largely followed Nominalism which was in tune with the growing emphasis on the absolutely unconstrained nature of God, which in turn emphasised his grace and the importance of individual belief and submission. His humanist approach was in tune with the return to the texts in the original languages of the Scriptures and classical authors. He emphasised that authority lay with the whole church and not with the Pope. Similarly, he asserted that authority in a kingdom lay not with the king but with the people, who could retake their power from a delinquent king (a striking echo of the ringing Declaration of Arbroath 1320 confirming to the Pope the independence of the Scottish crown from that of England). It is not surprising that he emphasised the natural freedom of human beings. His influence extended through enthusiastic pupils to the leading thinkers of the day but most obviously to a group of Spanish thinkers, including Antonio Coronel, who taught John Calvin and very probably Ignatius of Loyola. In 1522, at Salamanca, Domingo de San Juan referred to him as "the revered master, John Mair, a man celebrated the world over". The Salamanca school of (largely Thomist) philosophers was a brilliant flowering of thought until the early parts of the seventeenth century. It included Francisco de Vitoria, Cano, de Domingo de Soto and Bartolomé de Medina, each one thorough soaked in Mairian enthusiasms. Knox Major wrote in his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard "Our native soil attracts us with a secret and inexpressible sweetness and does not permit us to forget it". He returned to Scotland in 1518. Given his success and experience in Paris, it is no surprise that he became the Principal of the University of Glasgow. In 1523 left for the University of St Andrews where he was assessor to the Dean of Arts. In 1525 he went again to Paris from where he returned in 1531 eventually to become Provost of St Salvator's College, St Andrews until his death in 1550, aged about eighty three. One of his most notable students was John Knox (coincidentally, another native of Haddington) who said of Major that he was such as "whose work was then held as an oracle on the matters of religion" If this is not exactly a ringing endorsement, it is not hard to see in Knox's preaching an intense version of Major's enthusiasms – the