It was a difficult and dangerous process through which Donne was passing, this conversion from the Church of his fathers to conformity with the Church of England as by law established. It would be as absurd, in the face of a poem like this and of all that we know of Donne's subsequent life, to call it a conversion in the full sense of the term, a changed conviction, as to dub it an apostasy prompted by purely political considerations. Yet doubtless the latter predominated. The position of a Catholic in the reign of Elizabeth was that of a man cut off rigorously from the main life of the nation, with every avenue of honourable ambition closed to him. He had to live the starved, suspected life of a recusant or to seek service under a foreign power. Some of the most pathetic documents in Strype's _Annals of the Reformation_ are those in which we hear the cry of young men of secure station and means driven by conscientious conviction to abandon home and country. It is possible that before 1592 Donne himself had been sent abroad by relatives with a view to his entering a seminary or the service of a foreign power. His mother spent a great part of her life abroad, and his own relatives were among those who suffered most severely under Walsingham's persecution. 'I had', Donne says, 'my first breeding and conversation with men of suppressed and afflicted Religion, accustomed to the despite of death, and hungry of an imagined Martyrdome.' To a young man of ambition, and as yet certainly with no bent to devotion or martyrdom, it was only common sense to conform if he might. From this dilemma Donne escaped, not by any opportune change of conviction, or by any insincere profession, but by the way of intellectual emancipation. He looks round in this satire and sees that whichever be the true Church it is not by any painful quest of truth, and through the attainment of conviction, that most people have accepted the Church to which they may belong. Circumstances and whim have had more to do with their choice than reason and serious conviction. Yet it is only by search that truth is to be found: On a huge hill Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and hee that will Reach her, about must, and about must goe; And what the hills suddenes resists win so. Yet strive so, that before age, deaths twilight, Thy Soule rest, for none can work in that night.