nature prevailed. There was
no pardon for a relapsed heretic, and if he was again in the bishop's hands
he knew well the fate which awaited him.

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."[549] 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.

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.

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,"[550]--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 terrified by the cold merciless eyes of his
judge, he gave way, not about his friends, but about himself