Such was Knox's share in the working out of the English Reformation; and we have dwelt thus long upon it because the facts which we have stated have only recently been brought to light; and because we wished to set forth with as much clearness as condensation would allow the opinions which were held, and the mode of worship which was observed, by him, even at this early stage in his history. If Knox did something for England, England did much also for him. If he was instrumental in keeping the Church of that country from greater affinity with Romanism than it might otherwise have shown, there can be no doubt that the evil effects { 63} of compromise as witnessed by him there helped to make him more thorough in his later work in Scotland; while it is also most true that during his residence there his contact with the Christian people whom he met did something to soften and sweeten his piety, and to make it more inward and sympathising. Most of all, God was preparing him by it for the great work which he was afterwards to perform in his native land; and his years of service in England were blessed in securing for him the friendship and confidence of her ablest statesmen, without whose assistance, humanly speaking, Scotland might have been lost to Protestantism in the very crisis of her history.
[3] Dr. Lorimer has said (p. 31) that "in both the formularies recently set forth," the Order of Communion in 1548 and the "Book of Common Prayer" in 1549, the practice of kneeling in the Lord's Supper had been retained; and on a subsequent page (112) that "in the Second Prayer-Book of King Edward VI. a rubric had _for the first time_ been inserted appointing the Lord's Supper to be administered to the communicants in a kneeling posture." But these statements are not made with that author's usual accuracy. For the "Order of Communion" reads thus: "Then shall the priest rise, the people still reverently kneeling, and the priest shall deliver the communion, first to the ministers, if any be there present, that they may help the chief minister, and after to the others." But in the "Book" of 1549, the rubric is as we give it in the text. What the motive was for the omission of kneeling in the Book of 1549 it is not easy to say, but the fact of its omission is undoubted. (See "The Two Liturgies," by Rev. Joseph Kelley, p. 92.)