Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name: of the Faith and Presented to the Illustrious Members of Our UniversitiesCampion, Edmund, Saint
Religion
Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name: of the Faith and Presented to the Illustrious Members of Our Universities
Campion, Edmund, Saint
Catholic Church -- Apologetic works
Thus much for the inspiration and general significance of
Campion's work considered as a whole. It will also repay a much
more minute study, and to appreciate it we must enter into
further details.
As to the man himself, suffice it to say that he was a Londoner;
his father a publisher; his first school Christ's Hospital; that
he was afterwards a Fellow of St. John's, Oxford, and held at the
same time an exhibition from the Grocer's Company. At Oxford he
accepted to some extent the Elizabethan Settlement of religion,
but not sufficiently to satisfy the Company of Grocers, who
eventually withdrew their exhibition. This was a sign for further
inquisitorial proceedings, which made him leave the University,
and retire to Dublin; but he was driven also thence by the
zealots for Protestantism. Eventually he went over to the English
College at Douay, whence he migrated to Rome, entered the Society
of Jesus, and after eight years' training had returned, a priest,
to his native country, forty years old. His strong point was
undoubtedly a singularly lovable character, and he possessed the
gift of eloquence in no ordinary degree. For the rest, his
natural qualities and acquired accomplishments were above the
ordinary level, without reaching an extraordinary height. He was
a man who never ceased working, and whose temper was always
angelic, though he sometimes suffered from severe depression. He
was adored by his pupils both at Oxford and in Bohemia. His
memory was always bright, and his conversation always sparkled
with fresh thoughts and poetical ideas. He composed with
extraordinary facility in Latin prose and verse; but the extant
fragments of these literary exercises do not strike us as being
of unusual excellence, though genuinely admired in their day. He
was certainly an ideal missioner: saintly, inspired, eloquent,
untireable, patient, consumed with the desire for the success of
his undertaking, and unfaltering in his faith that success would
follow by the providential action of God, despite the obvious
fact that all appearances were against him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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