Letters to the Novices.

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live as they ought in this naughty world; then you will more easily see what you owe to His mercy in calling you out of infinite dangers into His society. How hard it is for them to follow Christ when He marches forth in haste against His enemies, who have wives in their bosoms, children on their shoulders, lands on their backs, cares on their heads, whose feet are bound with cords, whose spirits are well-nigh smothered. Is not your happiness great, whom the King marshals by His side, covers with His cloak, clothes and honours with His own livery? What great thing is it for me to have left friends for Him who left heaven for me? What great thing for me to be a servant to my brethren, when He washed the feet of the traitor Judas? What wonder if I obey my fathers, when He honoured Pilate? What mighty thing for me to bear labours for Him who bore His cross for me? What disgrace if I a sinner bear to be rebuked, when He an Innocent was curst, spit upon, scourged, wounded, and put to death? Whenever we look into the glass, my brethren, we see clearly that the temptation of no pleasure, the fear of no pain, should pluck us from the arms of such a Master. You see I have nearly filled my paper, though I have plenty to do; it is time to check myself, and to remit you to that Teacher who by His sacred influences can impress these things much more strongly than I can on your minds. Hear Him, for He hath the words of eternal life.

For my part, I kiss not you only, but the prints of your footsteps, and I beg you to give a poor needy wretch an alms of the crumbs that fall from your table.

Prague, Feb. 19th, 1577."*

Such was the spirit in which he performed these services, "poor in seeming, rich in fruit, and in discipline for minds elated with success; they break the assaults of pride, they dispel the fanciful clouds of vanity, and remind poor unstable humanity of its worthlessness and mortality. To visit the hospitals, to attend to the sick, to follow them to their graves; to endure the peevishness of the sufferers, their dirt, their groans, their stink; and to learn to * See Note 83.

feel horror and disgust at no poison, no filth, no corruption but the filth of sin." In these exercises the political difficulties of Campion were not solved, but overshadowed for the time by the overwhelming importance of the business of religion. For grace does not supplant nature, nor dispense with the necessity of worldly prudence and

common sense.

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CHAPTER IV.

THE unchequered life of Campion at Brünn and Prague has been chronicled with greater minuteness by his Bohemian brethren than his short agony in England by his own countrymen. The historians of the Society in Bohemia reckon the one great glory of the novitiate of Prague and Brünn to have been the preparation of Edmund Campion for his martyrdom. They tell us, that before he left Brünn he was warned of the death he was to die. This fact, unmentioned by his English biographers, is partly confirmed by his own letters, which show that he went to England fully impressed with the certainty of his fate. This presentiment was unreasonable, if Campion only considered what had taken place in England, where, among the bishops and priests and laymen who had died. in prison or beneath the gallows, not more than one or two had as yet suffered for religion alone. The murder of Dr. Storey was to satisfy an old grudge; Felton was hanged for pasting up Pius the Fifth's Bull on the Bishop of London's gates; Thomas Woodhouse, hanged in 1573, was so forward in anathematising the Queen's supremacy that Burghley considered him mad, and only had him. hanged to be rid of his importunity; Cuthbert Maine, Campion's pupil at Douai, was murdered, ostensibly for being in possession of a document which the English judges chose to call a Bull, but really in order to enable

them to convict in a præmunire certain gentlemen who had harboured him, and to enrich one of the Queen's cousins with the estates of Mr. Tregian.85 Nelson was hanged in 1578 for saying that the Queen was a heretic and schismatic-expressions which had a terrible meaning to princes with insecure titles in days when it was almost of faith that no schismatic or heretic had any civil rights at all, much less the right to rule over Catholics. The case of Sherwood was similar; and though these executions evinced a firm determination in the English government to treat as a traitor any one who used of the usurping head of the Anglican Church terms which implied that she had no right to the place she claimed, yet they could not have given solid grounds for anticipating the persecution which was to follow in the teeth of the repeated declarations of the government, that freedom of conscience in all purely spiritual matters was and ever would be respected. Schmidl, however, tells us that Campion's presentiment of martyrdom was grounded upon a vision he saw in the garden at Brünn, where the Blessed Virgin, in likeness as she is painted in the picture at Santa Maria Maggiore at Rome, attributed to St. Luke,-copies of which had been distributed by St. Francis Borgia to the various novitiates,-appeared to him in an old mulberry-tree, and exhibited to him a purple cloth, which he understood to be a sign that he was to shed his blood for religion.

Sept. 7, 1574, John Paul Campanus, the novice-master of Brünn, was appointed Rector of the House at Prague; after waiting a month to complete his year, he carried off with him Campion and two other novices, "in the coach of Chancellor Pernstein;" for these progresses of the humble fathers in the trappings of civil state are dwelt upon with a complacency which reminds one of

the Jewish chronicles of the royal procession of Mordecai through the streets of Suza.

October 18, the studies were solemnly commenced at Prague. Campion was made Professor of Rhetoric, and opened the schools with a "glorious panegyric," which Schmidl, in 1747, was able to read at Prague. And now began a series of routine labours, which are rather tedious even to describe. He was loaded with offices; besides being Professor of Rhetoric, he was matutinus excitator, and nocturnus visitator, and worked in the kitchen for recreation. He went to bed half an hour before the other fathers; but he had to rise and ring for the nightly examination of conscience, and after the lapse of a quarter of an hour to ring again for the lights to be put out. After another quarter of an hour, he looked into each cell to see that all were in bed, and all candles extinguished. In the morning he rose half an hour before the rest; he rang the bell to rouse them, and went to each cell to awaken the inmate and light his candle. After fifteen minutes he repeated his visits, to see that all were dressing; then he rang for prayers, and again for ending them. It was his place to see that all were decently covered in bed, and to report all habitual defaulters. After his prayers, meditation, mass, and private study, he went down to the class-room to teach rhetoric, and to form the minds of the rising aristocracy of Bohemia. His method was rigidly prescribed to him: the object of his lessons was to teach the use of language, and to cultivate the faculty of expression in prose and verse; the art of speaking, the style of writing, and the store of rhetorical materials and commonplaces were to be his care. In speaking and style, Cicero was to be almost the only model; for matter, his storehouses were to be history, the manners and customs of various nations, the Scriptures, and a mo