Campion, Edmund, Saint, 1540-1581; Christian martyrs -- Great Britain -- Biography; Jesuits -- England
of the See, when his friend Edmund Campion was two-and-twenty. In most
matters Cheyney followed Luther; Cranmer’s more heretical doctrines,
which prevailed on all sides in England, he thoroughly hated. He
longed always for a reconciliation which was never to be, and never
can be. He longed to see the Catholics (against the well-thought-out
and oft-repeated prohibition of their leaders, between 1562 and 1606)
do a little evil to procure a great good: namely, smooth matters
over, escape their terribly severe penalties, and in the end become
able to leaven the lump of English error, by the mere preliminary
of attendance at the service of Common Prayer according to law, in
their own old parish churches. The Book of Common Prayer, as he would
remind them, was expressly designed to suit persons of various and
even contradictory religious views: Catholic; not-so-very Catholic;
ex-Catholic; non-Catholic; anti-Catholic! Campion often rode over
the hills to Gloucester to sit by the episcopal hearth-fire, book on
knee, and hear such theories as this, and sympathize with the lonely
old man who “saw visions,” and had little else in his vexed life to
content him. His strong double desire was to save by his own effort for
the Church of England separated from Rome, that great body of ancient
belief and practice sure otherwise to be lost in the flood of invited
Calvinism; and to secure Edmund Campion himself as his intellectual
coadjutor and successor, as one of high gifts likely to “drink in
his thoughts and become his heir.” The two were together, not only
in matters of dogma, but in all minor points. Cheyney shared with
Campion dislike of politics, telling the Council that in such matters
he was “a man of small experience and little observation.” He kept
his old priestly ideals, and would never marry. Campion, too, chose
to be a celibate. If he gave his heart to either Church, he saw even
then that it must be an undivided heart. To him, with his underlying
tenderness towards the ancient faith, and his dream of peacemaking
through compromise, which is so English, and just in these matters so
mistaken, the mission thus opened out appealed. Half reluctantly, yet
not realizing the disloyalty of his act (as he himself tells us), he
allowed himself to receive from Cheyney’s hands Deacon’s orders in the
Church of England.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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