d
themselves by their cruelty. Had they been contented to accept the
recantation, they would have left the Archbishop to die broken-
hearted, pointed at by the finger of pitying scorn, and the
Reformation would have been disgraced in its champion. They were
tempted, by an evil spirit of revenge, into an act unsanctioned even
by their own bloody laws; and they gave him an opportunity of
redeeming his fame, and of writing his name in the roll of martyrs.
The worth of a man must be measured by his life, not by his failure
under a single and peculiar trial. The Apostle, though forewarned,
denied his Master on the first alarm of danger; yet that Master, who
knew his nature in its strength and its infirmity, chose him for the
rock on which He would build His Church."

It used to be said of Ernest Renan that he was toniours seminariste,
and there is a flavour of the pulpit in these beautiful sentences.
Beautiful indeed they are, and not more beautiful than true. The
implacable Mary, whose ghastly epithet clings to her for all time,
like the shirt of Nessus, found in Pole an apt and zealous pupil in
persecution. Both are excellent specimens of their Church, because
according to that Church they are absolutely blameless. Punctilious
in the discharge of all religious duties, they were chaste, sober,
frugal, and honest. They made long prayers. They tithed mint, and
anise, and cummin. They made clean the outside of the cup and
platter. They firmly believed that they were pleasing the Deity they
worshipped when they deluged England with blood. The spirit of the
Marian martyrs is one of the noblest tributes to the power of true
religion that the annals of Christendom contain. Henry' s victims
were few and conspicuous. Their crime, or alleged crime, was
treason. Mary's were obscure, and numbered by the hundred. Many of
them were artisans and mechanics, who, as Burghley afterwards said,
knew no faith except that they were called upon to abjure. They went
to the stake without a murmur, sustained against the terrors of
demonology by their own English hearts, by the love of their
friends, and by the grace of God. Tennyson, in his play of Queen
Mary, has put into the mouth of Pole some highly edifying sentiments
on the want of true faith which prompts persecution. Pole's example
was very different from these precepts. For the wretched Mary there
may be some excuse; she was perhaps not wholly sane. Her fixed idea,
that if she killed Prote