Blessed Edmund Campion

English exiles who were living in Flanders from their solitary and self-guided study to a more exact method and to collegiate obedience; and their next, to provide for

quiring into the other." The spirit of Douay was not reactionary, but the best spirit of the English Renaissance. It had, besides, a character or atmosphere holy and bright, not formed by mere human culture: it was as "a garden enclosed, and a fountain sealed." Campion found there a peace such as he had never known. He had already, at Oxford, given seven years to philosophy, and six more to Aristotle, positive theology, and the Fathers. The study of scholastic theology was dead in Oxford: Campion now first took up the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas. He arrived in June, and in August he bought a noble edition of the[55] Summa for his own use, in thr

Church. This is a passage from the revised De Juvene Academico, which had first been sketched out years before in Dublin. "Listen to our Heavenly Father asking back his talents with usury! . . . Behold, by the wickedness of the wicked the house of God is devoted to flames and to destruction; numberless souls are being deceived, are being shaken, are being lost, any one of which is worth more than the empire of the whole world. . . . Sleep not while the Enemy watches; play not while he devours his prey; sink not into idleness and folly while his fangs are wet with your brothers' blood. It is not wealth nor liberty nor station, but the eternal inheritance of each of us,[57] the very life-blood of our souls, our spirits, and our lives, that suffers. See, th

Rome, and there seek admission into the Society of Jesus. The medi?val Orders would have less attraction for Campion: he was an intensely "modern" man. Now this was a severe blow to Allen: hardly less so to others of Campion's circle. Campion, the pride, the example, the hope of the Seminary, to quit it for good, and to quit it in order to join the most recent of religious communities-one which

d a Protestant. The horseman first rode past the poor mendicant on the highway, and then was prompted by some dim sense of recognition to return and speak to him. On realizing that it was really Edmund Campion whom he used to know "in great pomp of prosperity," he showed much concern, proffered his good-will and his purse, and begged to hear how Campion had fallen into that ill plight. But the pilgrim refused aid; and the other traveller heard something then and there of the "contempt of this world, and the eminent dignity of serving Christ in poverty,"

g succeeded that great personality St. Francis Borgia, on St. George's Day, April 23, 1573. Biographers have represented that Campion had a half-year's delay in Rome before he was able to apply for admission to the Society; but such was not the case. He promptly presented himself, and was received as Merc?ur's first recruit, and received not as a postulant, but as a novice. As Anthony Wood tells us, "he was esteemed by the General of that Order to be a person every way complete." Four years later, Campion most affectionately thanked his own old tutor, John Bavand, for unasked "introductions, help and

ohemia won. Campion was sent as one of a company to Vienna, and then from Vienna to Prague, where the Noviciate was, with Father Avellanedo, Confessor to the Empress, a man of wide experience. He was so deeply edified by his companion that, he told Fr. Parsons long after, it had kept him all his life "much affectioned" towards England and Englishmen. Prague was in a miserable, godless state: the[63] Catholics were poor and few: th