The Society of Jesus had been founded only six years before Campion was born. It had as yet no English “Province,” that is, no members living under the English flag with a domestic government of their own. But Edmund Campion was already well known to the Provincials on the Continent, who had a warm contest over him, every one of them wishing to add such a promising soldier to his own wing of the army of the Lord. As it fell out, Bohemia won. Campion was sent as one of a company to Vienna, and then from Vienna to Prague, where the Noviciate was, with Father Avellanedo, Confessor to the Empress, a man of wide experience. He was so deeply edified by his companion that, he told Fr. Parsons long after, it had kept him all his life “much affectioned” towards England and Englishmen. Prague was in a miserable, godless state: the Catholics were poor and few: the great University had perished: and all this was due to the ruin, moral and material, produced by the preaching, at the dawn of the fifteenth century, of John Hus. That Hus got his Socialistic ideas from Wyclif was a fact never out of Campion’s mind while in Bohemia: for he thought that England owed some reparation to a country which she had helped to spoil, and he was more than willing to pay his part of that debt. VI THE WISHED-FOR DAWN: BOHEMIA: 1573-1579 CAMPION stayed but two months at Prague, as the small Noviciate was removed to Brünn in Moravia, where the inhabitants were most hostile to Catholicism. The Bishop of Olmütz begged the Jesuits to help him so far as their Rule permitted. Novices were sent out among the neighbouring villages, to catechize and instruct the poorer Catholics; and no one had so instant a success in this little enterprise as “God’s Englishman.” At the year’s end his Novice Master, John Paul Campanus, became Rector of the College in Prague, and took Edmund Campion back with him. The latter left a good deal of his heart within the gray and austere walls of Brünn, as two of his charming letters show. In the old garden, under a mulberry tree, he had had a wonderful vision: Our Lady stood there, smiling at him, and offering him a purple robe. He knew the portent of martyrdom, but for long hid it in his heart. At Prague Campion continued and increased his Douay employments. He opened the October term with what was called a “glorious peroration”. As Professor of Rhetoric, he wrote, in 1574, a beautiful little treatise on that subject so familiar to him. His duty was to be first in the house to rise and last to go to bed; he spent his recreation-time catechizing children, receiving converts, visiting the prison and the hospital, or helping the cook in the kitchen! In January, 1575, he set up at his College a branch Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, or Sodality of Our Lady, of which he became president. About the same time he made his first vows. He was continually called upon for great College occasions, and to pronounce public panegyrics. “Whatever had