Preface by J. S. Phillimore

In Maarten Maarten's novel, The Healers, a Dutch lady, who is just about to become a Catholic, is assailed, as with a final broadside, with the objection that she will be turning round and giving the lie to the whole history of her country. An enormous, oppressive consideration which perhaps reduces to terms some part at least of the vague bewilderment, the shivering diver's malaise who funks the plunge, which is the common and the inevitable experience of converts: inevitable, because, let reasoning lead never so straight and personal comforters be never so reassuring, that particular act of faith can never not be an act. The shock of this alteration of spiritual and intellectual climate is greater, perhaps, for a Briton or a Dutchman than for any others, just because that Revolution in the sixteenth century did so far succeed in making, for a time, the new religion overlay the whole length and breadth of public life in the nation.

A Nonconformist, it has been said (perhaps unjustly), could not write the history of England from his Nonconformist point of view, because he is foreign to it, all but a phase which came late and obtained only partially. From his point of view he cannot command the subject. The Alteration of Religion (as Cecil called it, surely knowing what he meant) in England organized a state of things by which Anglican and English should tend to become synonyms, the Establishment and the nation co-extensive, and all such persons as might refuse to accept the sovereign for their " Only Supreme Governor " in matters of religion be guilty not only of national disloyalty but of vi PREFACE self-ostracism. "Bluff King Hal" and "Good Queen Bess " became Shibboleths. And not content with that, the omnipotent exploiters of the new system brought in the subtle forces of convention and etiquette, and " scandal about Queen Elizabeth" was not merely a phrase to discredit, unheard, any dangerous historical revisions, but a social verdict of Bad Form. The great general legend, composed gradually and in the main unconsciously, more by instinct than policy, was composed of many falsifications of detail, all directed to subserve a common bias: namely to give the "colour " (as the old rhetoricians called it) that England's greatness only be-gan with England's Protestantism. The Renaissance, which in fact was arrested and delayed for a century by the Tudors, must (to suit the Ascendancy) be represented as a necessary and characteristic accompaniment of the new religion. English literature must begin with Elizabeth: or rather, that must be its glorious sunrise, harbingered by the glimmerings of a dawn in Wiclyf, a person about whom our evangelical mythologists have been peculiarly busy and copious. (See Gasquet's The Old English Bible and Other Essays.) Tennyson, a credulous poet, endowed with a journalist's sensitiveness to the fashion of his time, and in whom as in an echo we may. measure the clamorous resonance of Froude's fictions, by his spacious times of Great Elizabeth phrased just what many people were predisposed to believe. " Spacious times." How gratifying to national self-complacency I What did it matter if in times so spacious there should be no room for a Campion or a Southwell, except a hiding-hole, or a rack or a gibbet? Better still, the great term "Elizabethan" became serviceable for a double equivoque: thus, Elizabethan (" we always thought ")=Protestant; but evidently all literature pro-

PREFACE vii duced in the reign of Elizabeth is Elizabethan: Ergo, the whole glory, of English literature is Protestant. In some such style are the syllogisms of prejudice constructed. And then again, as a counterpart to suppressing our Aliens and Campions and Parsonses and Stapletons, they will have the word "Elizabethan", with convenient slovenliness, used to include any such Sixteenth Century work whatsoever, as it may suit their purpose to include under any special category. Thus from the first half of that century they pilfer its songs and ballads and sweep them all into the harvest of Elizabethan {i.e., Protestant, post Reformation) lyric.

But in the particular instances of Fisher and More a graver suppressio veri has been perpetrated. It has been tacitly agreed, in the interests of the Ascendancy, that these two shall be left in darkness. Their martyrdoms are lightly dismissed as regrettable but inevitable unpleasantnesses, such as will happen in the best-regulated Reformations, and which it is bad form to make much ado about. " Oh, yes, such a pity, but of course... " Or, when you drive an Anglican friend into a corner by arguing that if Henry's assumption of that Only Supreme Governorship in all questions Spiritual and Ecclesiastical (to which every Anglican prelate to this day swears allegiance) really meant so little, then More and Fisher must have been rather idiots than martyrs, in a moment you will have him guilelessly repeating from his manuals that More and Fisher were eccentrics, doctrinaire expoponents of a maximist Papalism. Surely the most impudent and fatuous of lies. More, who had warned Henry that in his Assertio he put the Pope's prerogative rather dangerously high, to be represented as an ultramontane fanatic!

