fury that any Englishman should dare to connect himself either with the world at large, or with his country’s own disclaimed yesterday. The State Trials, for instance, bear this out in a score of places. Many an official answer resembles the one made to that interesting character Blessed Ralph Sherwin, when he said truly that his coming back to his own land was to persuade the people to Catholic Unity. “You well know,” so the Counsel reproved him in Westminster Hall, “that it was not lawful for you to persuade the Queen’s subjects to any other religion than by her Highness’s instructions is already professed.” The “received religion,” or, as it was quite as often called, the “Queen’s religion,” was simply the new idea of nationalism torn away from relationship to the arch-idea of nations, which is the law of God. It was, in practice, no adoring angel at the Altar, but a capable parish beadle at the door. Now this was never the Catholic conception of what religion has been, or is meant to be. Happily, many thoroughly patriotic Englishmen felt that no least jot of Christian revelation, however much it stood in the way of Cæsar, could, with their consent, be put by; and to keep it free they were willing to make themselves very disagreeable indeed to their revered sovereign, and to their more easy-going countrymen. With that rude definiteness which is ever their chief family trait, the better Catholics threw their full force against the Oaths of Supremacy and Acts of Uniformity, as soon as they understood their meaning. The centuries passed since then prove that they succeeded in holding asunder what the Queen would join together. Was it unreasonable that she punished the men who tried to spoil her dream? And almost the chief of these men Edmund Campion was destined to be, though years were to pass before he lent his whole heart to the work God willed him to do. II THE HOUR OF UNREST: OXFORD, DUBLIN: 1566-1570