When, from the clouds of our actual vantage-point, we consider the date 1535, we are immediately conscious, because of the glorious event which illuminates this present year of suspense, of a scaffold and a block. Four hundred years intervene, and we shall perhaps congratulate ourselves on their passage, since the use of the headsman's axe as a means of religious persuasion has vanished with them and physical danger in the practise of our faith is at an end. We look back with humble reverence and gratitude to that scaffold set in the midst of our country and our history, where the two Blessed Martyrs, now to be canonized, welcomed the ultimate opportunity; and although we may be thankful that such an opportunity comes no more to Englishmen in England (since, by a curious paradox, we would often more willingly choose a life of heroism than a heroic death), we reverence them the more for their fortitude in a trial we are spared.

Their fame shines for us across the centuries, and we love them for holiness and wisdom, for wit and prevailing courage, timeless attributes displayed by them in a vanished time; for everything of that day has disappeared, the frame of life and its preoccupations, the look and sound of it. Gone is that world of individual efforts and harvests, and we think of it as a pastoral picture painted in clear tones, the green English scene enlivened by the peasant in his homespun, made ceremonial by the daily silks and velvets of the great. Its arguments and sufferings, its discoveries and abuses, are only knowledge for us.

But it was a time like this in which we live; new power, new danger, and new tyranny were abroad, and established things were threatened with disruption.