Plainly the theory of a sudden outburst and springtime of literature, arising with the beginnings of the new viii PREFACE religion, is sorely embarrassed if any pre-Elizabethan writer be allowed to appear eminent. More must therefore be buried in silence and obscurity; his claim to rank as the Father of English History or English Prose be hushed up, and no other work of his permitted to be spoken of but Utopia. Utopia was a youthful trifle which he lived to regret and to disown, and his esteem of which is best shewn by the fact that he never put it into English. The young student who swallows what his handbooks tell him is never allowed to suspect that More's English works fill 1400 pages of folio. Or suppose him to have learned this much (for the literary histories mention it), he is little the forwarder. There is hardly a possibility of his reading them. Since 1557 there has never been a complete reprint; and only three pieces, I think, have been reprinted at all.1

The famous series which has done so much for the revival of forgotten worthies and re-opened so many choked sources of English, Arber's Reprints, comprised no Catholic work at all. Surely an eloquent fact, and in itself a clinching proof that the Ascendancy has pursued the policy of choking as well as of poisoning the wells of history. If Fisher had been a heretic, you may be sure Arber would have included these Sermons in the series, which contains plenty of stuff inferior to Fisher whether in point of literary merit or of historical significance in the development of style. The bibliography of

1 Here is an example of the kind of thing that might make one despair. A master of English, discoursing on style and sketching an English Library, " excludes from consideration works whose sole importance is that they form a link in the chain of development. For example, nearly all the productions of authors between Chaucer and the beginning of the Eliza^ bethan period, such as Gower, Hoccleve and Skelton, whose works, for sufficient reason, are read only by professors and students who mean to be professors." — Arnold Bennett, Literary Taste, p. 90: London, 1911.

PREFACE ix the book tells a tale. It went through several editions between 1508 and the official birth-year of the Anglican Church, 1559. After that date, all is silence. Thomas Bayly's Life (published in 1655 and made out of Richard Hall's MS.) was not accompanied by a reprint of the works. Father Kenelm Vaughan came upon an edition anonymously published in 17 14. And finally Professor J. E. B. Mayor edited the works for the Early English Texts Society in 1876. Of these two there will be more to say anon.

I have been speaking of the procured illusions and prejudices usual among those who adopt reach-me-down opinions, and whose minds still display faded suites of the intellectual furniture of the Macaulay and Froude periods. Of course, things are no longer so in the high places of criticism. But it is a slow process carrying down the results of expert criticism and serious historical inquiry into the general mind of those who say, " Oh, but I always thought..." For those who " always thought " are just those who never think, and probably have never thought. One has little fault to find with the views expressed by such historians as the late Dr. James Gairdner; merely to regret that they fail to see, and execute in act, the conclusions of their premisses. Happily though such authors may be blind to the logic of their own inquiries, their readers will see it.

Nor do most of the critics, who have written since English Literature took its great modern development as a subject of University study, deserve reproach for any prejudiced suppression of Catholic writers. Magna est Veritas. The Catholic cause derives and will derive strong support from those who have no motive beyond or beside the discovery of historical truth. I may instance Professor Gregory Smith's judgment in his Transition Period, p. 340 {Periods oj English Literature, Black-x PREFACE wood, 1900), as ungrudgingly fair. But the extremely inconvenient form in which alone Fisher could be read must hinder even expert English scholars from savouring quite freely and simply the racy turns and living-cadences which hide themselves within a strange spelling and a dead punctuation. Such a presentment is not level with our senses.

But now some Catholics may say, " Why not let it alone? Why rake up literary antiques and curios when the Second Spring has a literature of its own, and, in particular, an abundant devotional literature of its own?" Well, we build new churches of our own because our fathers were expropriated from the old; yet, thank God, the history of ecclesiastical architecture is Catholic history beyond the power of sophistry to distort. But what would not Protestantism give to be able to claim any inheritance in Catholic art? And why should we make them a present of Literature? Is it not of great importance to the reassertion of the Church in this country that we can claim a share at all points in the national heritage? From that we can refuse to be expropriated. We have names enough to keep a footing, even during the 100 years when Anglican and English looked most like becoming synonyms, before the thin overlay of the new religion had shrunk much: Crashaw, Dryden and Pope. The Church cannot afford to yield the pen any more than the sword, to be misused. How immensely less would Newman's effectiveness have been had his literary power been negligible and his appeal restricted to an audience of cognoscenti in controversy or in theology!

This treatise is offered to the public which reads the Catholic Library both as an excellent piece of devotional reading and as an excellent piece of literature, deeply interesting to anybody who takes any pride in his mother

PREFACE xi tongue, and feels an honest complacency in recognizing" how near to the perfect adequacy and aptness of a civilized language was the speech of our ancestors 400 years ago.

