ground both Fisher and he rejected the plea of conscience when urged by heretics condemned to the flames. The dispute, indeed, passes the wit of man to decide. If conscience must reign supreme, all government is a _pis aller_, and in anarchy the true millennium must be found. If conscience is deposed, man sinks to the level of the lower creation. Human society can only be based on compromise, and compromise itself is a matter of conscience. Fisher and More protested by their death against a principle which they had practised in life; both they and the heretics whom they persecuted proclaimed, as Antigone had done thousands of years before,[938] that they could not obey laws (p. 334) which they could not believe God had made. [Footnote 933: _L. and P._, viii., 52; Rymer, xiv., 549.] [Footnote 934: The general idea that Fisher and More were executed for refusing to take an oath prescribed in the Act of Supremacy is technically inaccurate. No oath is there prescribed, and not till 1536 was it made high treason to refuse to take the oath of supremacy; even then the oath was to be administered only to civil and ecclesiastical officers. The Act under which they were executed was 26 Henry VIII., c. 13, and the common mistake arises from a confusion between the oath to the succession and the oath of supremacy.] [Footnote 935: _L. and P._, viii., 876.] [Footnote 936: _L. and P._, iv., 6199; vi., 1164, 1249. He told Chapuys that if Charles invaded England he would be doing "a work as agreeable to God as going against the Turk," and suggested that the Emperor should make use of Reginald Pole "to whom, according to many, the kingdom would belong" (Chapuys to Charles, 27th September, 1533). Again, says Chapuys, "the holy Bishop of Rochester would like you to take active measures immediately, as I wrote in my last; which advice he has sent to me again lately to repeat" (10th October, 1533). Canon Whitney, in criticising Froude (_Engl. Hist. Rev._, xii., 353), asserts that "nothing Chapuys says justifies the charge against Fisher!"]