magistrate's moderation too irreligious, the spoil of our goods great favour, our oppression great equity and glory. Which to have forewarned of our adversaries' drift, that coming among them, their malice and machinations against. you and your cause being discovered, you may know what armour and weapons you must provide. It shall suffice to conclude my epistle, and to testify how desirous I am of your safety, whereupon both the defence and fruit of this treatise and all spiritual weal of our country most dependeth, for which, as your faithful sentinel, I display and forewarn the said designs, not by me discovered without pains, patience, and peril. Yours most affectionately and assuredly in Christ Jesus, Douay, Oct. 26, 1611. Henry FitzSimon. FATHER HENRY FITZSIMON, S.J. (Continued from page 192, No. c.) WITH "thrasonic bluster" Rider asked leave to attack Fitz Simon, but was afraid to avail of the permission. At first, like the donkey famous in fable, who was disguised as a lion, "He roared so loud and looked so wondrous grim, But he soon showed and dropped his ears. As Fitz Simon says: Mr. Rider, as the hare is wont, before he seats himself in his form, had a great desire to strain himself to greater girds towards the end. As far as my remembrance serveth me, I read in Sir Philip Sydney's Arcadia a pleasant fiction of one Dametas, who had earnestly provoked one Clinias to combat, thinking he would not accept the challenge; but finding the challenge accepted, he declined to fight, on some trivial grounds of time, place, and manner. "So my Dametas relents on the main provocation, and excepts at trifles most timorously and impertinently. Mr. Rider, you might have had my answer long ago, but that your invitation to discussion was conformable to the new requesting of friends to meals-with many caps, but without hospitality. 1 "Confutation," circa, 364. You provoked me to labour it, but debarred me to publish it; and your conduct has been such that many of your most judicious surmisers suspect that by some promised promotion of the Papists you had prejudiced, and in a manner, betrayed your profession to infamy.1" "Ecolampad said to the Landgrave of Hesse, 'I would, most Excellent Prince, this right hand of mine were chopped off when first I began to write anything of the Lord's Supper.' Renew, renew the same cry, Mr. Rider. "For, 1o, as is evidently shown, you insinuated all the State, Lords and Council, to be fools and heretics. "2o. You directed us to authors most repugnant to your profession, testifying them to be against the Catholic Church, and by so testifying, leaving yourself forlorn and abandoned of all excuse. "3o. You have, by necessary inference, implied your own profession to be wicked and damnable, late, base and counterfeit. "4o. You have betrayed your profession, by the testimony of all the chief of the same, to a jury condemning you and them. "5° You have violated and corrupted, depraved and falsified the Sacred Scriptures themselves, perspicuously to all men's eyes. "6o. You have paragoned or compared the Mysteries of Christ's Gospel, with all the sacraments and sanctification thereof, to base, beggarly ordinances of the Old Law. "7°. You have disdained the words of Christ's institution of his Blessed Sacrament, and corrected them with a new institution of your own. "8o. You have denied the whole merits of Christ's life and death, and imputed your salvation to that which happened after Christ's death. "9o. You have made Christ's institution, by your active and passive commentary, to contradict itself and to be absurd and false. "10°. You have made princes and people, great and small, who ever did break images of Christ, to be traitors against Christ. "11°. You have testified yourself manifoldly to be a Puritan -that is a seditious resister, by your own private diversity of judgment, to princes and parliament ordinances of late reformation, and a deadly enemy of the Protestantry which hath been established. "12o. You have bound yourself to believe and not to believe Christ really and not really, literally yet not literally, spiri16. Epistle to Master John Rider" in the "Confutation." VOL. IX. 18 tually yet not spiritually, sacramentally yet not sacramentally, etc., in the Blessed Sacrament. "13o. You have concourse and association with Jews and Jewishness in yourself and your Patriarchs, as also with the most heinous heretics; and you also disproved all and every one of the most famous Protestants, and by them you as generally are refuted—which also is done by your own confessors and martyrs. "14°. You have entered bond and obligation in print to aver in unity and verity of doctrine all that ever might be blasphemed against God and godliness. "15°. You have most puritanically censured the acts of parliament, since the suppression, to be heretical, abominable, repugnant to God's truth, to the ancient Fathers, and the practise of the primitive Church. "16o. You have, contrary to your claim, disavowed the General Council of Nice, and have allured the nobility of Ulster in Ireland to imitate them, who intended to kill their king and rebelled against his constitutions.1 Briefly, what untruths, denials, interpretations, sequels, arguments, contradictions, impudencies, and impieties you have, beside all the former, run into-they are not so obscurely or seldomly incident, but that all who favour your profession may think you were hired, or of yourself intended to disgrace, disable, and condemn your and their cause. Since you cannot deny any syllable of these imputations, you may worthily cry the cry of Ecolampad, you may worthily shun the light of the sun, and thereby profess plainly and simply that heresy hath no defence but in a lie, and can but by lies and darkness be protected, and that coming to light it is suddenly discomfited. "Invincible