Of old, an occasional example had sufficed to hold heresy in check; the changed conditions were not now realised. The case had ceased to be one of checking; nothing short of up-rooting would now be of any avail. For Mary, with her intense conviction of the soul-destroying effect of heresy, no sufferings in the flesh would have seemed too severe to inflict if thereby souls might be saved. But a persecution such as she initiated was absolutely the most fatal of all courses for the end she had in view. Tens of thousands among her subjects had assimilated the new ideas, and were prepared to die rather than surrender their hope of Heaven. These the martyrdom of a few hundreds could not terrify; and the heroic endurance of the martyrs changed popular indifference into passionate sympathy. Applied on this scale, the theory of conversion by fire, hitherto generally acquiesced in, brought about its own condemnation. Such a persecution, on the simple issue of opinion, has never again been possible in England. Catholics or Covenanters might be doomed to death, but the excuse had to be political. Religious opinions as such might be penalised by fines, imprisonment, the boot or the thumbscrew, the imposition of disabilities; still the ultimate penalty had to be associated at least with the idea of treason. In Mary's time, heresy as such was the plain issue. The status of all but some half dozen of the early clerical victims precludes any other view: and the first movement against the heretics in January 1555 was contemporaneous with an amnesty for the surviving prisoners of the Wyatt rebellion. The immediate practical effect was that every martyrdom brought fresh adherents to protestantism, and intensified protestant sentiment while extending the conviction that persecution was part and parcel of the Roman creed. That any of those responsible, from Mary down, took an unholy joy in the sufferings of the victims, appears to be a libel wholly without foundation; for the most part they honestly believed themselves to be applying the only remedy left for the removal of a mortal disease from the body politic; Bonner, perhaps the best abused of the whole group, constantly went out of his way to give the accused opportunities of recanting and receiving pardon. The fundamental fact which must not be forgotten in judging the authors of the persecution is, that the general horror of death as the penalty for a false opinion was not antecedent to but consequent upon it. What they did was on an unprecedented scale in England because heresy existed on an unprecedented scale; and the result was that the general conscience was awakened to the falseness of the principle. The same ghastly error for which Christendom has forgiven Marcus Aurelius was committed by Mary and endorsed by Pole, both of them by nature little less magnanimous and no whit less conscientious than the Roman emperor, though the moral horizon of both was infinitely more restricted. [Sidenote: Gardiner]