As a book of devotion it certainly escapes the commonest fault in that kind, the sin of sweetishness or false unction. The reason why this so often defaces books of devotion is that they are taken from foreign originals with too little respect for idiom. Much sentiment is good and pleasant to the native palate in French or Italian, which, done into English, will estrange, offend and even scandalize an English reader. The literary charm, the raciness, the solidity and sincerity of Fisher's English give a most engaging address to these printed mission-aries. Reading and rereading these proofs I find him, in my own experience, extraordinarily satisfying and uncloying. Such sweetness without sentimentality, such mastery in tempering hope and fear together, rebuke and consolation; in a word, such a man, and such a Saint.

Moreover, is it mere antiquarianism of temper if of two books of devotion, otherwise equally good, I find that the one which is 400 years old has a seniority of values and interest to which even the modern classic must defer? History is everywhere, if you are on the alert for her: and every book has, beyond its intrinsic quality, a further quality as being a piece or a document of the mind of its time. What was our countrymen's mind like in the fatal half-century before the apostasy? You may learn it from descriptions by historians, if you please to take their word for it, but unless you know what books any generation of men read and took pleasure in, the mind of that time is closed to you. In reading this Treatise, both the preacher and his hearers revive and advance towards us and draw near out of their dim distance. Also, if I mistake not, the reader of these serxii PREFACE mons will feel not only " How Catholic this is," but " How racy, how English this is." Quod se?nper, quod ab omnibus is a great text for many applications: let us apply it to our countrymen, and rejoice in the real continuity which makes this Doctor and Martyr such near neighbours to ourselves in the idiom and the rhythm of his language.

The taunt of the " Italian Mission " is one of those foolish taunts which blacken the utterer's lips without hitting their object. But Continuitarianism is still amongst us, the sorry remnant of false reasoning, false history and sophistication with which those who made the gran rifiuto after the Oxford Movement corrupted such provinces of the Victorian mind as they had access to. Now every well chosen reprint of a pre-Reformation piece of English Literature is both a sound defence against the ultra-Protestant policy of expatriating the Papists from their birthright in the national tradition, and also a demonstration of the living continuity (to take our particular case) between the Church of which the Bishop of Rochester was a Cardinal and the Church which has raised Blessed John Fisher to the honours of her altars.

It has been mentioned above that these sermons have been twice reprinted; but each time it was under conditions which leave this present book virtually unforestalled.

In 1876 Professor J. E. B. Mayor, of St. John's College, Cambridge, reprinted for the Early English Text Society, vol. i. of Fisher's Works, containing, besides this treatise, several other pieces which it is hoped also to include later in the Catholic Library. He anticipated in his advertisement that he would never finish the edition; which neither he did, nor has any other come forward to do vol. ii., using the indications

PREFACE xiii which Mayor left for his eventual successor. Mayor printed from the MSS., reproducing the spelling and punctuation that he found. He was a skilled palaeographer and textual scholar, and his general accuracy beyond question; but there are nevertheless a good few-passages where he makes Fisher talk nonsense, for want of some slight emendation such as he would never have stuck at had he been dealing with the text of Juvenal or Cicero. I have been content to correct these places tacitly. But the reason why his edition (not a common book, either, for that matter) is useless for all but lexicographers and (to recite Arnold Bennett's cheerless classification) " professors and students who mean to be professors," is that he meticulously preserves the ancient spelling and punctuation. Possibly Mayor would not have cared to see this papistical treatise save in the hands of antiquaries or curious savants. While he was about it, Gothic type would have improved the uncouthness. But certainly, as it is, no further obstacles are needed to make the book unreadable, in any effective sense of the verb to read. The modern eye cannot travel freely, picking up its clues on the page, where even the commonest word is an orthographical monster, and the stops give no clue to the articulation of the sentence. In this respect Mayor's text is a monument of laborious pedantry. Consider this phrase for example:

" Every one of them wolde execute all that perteyneth to his office quykly without fayninge or parcyalyte." It looks a queer enough collection of beasts to set on a modern page, and one takes some little thought to discover what "quykly" and "parcyalyte" may mean. Show this to the railway traveller at the bookstall, and his shilling will not rise to such a bait with much eagerness, Yet nothing is amiss with it but the disguise. Put it in modern form:

xiv PREFACE

" Every one of them would execute all that pertaineth to his office quickly without feigning or partiality," and nothing is left that need disconcert an ordinarily literate reader. All that outlandishness, all that air as of some quaint half-real thing raised up on the farther side of a vast chasm of time, across which we have no equal and familiar communications, is almost wholly a matter of dressing and presenting, or, in other words, of spelling and pointing.

