www.freecatholicebooks.com Author: Edmund Campion TEN REASONS PROPOSED TO HIS ADVERSARIES FOR DISPUTATION IN THE NAME OF THE FAITH AND PRESENTED TO THE ILLUSTRIOUS MEMBERS OF OUR UNIVERSITIES*** TEN REASONS PROPOSED TO HIS ADVERSARIES FOR DISPUTATION IN THE NAME OF THE FAITH AND PRESENTED TO THE ILLUSTRIOUS MEMBERS OF OUR UNIVERSITIES BY EDMUND CAMPION PRIEST OF THE SOCIETY OF THE NAME OF JESUS Nihil Obstat S. GEORGIUS KIERAN HYLAND, S.T.D, CENSOR DEPUTATUS Imprimatur + PETRUS EPUS SOUTHWARC CONTENTS INTRODUCTION RATIONES DECEM TRANSLATION INTRODUCTION www.freecatholicebooks.com Though Blessed Edmund Campion's _Decem Rationes_ has passed through forty-seven editions,[1] printed in all parts of Europe; though it has awakened the enthusiasm of thousands; though Mark Anthony Muret, one of the chief Catholic humanists of Campion's age, pronounced it to be "written by the finger of God," yet it is not an easy book for men of our generation to appreciate, and this precisely because it suited a bygone generation so exactly. Before it can be esteemed at its true value, some knowledge of the circumstances under which it was written, is indispensable. 1. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE _Decem Rationes_. The chief point to remember is that the _Decem Rationes_ was the last and most deliberate free utterance of Campion's ever-memorable mission. During the few months that mission lasted he succeeded in staying the full tide of victorious Protestantism, which had hitherto been irresistible. The ancient Church had gone down before the new religion, at Elizabeth's accession twenty years before, with an apparently final fall, and since then the Elizabethan Settlement had triumphed in every church, in every school and court. The new generation had been www.freecatholicebooks.com moulded by it; the old order seemed to be utterly prostrate, defeated and moribund. Nor was it only at home that Protestantism talked of victory. In every neighbouring land she had gained or was gaining the upper hand. She had crossed the Border and subdued Scotland, she held Ireland in an iron grip, she had set up a new throne in Holland, she had deeply divided France, and had learned how to paralyze the power of Spain. What could stay her progress? Then a new figure appeared, a fugitive flying before the law. He was hunted backwards and forwards across the country, every man's hand seemed against him. It was impossible to hold out for long against such immense odds, and he was in fact soon captured, mocked, maligned, sentenced and executed with contumely. Yet Campion and his handful of followers had meanwhile succeeded in doing what the whole nation, when united, had failed to do. He had evoked a spirit of faith and fervour, against which the violence of Protestantism raged in vain. He had saved the beaten, shattered fragments of the ancient host, and animated them with invincible courage; and his work endured in spite of endless assaults and centuries of persecution. The _Decem Rationes_ is Campion's harangue to those whom he called upon to follow him in the heroic struggle. www.freecatholicebooks.com 2. THE MAN AND THE MISSION. Thus much for the inspiration and general significance of Campion's work considered as a whole. It will also repay a much more minute study, and to appreciate it we must enter into further details. As to the man himself, suffice it to say that he was a Londoner; his father a publisher; his first school Christ's Hospital; that he was afterwards a Fellow of St. John's, Oxford, and held at the same time an exhibition from the Grocer's Company. At Oxford he accepted to some extent the Elizabethan Settlement of religion, but not sufficiently to satisfy the Company of Grocers, who eventually withdrew their exhibition. This was a sign for further inquisitorial proceedings, which made him leave the University, and retire to Dublin; but he was driven also thence by the zealots for Protestantism. Eventually he went over to the English College at Douay, whence he migrated to Rome, entered the Society of Jesus, and after eight years' training had returned, a priest, to his native country, forty years old. His strong point was undoubtedly a singularly lovable character, and he possessed the gift of eloquence in no ordinary degree. For the rest, his www.freecatholicebooks.com natural qualities and acquired accomplishments were above the ordinary level, without reaching an extraordinary height. He was a man who never ceased working, and whose temper was always angelic, though he sometimes suffered from severe depression. He was adored by his pupils both at Oxford and in Bohemia. His memory was always bright, and his conversation always sparkled with fresh thoughts and poetical ideas. He composed with extraordinary facility in Latin prose and verse; but the extant fragments of these literary exercises do not strike us as being of unusual excellence, though genuinely admired in their day. He was certainly an ideal missioner: saintly, inspired, eloquent, untireable, patient, consumed with the desire for the success of his undertaking, and unfaltering in his faith that success would follow by the providential action of God, despite the obvious fact that all appearances were against him. Campion landed at Dover late in June, 1580, and reached London at the end of the month. There was an immediate rush to hear him, and Lord Paget was persuaded to lend his great hall at Paget House in Smithfield to accommodate a congregation for the feast of Saints Peter and Paul. The sermon was delivered on the text from the Gospel of the day, _Tu es Christus, Filius Dei vivi_. The hall was filled, and the impression caused by the www.freecatholicebooks.com sermon was profound; but the number of hearers had been imprudently large. Though no arrests followed, the persecutors took the alarm, and increased their activity to such an extent that large gatherings had for ever to be abandoned; and after a couple of weeks both Campion and Persons left London to escape the notice of the pursuivants, whose raids and inquisitorial