than divine; and they were made, and unmade, and remade with a rapidity and violence which must have involved an ordinary mind in the most hopeless perplexity and terror. We must add to this, the general consideration that, in any age of the world, the proportion of men in whom there exists the true stuff of which martyrs are made is but very small, and is found, generally, in larger proportions on the side of new opinions, with new hopes and new aspirations, than on that of old ones, which have become to some extent matters of inheritance, or education, or habit, rather than of intense personal conviction; and also the particular consideration, to which I have already had to refer, and which will be amply proved ere long, that the moral standard of the age was a low one, and was lower, rather than higher, among the clergy of both sides than among other people. Under all these circumstances, it is far from surprising that the recusants were few in number.[1] Nearly all the clergy, in fact, remained the Papists which they always were.
The action of those few dignitaries who, having conformed under Henry and Edward, refused to do the same under Elizabeth, is easily intelligible, and is certainly creditable to them, as far as it goes. The suddenness and violence of Henry's onslaught took them by surprise, and they yielded to it, doubtless, farther than their consciences justified them in doing; but, in fact, a man with a knife held to his throat is not in a favourable position for either cool judgment or dignified action. Once surprised into yielding, they may well have waited to see what further changes were to come, and the somewhat reactionary character of Henry's later government may have fed their hopes for
- ↑ Jewell says "none of the clergy."
