It was already, however, a commonplace with Anglican Protestants.

Nothing of the sort was to be found in the _first_ Prayer Book of Edward VI.; broken lights of various ways of regarding the Sacrament probably played, at this moment, over the ideas of Knox's Scottish disciples.

Indeed, their consciences appear to have been at rest, for it was _after_ Knox's declaration about the "idolatrous" character of the Mass that "the matter began to be agitated from man to man, the conscience of some being afraid." To us it may seem that the sudden denunciation of a Christian ceremony, even what may be deemed a perverted Christian ceremony, as sheer "idolatry," equivalent to the worship of serpents, bulls, or of a foreign Baal in ancient Israel--was a step calculated to confuse the real issues and to provoke a religious war of massacre.

Knox, we know, regarded extermination of idolaters as a counsel of perfection, though in the Christian scriptures not one word could be found to justify his position.
He relied on texts about massacring Amalekites and about Elijah's slaughter of the prophets of Baal.

The Mass was idolatry, was Baal worship; and Baal worshippers, if recalcitrant, must die.
These extreme unchristian ideas, then, were new in Scotland, even to "divers who had a zeal to godliness." For their discussion, at Erskine of Dun's party, were present, among others, Willock, a Scots preacher returned from England, and young Maitland of Lethington.