was not suppressed so rigorously as he would have been otherwise ... but this is pleasant conjecture. His mother was a woman of character: "a woman of noble wit, and of good and godly opinions," writes John Foxe of her, and proceeds to tell how she visited poor Agnes Prest when she was in prison for having Protestant opinions (that was when Mary was on the throne, and Philip of Spain was powerful in England), and conversed with her before she was burned at the stake on Southernhay. "Mistress Ralegh came home to her husband and declared to him that in her life she never heard any woman, of such simplicity to see, to talk so godly and so earnestly; insomuch that if God were not with her she could not speak such things. I was not able to answer her: I, who can read, and she cannot." The story does not relate what answer Mistress Ralegh wanted to give; it does not necessarily show her a Catholic in sympathy, though she probably did not sympathize with Agnes Prest's desire for martyrdom, and wanted to prevent the old woman from losing her life in such a terrible way. The story illustrates how inextricably religion was bound up with patriotism, and what a quandary the ordinary peace-loving gentlefolk, whose wish was to serve God and their country, must have been in, when the interests of either changed with the sovereign. That was why Elizabeth, by her policy of gradually cutting the ties that linked England to the Pope and the countries under his authority, gave such immense strength to the English; she united, as it were, the strength drawn from patriotism and the strength drawn from religion, by forcing England to rely on herself alone; and so she overcame the countries weakened by the constant antagonism between the welfare of their religion and the welfare of their state. She saw, as her father Henry had seen, the value of religion as a political asset; and with cold common sense she used that asset for all its peculiar worth. Her policy is more praiseworthy than her religion. Never was woman less religious; few women have been dowered with her state-craft. Religion and patriotism became practically identical: their interests were no longer conflicting. The Pope and his followers became, for adventurous Englishmen, comfortingly akin to the devil and the devil's workers, to have at whom has always been the privilege of good men since the world began. Moreover, in this case the powers of evil were wealthy and pompous, but unwarlike; and wealth is a pleasant perquisite to virtue. The time did not lend itself to contemplation. There was too much to be done. It was a time of action. The material world, with all its tremendous possibilities, was opening out before the astonished gaze of Englishmen, and left but little time for the exploration of the spiritual world. Men of action and men of art passed on their way triumphantly, "if not to heaven--then hand in hand to hell."