retext or
another, a single girl only being left, and he withdrew to a garret at the
top of the house, which he used as an oratory. A large crucifix was on the
wall, and the girl having some question to ask, went to the room, and found
him standing before it "bitterly weeping." He told her to take his sword,
which was rusty, and clean it. She went away, and left him; when she
returned, a little time after, he was hanging from a beam, dead. He was a
singular person. Edward Hall, the historian, knew him, and had heard him
say, that "if the king put forth the New Testament in English, he would not
live to bear it."[554] And yet he could not bear to see a heretic die. What
was it? Had the meaning of that awful figure hanging on the torturing cross
suddenly revealed itself? Had some inner voice asked him whether, in the
prayer for his persecutors with which Christ had parted out of life, there
might be some affinity with words which had lately sounded in his own ears?
God, into whose hands he threw himself, self-condemned in his wretchedness,
only knows the agony of that hour. Let the secret rest where it lies, and
let us be thankful for ourselves that we live in a changed world.

Thus, however, the struggle went forward; a forlorn hope of saints led the
way up the breach, and paved with their bodies a broad road into the new
era; and the nation the meanwhile was unconsciously waiting till the works
of the enemy were won, and they could walk safely in and take possession.
While men like Bilney and Bainham were teaching with words and writings,
there were stout English hearts labouring also on the practical side of the
same conflict, instilling the same lessons, and meeting for themselves the
same consequences. Speculative superstition was to be met with speculative
denial. Practical idolatry required a rougher method of disenchantment.

Every monastery, every parish church, had in those days its special relics,
its special images, its special something, to attract the interest of the
people. The reverence for the remains of noble and pious men, the dresses
which they had worn, or the bodies in which their spirits had lived, was in
itself a natural and pious emotion; but it had been petrified into a dogma;
and like every other imaginative feeling which is submitted to that bad
process, it had become a falsehood, a mere superstition, a substitute for
piety, not a stimulus to it, and a perpetual occasion of fraud. The people
bro