could make it, or a dreadful death.  The hearts of many failed them in the trial, and of all the confessors those perhaps do not deserve the least compassion whose weakness betrayed them, who sank and died broken-hearted.  Of these silent sufferers history knows nothing.  A few, unable to endure the misery of having, as they supposed, denied their Saviour, returned to the danger from which they had fled, and washed out their fall in martyrdom.  Latimer has told us the story of his friend Bilney—­little Bilney, or Saint Bilney,[548] as he calls him, his companion at Cambridge, to whom he owed his own conversion.  Bilney, after escaping through Wolsey’s hands in 1527, was again cited in 1529 before the Bishop of London.  Three times he refused to recant.  He was offered a fourth and last chance.  The temptation was too strong, and he fell.  For two years he was hopelessly miserable; at length his braver 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