Though England was on the whole prosperous and hopeful, though by comparison with her
neighbors she enjoyed internal peace, she could not evade the fact that the world of
which she formed a part was torn by hatred and strife as fierce as any in human history.
Men were still for from recognizing that two religions could exist side by side in
the same society; they believed that the toleration of another religion different
from their own. And hence necessarily false, must inevitably destroy
such a society and bring the souls of all its members into danger of hell.
So the struggle went on with increasing fury within each nation to impose
a single creed upon every subject, and within the general society of Christendom to
impose it upon every nation. In England the Reformers, or Protestants, aided by the
power of the Crown, had at this stage triumphed, but over Europe as a whole
Rome was beginning to recover some of the ground it had lost after Martin Luther's
revolt in the earlier part of the century. It did this in two ways,
by the activities of its missionaries, as in parts of Germany, or by the military might
of the Catholic Powers, as in the Low Countries, where the Dutch provinces
were sometimes near their last extremity under the pressure
of Spanish arms. Against England, the most important of all the Protestant nations
to reconquer, military might was not yet possible because the
Catholic Powers were too occupied and divided: and so, in the 1570's Rome
bent her efforts, as she had done a thousand years before in the days of Saint
Augustine, to win England back by means of her missionaries. These were young
Englishmen who had either never given up the old faith, or having done so,
had returned to it and felt called to become priests. There being, of course,
no Catholic seminaries left in England, they went abroad, at first quite easily,
later with difficulty and danger, to study in the English colleges at Douai or
Rome: the former established for the training of ordinary or secular clergy,
the other for the member of the Society of Jesus, commonly known as Jesuits,
a new Order established by St, Ignatius Loyola same thirty years before.
The seculars came first; they achieved a success which even the most eager
could hardly have expected. Cool-minded and well-informed men, like Cecil,
had long surmised that the conversion of the English people to Protestantism
was for from complete; many-Cecil thought even the majority-had conformed
out of fear, self-interest or-possibly the commonest reason of all-sheer bewilderment
at the rapid changes in doctrine and forms of worship imposed on them in so short
a time. Thus it happened that the missionaries found a welcome, not only with
the families who had secretly offered them hospitality if they came, but with
many others whom their first hosts invited to meet them or passed them on to.
They would land at the ports in disguise, as merchants, courtiers or what not, professing
some plausible business in the country, and make by devious may for their first house of
refuge. There they would administer the Sacraments and preach to the house holds and to
such of the neighbors as their hosts trusted and presently go on to some other
locality to which they were directed or from which they received a call.