c, and if he
was again in the bishop's hands he knew well the fate which awaited him.

[Sidenote: He "goes up to Jerusalem."]

He told his friends, in language touchingly significant, that "he would
go up to Jerusalem"; and began to preach in the fields. The journey
which he had undertaken was not to be a long one. He was heard to say in
a sermon, that of his personal knowledge certain things which had been
offered in pilgrimage had been given to abandoned women. The priests, he
affirmed, "take away the offerings, and hang them about their women's
necks; and after that they take them off the women, if they please them
not, and hang them again upon the images."[101] This was Bilney's
heresy, or formed the ground of his arrest; he was orthodox on the mass,
and also on the power of the keys; but the secrets of the sacred order
were not to be betrayed with impunity. He was seized, and hurried before
the Bishop of Norwich; and being found heterodox on the papacy and the
mediation of the saints, by the Bishop of Norwich he was sent to the
stake.

[Sidenote: James Bainham,]

Another instance of recovered courage, and of martyrdom consequent upon
it, is that of James Bainham, a barrister of the Middle Temple. This
story is noticeable from a very curious circumstance connected with it.

[Sidenote: The latitudinarian martyr.]

[Sidenote: On his first trial he recants.]

Bainham had challenged suspicion by marrying the widow of Simon Fish,
the author of the famous _Beggars' Petition_, who had died in 1528; and,
soon after his marriage, was challenged to give an account of his
faith. He was charged with denying transubstantiation, with questioning
the value of the confessional, and the power of the keys; and the
absence of authoritative Protestant dogma had left his mind free to
expand to a yet larger belief. He had ventured to assert, that "if a
Turk, a Jew, or a Saracen do trust in God and keep his law, he is a good
Christian man,"[102]--a conception of Christianity, a conception of
Protestantism, which we but feebly dare to whisper even at the present
day. The proceedings against him commenced with a demand that he should
give up his books, and also the names of other barristers with whom he
was suspected to have held intercourse. He refused; and in consequence
his wife was imprisoned, and he himself was racked in the Tower by order
of Sir Thomas More. Enfeebled by suffering, he was then brought before
Stokesley, and ter