o them; as also against Jovinian for
the rank to be allowed to virginity. Will they endure him?
Ambrose honoured his patron saints Gervase and Protase with a
most glorious solemnity by way of putting the Arians to shame.
This action of his was praised by most godly Fathers, and God
honoured it with more than one miracle. Are they going to take a
kindly view off Ambrose here? Gregory the Great, our Apostle, is
most manifestly with us, and therefore is a hateful personage to
our adversaries. Calvin, in his rage, says that he was not
brought up in the school of the Holy Ghost, seeing that he had
called holy images the books of the illiterate.

Time would fail me were I to try to count up the Epistles,
Sermons, Homilies, Orations, Opuscula and dissertations of the
Fathers, in which they have laboriously, earnestly and with much
learning supported the doctrines of us Catholics. As long as
these works are for sale at the booksellers' shops, it will be
vain to prohibit the writings of our controversialists; vain to
keep watch at the ports and on the sea-coast; vain to search
houses, boxes, desks, and book-chests; vain to set up so many
threatening notices at the gates. No Harding, nor Sanders, nor
Allen, nor Stapleton, nor Bristow, attack these new-fangled
fancies with more vigour than do the Fathers whom I have
enumerated. As I think over these and the like facts, my courage
has grown and my ardour for battle, in which whatever way the
adversary stirs, unless he will yield glory to God, he will be in
straits. Let him admit the Fathers, he is caught: let him shut
them out, he is undone.

When we were young men, the following incident occurred. John
Jewell, a foremost champion of the Calvinists of England, with
incredible arrogance challenged the Catholics at St. Paul's,
London, invoking hypocritically and calling upon the Fathers, who
had flourished within the first six hundred years of
Christianity. His wager was taken up by the illustrious men who
were then in exile at Louvain, hemmed in though they were with
very great difficulties by reason of the iniquity of their times.
I venture to assert that that device of Jewell's, stupid,
unconscionable, shameless as it was, qualities which those
writers happily brought out, did so much good to our countrymen
that scarcely anything in my recollection has turned out to the
better advantage of the suffering English Church. At once an
edict is hung up on the doors, forbidding the