[Sidenote: Dalaber and his friends carry fagots in High-street.] The remaining brethren were then dispersed. Some were sent home to their friends,--others, Anthony Dalaber among them, were placed on their trial, and being terrified at their position, recanted, and were sentenced to do penance. Ferrars was brought to Oxford for the occasion, and we discern indistinctly (for the mere fact is all which survives) a great fire at Carfax; a crowd of spectators, and a procession of students marching up High-street with fagots on their shoulders, the solemn beadles leading them with gowns and maces. The ceremony was repeated to which Dr. Barnes had been submitted at St. Paul's. They were taken three times round the fire, throwing in each first their fagot, and then some one of the offending books, in token that they repented and renounced their errors. [Sidenote: Oxford is purged.] Thus was Oxford purged of heresy. The state of innocence which Dr. London pathetically lamented[84] was restored, and the heads of houses had peace till their rest was broken by a ruder storm. [Sidenote: The early history of Protestantism is the history of its martyrs and confessors,] [Sidenote: And its evidences, their endurance and suffering.] In this single specimen we may see a complete image of Wolsey's persecution, as with varying details it was carried out in every town and village from the Tweed to the Land's End. I dwell on the stories of individual suffering, not to colour the narrative, or to reawaken feelings of bitterness which may well rest now and sleep for ever, but because, through the years in which it was struggling for recognition, the history of Protestantism is the history of its martyrs. No rival theology, as I have said, had as yet shaped itself into formulas. We have not to trace any slow growing elaboration of opinion. Protestantism, before it became an establishment, was a refusal to live any longer in a lie. It was a falling back upon the undefined untheoretic rules of truth and piety which lay upon the surface of the Bible, and a determination rather to die than to mock with unreality any longer the Almighty Maker of the world. We do not look in the dawning manifestations of such a spirit for subtleties of intellect. Intellect, as it ever does, followed in the wake of the higher virtues of manly honesty and truthfulness. And the evidences which were to effect the world's conversion were no cunningly arranged syllogistic demonstrations, but once more those loftier evidences which lay in the calm endurance by heroic men of the extremities of suffering, and which touched, not the mind with conviction, but the heart with admiring reverence. [Sidenote: Wolsey falls, but the persecution is continued by the bishops.]