possession of the historian when viewing the great defection" gives way to pride and emotion when it becomes his duty to recount the piety, zeal, and religious devotion of the various members of his great society who, at the cost of life and liberty, quickly began what is now called "the Counter-Reformation." None the less, the original puzzle remains tormenting the breast.

The second point our historian makes, to use a phrase of De Quincey's, "almost excruciatingly plain," is that, under Providence, we owe our Protestantism to Sir William Cecil. There were other men on the same side, and more strongly on the same side-Walsingham, Leicester, Nicholas Bacon-but Cecil's was the guiding hand, his was the brooding brain. Those of us who are still good Protestants ought not to forget this debt of obligation the next time we are disposed to be angry with what we may conceive to be some of the vagaries of living representatives of this still famous family.

Father Pollen, though he cannot but write of Cecil "as the instrument of ruin, the inventor of frauds, the agent of cruelty," seems glad to admit that Cecil was not " primarily cruel or fraudulent," and is able (p. 14) to say of him: "Everyone who had to do with Elizabeth and her Court knew that in an atmosphere of worldliness and insincerity, of avarice and baser vices, Cecil gave an example of religious and moral virtue, of humanity, moderate ambition, and general honesty." The worst thing, from the Roman Catholic point of view, that can be said against Cecil is that he was a heretic sans phrase; pero herege, as the Spanish Ambassador

said of him when writing to Philip, and what is more, he was also a heretic who meant to win the game. And yet, not only had Cecil been baptised and educated in the old religion, but in Queen Mary's time he had conformed and communicated according to the old rites, and this, although he had done his best to oust both Mary and Elizabeth out of the succession in favour of a Protestant lady. How can one hope to fathom the mystery of the characters of this period? Father Pollen is apt to say, not only of Protestants but of Popes, that they were "the children of their times." This is true of all of us, everywhere and at all times. We cannot dispute the paternity, but, from the ethical" point of view," it is a pre-eminently unsatisfactory explanation and one which requires to be carefully handled by the orthodox.

Anyhow, whatever qualms Cecil may have felt when on his knees, yet as a statesman, a legislator, and an Englishman "dreaming of things to come he fought Rome, per fas et nefas, and took his Queen-wayward, uncertain, carrying on ten years' flirtations with half a dozen Catholic suitors and herself half-Catholic at heart-along with him as he went. Terrible was the price he had to pay; he walked in crooked ways, he invented plots, he incited religious discords in Scotland and elsewhere, he witnessed cruelty and steeled his heart against torture, yet he never seems to have flinched, and, to use a vile, commercial phrase not wholly incongruous with the theme, he "got the goods delivered." Through all the shoals and shallows, as well as across a stormy sea, he steered the ship of State into a secure Protestant anchorage.

Father Pollen follows Cecil's devious tracks with the closest attention, and cannot at times restrain the admiration he feels, not only for his mastery of detail, and the calmness of his temper even when his authority over his royal mistress was challenged and gravely threatened, but for those rare qualities of foresight and insight, so conspicuously absent in the Popes of the period. It is, however, only fair to remember that Cecil was an Englishman on the spot, and the Popes were Italians in a city three months away.

Over these four Popes, though one of them has been canonised, even Farm Street can hardly help shaking a disappointed head. One was too sowl, another too quick, and all ill-informed as to the nature and temper of Englishmen.

There is the Bull of Excommunication, dated the 23rd of February, 1570, of Pope Pius V. What can be said in its favour? The first quality you demand in a writ is that it should run, and be capable of enforcement. This writ never ran a yard outside Italy, and there was neither Emperor nor King able or willing to execute it; and all that happened was that the poor fellow who bore the ominous name of Felton, and had the courage or effrontery to pin a copy to the Bishop of London's Palace in St. Paul's Churchyard, was clapt into the Tower, tortured, and put to death.

There is something splendid in the idea of a vicegerent of the Almighty on earth who can, on cause shown and strictly proved, pull down illconditioned kings and dispense their subjects from their oaths of allegiance. But then, the writs of these vicegerents must run, and the men who

serve them protected from ill-usage and gross contempt of Court.

As it turned out, this brutum fulmen of St. Pius, the massacre of St. Bartholomew, the memory of the fires of Smithfield, Foxe's Book of Martyrs (which almost ranked with the Bible), the dread of a Catholic League to exterminate all Protestants, the plots to assassinate the Queen, and the crowning blow of the Armada, riveted Protestantism upon England, evoked the rival principle of nationality, and, after calling into existence that strangest and least religious of compounds " 'John Bullism,' converted the toast of "Church, King, and Country "into a writ that really ran from Berwickon-Tweed to the Land's End. There was surely a Nemesis in this, for was it not the Catholic Church that first strove to teach the English people the servile doctrines of the divine right of kings "to govern wrong," and of passive obedience to the Lord's anointed? But I must stop here, almost before I have begun, and without lighting a single candle at the shrine of Edmund Campion, the hero of the "Counter-Reformation."

T

THE NON-JURORS

1905

O anyone blessed or cursed with an ironical humour the troublesome history of the Church of England since the Reformation cannot fail to be an endless source of delight. It really is exciting. Just a little more of Calvin and of Beza, half a dozen words here, or Cranmer's pencil through a single phrase elsewhere; a quantum suff. of the men that allowed no Eucharistic sacrifice," and away must have gone beyond recall the possibility of the Laudian revival and all that still appertains thereunto. We must have lost the " primitive men, the Kens, the Wilsons, the Knoxes, the Kebles, the Puseys. On the other hand, but for the unfaltering language of the Articles, the hearty tone of the Homilies, and the agreeable readiness of both sides to curse the Italian impudence of the Bishop of Rome and all his "detestable enormities," our Anglican Church history could never have been enriched with the names or sweetened by the memories of the Romaines, the Flavels, the Venns, the Simeons, and of many thousand unnamed saints who finished their course in the fervent faith of Evangelicalism.

But on what a thread it has always hung! An ill-considered Act of Parliament, an amendment hastily accepted by a pestered layman at midnight, a decision in a court of law, a Jerusalem