Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 11.djvu/125

 1581.] THE JESUIT INVASION 109 lawful to execute the secret conspirator who is teaching doctrines, in the name of God, which are certain to be fatal to it. The Catholics throughout Europe had made war upon Protestants. They had taught as part of their creed the duty of putting heretics to death. Eng- land had shaken off their yoke, but it had not retaliated, and although the professors of such an accursed doctrine might have been treated without injustice as public enemies, Elizabeth had left her Catholic subjects to think as they pleased so long as they would remain quiet under the law. They refused to accept her for- bearance. They availed themselves of her lenity as a shelter. They conspired behind it against her throne and life, and they brought down upon themselves at last with overwhelming force the heavy hand of justice. They imagined that the persecution would efface the memory of the Marian cruelties. Persecution was to be the beginning of their triumph. The blood of martyrs was the seed of the Church. ' What greater comfort can there be,' wrote one of them, ' than to see God work these strange wonders in our days, to give such rare grace of zeal, austerity of life, and constancy of martyrdom unto young men, learned men brought up in the adversaries' own schools, and to whom if they would have followed the pleasures of the world it had been lawful to have lived in favour and credit ? This cannot come of flesh and blood, when the tenderest and frailest flesh passeth valiantly to heaven through rackings, hangings, drawings, quarter- ings, and through a thousand miseries.