing of world-interest at all but this Reformation
by Knox. A poor, barren country, full of continual broils, dissensions,
massacrings; a people in the last state of rudeness and destitution,
little better perhaps than Ireland at this day. Hungry, fierce barons,
not so much as able to form any arrangement with each other _how to
divide_ what they fleeced from these poor drudges; but obliged, as the
Colombian Republics are at this day, to make of every alteration a
revolution; no way of changing a ministry but by hanging the old
ministers on gibbets: this is a historical spectacle of no very
singular significance! "Bravery" enough, I doubt not; fierce fighting
in abundance, but not braver or fiercer than that of their old
Scandinavian Sea-king ancestors, whose exploits we have not found worth
dwelling on! It is a country as yet without a soul: nothing developed
in it but what is rude, external, semi-animal. And now, at the
Reformation, the internal life is kindled, as it were, under the ribs
of this outward material death. A cause, the noblest of causes, kindles
itself, like a beacon set on high; high as Heaven, yet attainable from
Earth, whereby the meanest man becomes not a Citizen only, but a Member
of Christ's visible Church; a veritable hero, if he prove a true man!
But to return: This that Knox did for his Nation, I say, we may really
call a resurrection as from death.
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