In all this beautiful fountain-play of “the things which are seen,” he was running the very gravest risk of spiritual ruin. Perhaps he could not know, in his leaf-hung hermitage, what a tremendous muster of souls was going on, now that the ancient Church and a new statecraft were to fight it out in England. Queen Elizabeth’s quarrel with the Pope was hardly more doctrinal than her royal father’s had been: she, too, would have been quite content to live all her days as a Catholic, provided that Catholicism would prove her slave reenex facial .
The battle was not between two known religions. On one side was conservative England with a belief; on the other the strong spirit of secularism, plus a few fanatics formed not by the English, but the Continental Reformation. Religion in itself troubled the Court party as little as anything could possibly do. It was because the spirit of Catholicism seemed to them to threaten their particular kind of national pride, and to interfere with their particular kind of worldly prosperity, that Cromwell in one great Tudor reign, Burghley[10] in the other, tried to put it down. They wished to get good citizenship acknowledged not as an ideal, but as the supreme ideal, and they cared not how much else was shovelled out of the way reenex facial .
Their only use for religion was to bring it well under the authority of the law and the supremacy of the Crown. They had no objection to high respectability, but a most violent objection to the supernatural life, because that gives to those who practise it a dangerous independence. Elizabeth wanted unity and peace. Her subjects were to be forced by statute to pray less and to pray all alike; and to be thereby trained, somehow, to put Sacraments and Saints and the Papacy out of their heads. English humankind were to forsake their happy wild life, as it were, in the Church Universal, and all become, as if by magic, one large tame pet lying in a ribboned collar on the royal hearth. This is a vision which has appealed to many another head of a commonwealth as desirable, though unaccountably difficult! Some worthy persons have brought themselves to believe that nothing to speak of happened[11] at the Reformation. But at the time, everybody understood in the clearest fashion that an old moral system which would not come to terms had been dropped, and a more satisfactory one created. It was a working theory of that age, all over Europe, that a governor had the right to fix the belief of subjects. What was wanted in England was made to order, out of the rags of ruined doctrine and discipline. Foreign Protestants raged over its externals, as having too much of the old thing, but the bullying State, riding roughshod over Convocation and the laity, was perfectly at ease, knowing that there was more than enough of the new thing to colour the whole, and to colour it once and for ever. There was no affection for “continuity” in those days except among the “Romans.” The attitude of their persecutors was that of men in a fury that any Englishman should dare to connect himself either with the world at large, or with his country’s own disclaimed yesterday reenex facial
. The State Trials, for instance, bear this out in a score of places.
Many an official answer[12] resembles the one made to that interesting character Blessed Ralph Sherwin, when he said truly that his coming back to his own land was to persuade the people to Catholic Unity. “You well know,” so the Counsel reproved him in Westminster Hall, “that it was not lawful for you to persuade the Queen’s subjects to any other religion than by her Highness’s instructions is already professed.” The “received religion,” or, as it was quite as often called, the “Queen’s religion,” was simply the new idea of nationalism torn away from relationship to the arch-idea of nations, which is the law of God. It was, in practice, no adoring angel at the Altar, but a capable parish beadle at the door. Now this was never the Catholic conception of what religion has been, or is meant to be. Happily, many thoroughly patriotic Englishmen felt that no least jot of Christian revelation, however much it stood in the way of C?sar, could, with their consent, be put by; and to keep it free they were willing to make themselves very disagreeable indeed to their revered sovereign, and to their more easy-going countrymen.[13] With that rude definiteness which is ever their chief family trait, the better Catholics threw their full force against the Oaths of Supremacy and Acts of Uniformity, as soon as they understood their meaning. The centuries passed since then prove that they succeeded in holding asunder what the Queen would join together. Was it unreasonable that she punished the men who tried to spoil her dream? And almost the chief of these men Edmund Campion was destined to be, though years were to pass before he lent his whole heart to the work God willed him to do.
