There seems, moreover, to have been some tumultuary image-breaking.

{78} Knox may have been merely timid: he is not certain, but his delay passed in consulting the learned, for the satisfaction of his conscience, and his confessed doubts as to whether Christianity should be pushed by civil war, seem to indicate that he was not always the prophet patron of modern Jehus, that he did, occasionally, consult the Gospel as well as the records of pre-Christian Israel.
The general result was that, from October 1557 to March 1558, Knox stayed in Dieppe, preaching with great success, raising up a Protestant church, and writing.
His condition of mind was unenviable.

He had been brought all the way across France, leaving his wife and family; he had, it seems, been met by no letters from his noble friends, who may well have ceased to expect him, so long was his delay.

He was not at ease in his conscience, for, to be plain, he was not sure that he was not afraid to risk himself in Scotland, and he was not certain that his new scruples about the justifiableness of a rising for religion were not the excuses suggested by his own timidity.

Perhaps they were just that, not whisperings either of conscience or of Satan.