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 brought offerings to the shrines where it was supposed that the relics were of greatest potency.  The clergy, to secure the offerings, invented the relics, and invented the stories of the wonders which had been worked by them.  The greatest exposure of these things took place at the visitation of the religious houses.  In the meantime, Bishop Shaxton’s unsavoury inventory of what passed under the name of relics in the diocese of Salisbury, will furnish an adequate notion of these objects of popular veneration.  There “be set forth and commended unto the ignorant people,” he said, “as I myself of certain which be already come to my hands, have perfect knowledge, stinking boots, mucky combes, ragged rochettes, rotten girdles, pyl’d purses, great bullocks’ horns, locks of hair, and filthy rags, gobbetts of wood, under the name of parcels of the holy cross, and such pelfry beyond estimation."[555] Besides matters of this kind, there were images of the Virgin or of the Saints; above all, roods or crucifixes, of especial