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And this was the misery of the position. For it was soon to appear that the King's definite and final intentions, varied from day to day. It was almost humorous to find him at that moment condemning all opinions but those of Calvin and Beza in Holland, while his course to the strictest confessors of that creed in England was so ferocious.
In Scotland farther north it was another kind of ballad which was said and sung, or whispered under the breath with many a peal of rude laughter, the Satires of "Davy Lindsay" and many a lesser poet ludicrous stories of erring priests and friars, indecent but humorous, with lamentable tales of dues exacted and widows robbed, and all the sins of the Church, the proud bishop and his lemans, the avaricious priest and his exactions, the confessors who bullied a dying penitent into gifts which injured his family, and all the well-worn scandals by which in every time of reformation the coarser imagination of the populace is stirred.
They not only sighed over the remembrance of the pastures where they had fed their flocks, but they also groaned for the temples of God which had been broken down. For the voice of truth which was now silenced in the land of martyrs and confessors, and simultaneously grew up the hope and the desire of returning to the place which had been for so long the home of their fathers.
"By no means," he answered, "for besides the fact that we are bound to obey the law of God coming to us through our Superiors, both spiritual and temporal, we must also defer most humbly to our Confessors, to whom we lay bare the secrets of our conscience.
Reviews are like Jesuit father confessors guiding the opinions of the multitude, who blindly follow the suggestions of those to whom they may have entrusted their literary consciences.
And in the said place he made two very beautiful little doors of bronze in low-relief, with the Apostles, Martyrs, and Confessors; and above these he made some flat niches, one containing a S. Laurence and a S. Stephen, and the other S. Cosimo and S. Damiano. In the transept of the church he executed four saints in stucco, each five braccia high, which are wrought in a masterly manner.
He found, on his accession, the terrible penal laws against the Papists in full force; the hangman's knife was yet warm with its ghastly butcher-work of quartering and disembowelling suspected Jesuits and victims of the lie of Titus Oates; the Tower of London had scarcely ceased to echo the groans of Catholic confessors stretched on the rack by Protestant inquisitors.
It is true that the victims were fewer, for the majority of confessors had been seized and tortured to death. The Christians who remained had either left Rome to wait out the storm in distant provinces, or had hidden most carefully, not daring to assemble in common prayer, unless in sand-pits outside the city.
Such was Schmucke, formerly chapel-master to the Margrave of Anspach; a musical genius, who was now examined by a council of devotes, and asked if he kept the fasts. The master was much inclined to answer, "Look at me!" but how could he venture to joke with pious dowagers and Jansenist confessors?
To aid him in this work the author calls to his assistance the holy confessors, martyrs, and other celestial dominations, who, by the commandments of God, were the promoters of good in this affair.
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