' He would not have gone out into the wilderness
in 1843, and he would most certainly have opposed the ideas of the
United Presbyterians. This theory may surprise at a first glance, but
it has been reached after many hours of earnest consideration.
Knox's ideas, as far as he ever reasoned them out, reposed on this
impregnable rock, namely that Calvinism, as held by himself, was an
absolutely certain thing in every detail. If the State or 'the civil
magistrate,' as he put the case, entirely agreed with Knox, then Knox
was delighted that the State should regulate religion. The magistrate
was to put down Catholicism, and other aberrations from the truth as
it was in John Knox, with every available engine of the law, corporal
punishment, prison, exile, and death. If the State was ready and
willing to do all this, then the State was to be implicitly obeyed in
matters of religion, and the power in its hands was God-given--in
fact, the State was the secular aspect of the Church. Looking at the
State in this ideal aspect, Knox writes about the obedience due to the
magistrate in matters religious, after the manner of what, in this
country, would be called the fiercest 'Erastianism.
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