Pounde took his copy, which Campion forgot to seal, back to London, read it in raptures, let it be seen, admired, talked about, and transcribed: this was his curious way of keeping a secret. The result was that what was meant to meet a particular crisis, and serve for a last will and testament, became as common property, beforehand, as any ballad sold in the streets. Lively measures were at once taken by the Bishop of Winchester; and the State, hypocritically urging “conspiracy,” pounced upon a host of Catholic lords and gentlemen. Yet Campion’s little composition, which bred all this fury, only asks for “three sorts of indifferent and quiet audience”: one hearing before the Lords in Council, on the relation of the Church to the English Government; the next before the Heads of Houses of both Universities, on the proofs of the truth of the Catholic religion; the last before the courts spiritual and temporal, “wherein I will justify the said Faith by the common wisdom of the laws standing.” Then he pleads in deferent and almost affectionate words, for a special audience of “her noble Grace” the Queen. In his candour and fearless simplicity he believed that opponents had only to hear to be convinced, thus crediting them with that earnestness in religious matters which he possessed himself, and which only a very few of the best Protestants of that day shared with him. Campion closes his appeal with a wonderfully beautiful reference to the vowed Seminarian priests, and in a lofty music of good English, worthy to stand by any passage of like length in the great prose classics. “Hearken to those which spend the best blood in their bodies for your salvation. Many innocent hands are lifted up unto Heaven for you, daily and hourly, by those English students whose posterity shall not die, which, beyond the seas, gathering virtue and sufficient knowledge for the purpose, are determined never to give you over, but either to win you to Heaven or to die upon your pikes. And touching our Society, be it known unto you that we have made a league (all the Jesuits in the world, whose succession and multitude must overreach all the practices of England!) cheerfully to carry the cross that you shall lay upon us, and never to despair your recovery while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, or to be racked with your torments, or to be consumed with your prisons. The expense is reckoned; the enterprise is begun; it is of God: it cannot be withstood. So the Faith was planted. So it must be restored. If these my offers be refused, and my endeavours can take no place, and I, having run thousands of miles to do you good, shall be rewarded with rigour, I have no more to say, but recommend your case and mine to Almighty God, the Searcher of Hearts: Who send us of His grace, and set us at accord before the Day of Payment, to the intent we may at last be friends in Heaven, where all injuries shall be forgotten.”