nourished you, consecrated you; acknowledge how cruel and undutiful you have been: let confession be the salve of your sin.... Be merciful to your soul; spare my grief. Your ship is wrecked, your merchandise lost: nevertheless, seize the plank of penance, and come even naked into the port of the Church. Fear not but that Christ will preserve you with His hand, run to meet you, kiss you, and put on you the white garment: Saints and Angels will sing for joy! Take no thought for your life: He will take thought for you who gives the beasts their food, and feeds the young ravens that call upon Him. If you but made trial of our banishment, if you but cleared your conscience, and came to behold and consider the living examples of piety which are shown here by Bishops, priests, friars, Masters of Colleges, rulers of Provinces, lay people of every age, rank and sex, I believe that you would give up six hundred Englands for the opportunity of redeeming the residue of your time by tears and sorrow.... Pardon me, my venerated old friend, for these just reproaches, and for the heat of my love. Suffer me to hate that deadly disease; let me ward off the imminent danger of so noble a man and so dear a friend with any dose, however bitter. And now if Christ give grace and you do not refuse, my hopes of you are equal to my love: and I love you as passing excellent in nature, in learning, in gentleness, in goodness, and as doubly dear to me for your many kindnesses and courtesies. If you recover your [spiritual] health, you make me happy for ever. If you slight me, this letter is my witness. God judge between you and me: your blood be on yourself! Farewell, from him that most desires your salvation.” One phrase in this steel web of phrases from the pen of a rhetorician with a heart, shows that Campion knew of Cheyney’s sad and now complicated position in England. The letter was written November 1, 1571. A Convocation had met in the preceding April, on the heels of the Act of Uniformity, to which Cheyney was summoned in vain. It required the signing of the Thirty-nine Articles, and enacted, under Archbishop Grindal’s leadership, many things equally hateful to Cheyney, such as displacement and defacement of Altar-stones—(a great symbol, this, and no mere act of pillage!), the abolition of Prayers for the Dead, the prohibition even of the Sign of the Cross in church. Cheyney, excommunicated for his wilful absence, afterwards sued by proxy for absolution, for the sake of averting temporal penalties: but he had nothing more to do with the hierarchy. “Now you have declared war against your colleagues,” shows that Campion had heard accurate news of all this.