Who's that which knocks? Oh stay, my Lord, I come: I know that call, since first it made me know My self, which makes me now with joy to run, Lest He be gone that can my duty show. Jesu, my Lord, I know Thee by the Cross Thou offer'st me, but not unto my loss. Come in, my Lord, whose presence most I crave, And shew Thy will unto my longing mind; From punishments of sin Thy servant save, Though he hath been to Thy deserts unkind. Jesu forgive, and strengthen so my mind, That rooted virtues thou in me maist find. Stay still, my Lord, else will they fade away, As Marigold that mourns for absent Sun: Thou know'st thou plantest in a barren clay That choaks in Winter all that up is come; I do not fear thy Summers wished for heat May tears shall water where thy shine doth threat. However deeply Sir Everard Digby may have sinned, he knew how to make his peace with God when death approached him. He had a definite religion to depend on, he had no need to consider which of many widely divergent views held by the professors of one nominal church was the most probable. It is true that he was deprived of those consoling rites which the Catholic Church provides for her children when on the threshold of death; he had none of the "soothing charm" of "the words of peace and blessing"[405] uttered by the confessor in absolution; he was not strengthened for the perilous journey from this life to the next by the sacred viaticum, but he knew that, where these privileges could not be obtained, a hearty desire for them, with a good act of contrition, might obtain many of their blessings and all that was necessary for salvation. [405] See Cardinal Newman in _Present Position of Catholics_, p. 351. From a theological point of view, it was a happy thing that he knew the plot in which he had been implicated to be all but universally condemned by his co-religionists. If many of them had defended it, and he had heard that there were two parties, one extenuating the conspiracy and another anathematising it, he might have clung to the belief that he had done nothing wrong, and that "rending of the heart" conducive to true contrition might have been wanting. He had sinned deeply; let us hope that deep was his sorrow. Yet is not this the moment--the moment when we are supposing him in the deepest degradation of spirit for his iniquities--at which we may best say a kind word for him? Hitherto I have written little in palliation of his crime; perhaps the very fact of his having professed my own religion may have made me more careful to say nothing that might have the appearance of minimising his guilt; nor, in the few more pages that I have still to write, do I intend to plead that his sentence ought to have been commuted on account of any extenuating circumstances. Unquestionably he deserved to die, but I beg to commend his memory to the mercy of my readers.