searches were making the lot of Catholics in town unbearable, whereas in the country the pursuit was far less active, and could be much more easily avoided. The two Fathers met for the last time at Hoxton, then a village outside London, to concert their plans for the next couple of months, and were on the point of starting, each for his own destination, when a Catholic of some note rode up from London. This was Thomas Pounde, of Belmont or Beaumont, near Bedhampton, a landed gentleman of means, an enthusiastic Catholic, and for the last five years or so a prisoner for religion. Mr. Pounde's message in effect was this. "You are going into the proximate danger of capture, and if captured you must expect not justice, but every refinement of misrepresentation. You will be asked crooked questions, and your answers to them will be published in some debased form. Be sure that whatever then comes through to the outer world will come out poisoned and perverted. Let me therefore urge you to write now, and to leave in safe custody, what you would wish to have www.freecatholicebooks.com published then, in case infamous rumours should be put about during your incarceration, rumours which you will then not be able to answer or to repudiate." Father Persons seems to have agreed at once. Campion at first raised objections, but soon, with his ever obliging temper, sat down at the end of the table and wrote off in half an hour an open letter _To the Lords of Her Majesty's Privy Council_, afterwards so well known as _Campion's Challenge._ 3. THE CHALLENGE. Campion, after finishing his letter and taking copy for himself, had consigned the other copy to Pounde. Persons had done the same; but whereas the latter took the precaution to seal his letter, Campion had handed over his unfastened. Then the company broke up. Persons made a wide circle from Northampton round to Gloucester, while Campion made a smaller circle from Oxfordshire up to Northampton. When they got back to town in September, they found all the world discussing "the Challenge." What had happened was that proceedings had been taken by the Ecclesiastical Commission against Pounde, and he had been committed to solitary confinement in the ruinous castle of Bishop's Stortford. Before he left London he began to communicate the letter to others, lest www.freecatholicebooks.com it should be altogether lost, and as soon as it was thus published it attracted everyone's attention, and his adversaries had ironically christened it _the challenge_. The word was indeed one which Campion had used, but he had employed it precisely in order to avoid any charge that might have arisen, of being combative and presumptuous. Thus in the course of three months Campion, as it were in spite of himself, had filled England with his name and with the message he had come to announce, and he had reduced his adversaries to a very ridiculous position. They had been dared to meet him in disputation, and this they feared to do. In effect, they in their thousands were hiding their heads in the sand, while their constables and pursuivants were raiding the houses of Catholics on every side in hopes of catching the homeless wanderer, and of stopping his mouth by violence. The pulpits, of course, rang with outcries against the newcomer, and in his absence his doctrines were rent and scoffed at; but, as Campion said in a contemporary letter, "The people hereupon is ours, and the error of spreading that letter abroad hath done us much good." This was the first popular success which the Catholics had scored for years; and after so many years of oppression some popular success was of immense importance to the cause. Father Persons, in a www.freecatholicebooks.com contemporary letter, says that the Government found that there were 50,000 more recusants that autumn than they had known of before. The number is, of course, a round one, and is possibly much exaggerated, but it gives the Catholic leader's view of the advantage won at this time. We may now turn to _The Challenge_ itself, the only piece of Campion's English during this his golden period, which has survived. [TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE, THE LORDS OF HER MAJESTIE'S PRIVY COUNCIL] RIGHT HONOURABLE: Whereas I have come out of Germanie and Boemeland, being sent by my Superiors, and adventured myself into this noble Realm, my deare Countrie, for the glorie of God and benefit of souls, I thought it like enough that, in this busie watchful and suspicious worlde, I should either sooner or later be intercepted and stopped of my course. Wherefore, providing for all events, and uncertaine what may become of me, when God shall haply deliver my body into durance, I supposed it needful to put this writing in a readiness, desiringe your good Lordships to give it ye reading, for to know my cause. This doing I trust I shall ease www.freecatholicebooks.com you of some labour. For that which otherwise you must have sought for by practice of wit, I do now lay into your hands by plaine confession. And to ye intent that the whole matter may be conceived in order, and so the better both understood and remembered, I make thereof these ix points or articles, directly, truly and resolutely opening my full enterprise and purpose. i. I confesse that I am (albeit unworthie) a priest of ye Catholike Church, and through ye great mercie of God vowed now these viii years into the Religion of the Societie of Jhesus. Hereby I have taken upon me a special kind of warfare under the banner of obedience, and eke resigned all my interest or possibilitie of wealth, honour, pleasure, and other worldlie felicitie. ii. At the voice of our General Provost, which is to me a warrant from heaven, and Oracle of Christ, I tooke my voyage from Prage to Rome (where our said General Father is always resident) and from Rome to England, as I might and would have done joyously into any part of Christendome or Heathenesse, had I been thereto assigned. iii. My charge is, of free cost to preach the Gospel, to minister the Sacraments, to instruct the simple, to reforme