Father Kenelm Vaughan saw this. He says in the little Introduction to his reprint (Burns and Oates, 1888):

When my intention of reprinting this book was known, a friend in the British Museum urged me to bring out a facsimile of the original text, written in Old English, which might be a grateful reminiscence of those bygone days. But my aim in the reproduction of this book is not a literary but a devotional one. My desire is not to gratify the tastes, of antiquarians, which has already been done by the E.E.T.S., but to supply holy reading.

But since the present editor is aiming at an object which lies between that and Mayor's, a middle way has been taken here with the problem, how to present the text. Mayor's method we have seen; this is how Father Vaughan describes his:

Upon this edition (which I have compared with the original), published in 17 14 and modernized then to suit the requirements of those days, I have formed this new edition, modernizing it still further, so as to bring it down to our times. In other words I have paragraphed these sermons, which scarcely had a break in them from beginning to end; disentangled and divided long involved sentences; adopted throughout modern orthography and punctuation; replaced obsolete words with words of common usage; and modified certain rude modes of expression, which, though suitable to a less polished age, would grate offensively on the ears of this more refined and sensitive generation.

PREFACE xv

All this was quite legitimate for Father Vaughan's purpose, but it transmogrifies Fisher too much for mine, for, desiring to make a reprint which should come in handy to serve the literary student's turn, who might care to read a good book of 1508, although he had no liking for a book of devotions, it would be a fatal blunder to modernize beyond the (minimum point of convenience, or to bowdlerize. A true student's temper must always be what Pliny expressed: ea est stomachi mea natura ut nil nisi merum et to turn velit.

I have therefore adapted the spelling, but not the diction, preferring instead to add a running glossary of the obsolete words, which are surprisingly few. As to Father K. Vaughan's last matter I have ventured to leave to the Beatus this uncloaked homeliness of his plain-speaking. I feel that one must gravely falsify either More or Fisher by dissembling a certain crudeness, profoundly and instinctively healthy; which, if we find it offensive, is just the measure of our decadence. The most vicious ages and the most vicious books taboo the gros mot; but there are much more insidious corruptions in the refinements of euphemists than in the round terms which More and Fisher, like St. Augustine and St. Jerome, think it no shame to write. There are Saints who have almost a cynical brusqueness in this matter, just because they hold the flesh in contempt, and grudge under its wearisome exactions. Why then should they flatter it with daintinesses of language?

I have thought it needless to say anything of Blessed John Fisher's life and martyrdom, because Father Bridget's book is so well-known and so accessible. But in conclusion I will add two quotations. The first shall be from the Proemial Annotations upon the Psalms in the Douay Bible (ed. 1610):

In Litanies and almost all Public Prayers, and in administraxvi PREFACE tion of other Sacraments and Sacramentals, either whole Psalms or frequent verses are inserted. Likewise the greatest part of the Offices of our B. Lady and for the Dead, are Psalms: beside the Seven Penitential arid fifteen Gradual Psalms, at certain times. So that clergymen's holy office consisteth much in singing or reading Psalms. And therefore all Bishops especially are strictly bound by a particular Canon {Dist. 38 cap. Omnes psallettles) to be skilful in the Psalms of David: and to see that other Clergymen be well instructed therein.

Here is Fisher as the model Bishop, as he was in so many other respects; and now for Fisher as prophet: this second is from our text, in the comment on Psalm cii.:

So, good Lord, do now in like manner again with thy Church militant; change and make the soft and slipper)' earth into hard stones; set in thy Church strong and mighty pillars that may suffer and endure great labours, watching, poverty, thirst, hunger, cold and heat; which also shall not fear the threatings of princes, persecution, neither death but always persuade and think with themself to suffer with a good will, slanders, shame and all kinds of torments for the glory and laud of Thy Holy Name.

This prayer was spoken in the last year of Henry VII.; it was fulfilled in the author's person twenty-seven years later on Tower Hill.

June 15, 1914

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

In place of a general bibliography it will be sufficient for the scope of this volume to refer to Henry Morley's English Writers, vol. vii., pp. 331 — 335 (published 1 891), and to the standard Life of the Blessed John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, and Martyr under Henry VIII., by the Rev. T. E. Bridgett, of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer. Second edition 1890. These will furnish the fullest materials.