and infallible Spouse of Christ, the Catholic Church! I resign and devote my travails and writings to thy sacred doom. With thee I say and unsay, commend and condemn all doctrine by me and others professed." Father Fitz Simon was sometimes distracted from his controversial labours and his sufferings by witnessing from his tower in the Castle some sights of the outer world, which amused, if they did not edify him. Here is a little incident which we shall let him tell in his own words, begging the reader to imagine himself for a moment living in the early years of the seventeenth century. However, we shall take the liberty of representing by stars certain Elizabethan expressions, which are too Saxon for our times. "Adam Loftus was an apostate priest, Lord Primate, etc., 1 FitzSimon refers to the articles, in which all these things are proved. by which office he exalted his plentiful brood to knighthood, to noble alliance, and lofty estates. Time bringing him to old age, and to anguish and torment of mind for his straying courses,' he betook himself to read Catholic books, and, as was blundered abroad, meditated how to recant and repent before being called to account. "Sir George Carie, Lord Justice, having a tooth against Loftus, upbraided him with the reported 'infamy of his revolt.' Adam had to justify himself privatelie, and after that publiclie by a sermon on Catholic doctrine. Purgatorie seemed fittest, lest he might seem to aspire thereto. Great was the assemblie to hear the old man purge himself from the imputation. He purged himself, not as you may think; for after his text scantly uttered, he was suddenlie his colour changed, his voice grew weak, his memorie failed, he bit his lips, let fall his hands, and to the hearing and the admiring and confounded audience (save your honour, reader!), he himself in the pulpit. He to his man Robert Lei was borne * * of all Some said cester's house, in the Fishamble-street, on men's shoulders, and there was with much ado comforted. This happened in the year of our Lord 1602, and of no small part thereof was I, being then in prison, a beholder: namely, of the abrupt dispersion of the hearers, of the mournful countenances of our Puritan Collegists, returning in all shame, and of the headlong running of Adam's servants to fetch new apparel, new cordial restoratives, and all that was needful. And of what I was not a beholder I was manifoldly assured by all certainty that in any case might be required. Adam had taught purgatorie of while he would disprove purgatorie of soul; others, that the sterile faith of reformers was now * to see whether it would be brought to bear fruit; others, that he was to preach the cloacal doctrine of Luther, who never had but devil's in his mouth; others, that God had struck inimicos. suos in posteriora; others, that this copronymous belief came with breath, and was ending in of Arius; others, that it did that * corporally what it did in the soul spiritually; others recited the verse : * * * * as that "Putidus es qui sic fecisti, Adame, quod in te est." Let me be believed on the word of a religious man, that not private hate, nor any desire to gravel any of Adam's issue, part whereof is linked to me in kindred, but only irrefragable 1 He was the brute that got Archbishop O'Hurley tortured and hanged. 2 Perhaps "the nephew of the Archbishop of Dublin," who, according to Cretinean-Joly, was converted by the Jesuits at this time, was a convert and kinsman of Fitz Simon. truth in my own knowledge, and to reveal the works of God, occasioned me to relate this otherwise unclean storie." About the time that this extraordinary incident occurred among the Puritans, FitzSimon heard of their sacrilegious acts in and around Dublin. For instance, he writes in his work on the Mass: "In the year 1603, one Hewetson, Vicar of Swords, and his chaplain, Waller, a murderer, hanged upon a gibbet a crucifix of their own making, with this subscription: 'Unless the Papists help me better than I can help them, I shall rot on the gallows.' The sacrilege moved Mr. Barnwall of Dunbro, to present to the Lords of the Council the said crucifix and subscription-he thinking that if O'Roerk was lawfully executed for trailing disdainfully the Queen's image, it could not choose but that exemplar correction would be taken of the sacrilege. But the issue was, that some present in the council chamber dismembered the crucifix, and threw it into the fire."2 History repeats itself.-One hundred and fifty years afterwards, Cobbe, Rector of St. Audoen's, took down the cross and put in its stead a crown with a boar's head. He was punished severely by a man, who had more sense than Barnwall of Dunbro, and who wrote the following lines on the act of Parson Cobbe : "Christ's Cross from Christ's church cursed Cobbe hath plucked down, And placed in its stead what he worships-the Crown. The scoundrel hath placed a swine's head on the steeple: That his hearers are swine, and his church but a sty.” Father FitzSimon gives some inflicted on these wicked Puritans. instances of punishment . He says: "I will relate a fact which I have got lately in a letter from men most worthy to be believed. I have many other things of the same kind to tell, but I reserve them for their own time. "In the year 1594, Sir J. Dowdal commanded the garrison of Youghal in Ireland, and a Mr. Lyth was the preacher of it. He was in the pulpit one day, and he declaimed most violently against the embassy of the angel Gabriel to Mary. Having gone home from the church, feeling weak, he got into bed, and said to a soldier who was in his room- Please lend me your dagger, for I am obliged by the order of the devil, my master, to put an end to my life.' The soldier 2 "On the Masse," by FitzSimon. 3 See Mr. Gilbert's "History of Dublin." 1 "The Masse." |