30. John Philpot, Martyr.

This martyr is made a red letter saint in Fox's Calendar, although he was but an unlearned man, being distinguished only by his obstinate attachment to error, and his restless disposition therein. This Philpot is not the archdeacon Philpot of Winchester, of whom the modern editors have given a long account, which we shall notice in the proper place, Fox having canonized him on the 18th of December. The above John Philpot was a poor countryman at Tenderden in Kent, and was burned at Canterbury. Why Fox should make him more conspicuous than the rest of his godly martyrs we are at a loss to discover, and the modern editors found it so difficult to explain the circumstance, that they deemed him unworthy of notice altogether.

31. Thomas Stephens, Martyr.

This was another troublesome and ignorant man, who suffered with the above in the last year of the reign of Mary.

Though all were classed as "godly" and "heavenly" martyrs, yet it is to be noted, and should constantly be borne in mind by the reader, that not one of them held the same doctrines, but all differed in some point from each other. This Fox himself was aware of, and attempted to excuse. He says, p. 1787,"What the ordinary articles were, commonly to them eted of Canterbury diocess, is before rehearsed, &c. To which articles, what these men's answers were, needeth no great rehearsa seeing they all agreed together, though not in the same form of words, yet in much like effect of purpose. And though they did not all answer uniformly in some smaller things, as their learning served them, yet in the most principal and chiefest matters they did not greatly discord," &c. To this pitiful sophistry father Parsons replies:-" Thus writeth Fox, and not without cause, you must think, doth he go about here to excuse the disagreeing of his martyrs. And yet you may note that he doth not affirm, that they did all agree in one belief, or in all articles thereof: but (saith he) in much like effect of purposes.". Which is a point that may be granted to all sectaries in the world among themselves; whose purposes are much alike in impugning the Church and Catholic faith, though their opinions be different. And then, he addeth further: 'that in the most principal and chiefest matters they did not greatly discord.' So that some discord he admitted also, not only in purposes, but even in the most principal points of their belief. Which you may imagine to be, that one was a Lutheran, another a Zuinglian, another a Calvinist, and another savouring of Anabaptism, Wickliffianism, Hussism, Puritanism, or the like. All which with Fox (and we may add with his modern editors) doth not prejudicate the unity or integrity of their faith, &c.

"And thus much (continues Parsons) for the Foxian martyrs of this month of January, whom if we will distribute into their ranks and orders, either of their states and conditions, (some being apostate priests and friars, some seditious turbulent soldiers, and some fond and obstinate poor women) or according to their different beliefs, professions, or sects, which they were of; or conform to the several offences, faults, or obstinate fantasies, for which they were punished; or according to their VOL. III.

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boldness of imprudent words or behaviour, by which they shewed their deceived and intemperate spirit, you will easily conceive how contemptible and pitiful brawlers they are to be canonized by John Fox. Especially if you compare them with the most excellent and holy company of Catholic saints which offer themselves against them in the opposite calendar of the Roman church, of whom now we are briefly to speak a word or to, before we end this narration."

The learned antagonist of Fox then proceeds to draw a comparison between the Catholic and Foxian Calendar for this month, through which we cannot spare room to follow him. Suffice it to say, that the saints honoured by the Catholic church, are divided into four classes. 1st. Martyrs, or such as taught and testified with their blood, the name and religion of Christ Jesus, which observe was and is always ONE and THE SAME, without modification or change, and these sufferers for Christ's sake were both men and women. 2. Doctors and Teachers, who by their writing and preaching gave testimony of the same truth, though not by their blood. 3. Those that did the same, sealing with their blood that which they taught by their word and writing. 4. Such as by their extraordinary holiness and virtuous conduct of life, did illustrate the divine precepts of the Catholic religion, namely, Virgins, Monks, Hermits, &c. Of these four sorts, the Catholic church commemorates the following in the month of January.

Year. Day.

THE CATHOLIC CALENDAR.

11 Circumcision of our Lord. 394 2 St. Macarius, Anchoret. 422 3 St. Genevieve, Virgin. 94 4 St. Titus, Bishop.

134 5 St. Telesphorus, Pope and Mart. 1 6 Epiphany of our Lord. 312 7 St. Lucian, Priest and Martyr. 175 8 St. Apollinaris, Bishop, 387 9 St. Peter, Bp. and Confessor. 1229 10 St. William, Archbp. and Conf. 158 11 St. Hyginus, Pope and Martyr. 690 12 St. Benedict Biscop, Abbot. 1497 13 St. Veronica, of Milan. 337 14 St. Hilary, Bp. and Confessor. 308 15 St. Paul, the first Hermit. 300 16 St. Marcellus, Pope and Martyr.

Some of these holy saints we see were Popes in the primitive ages of the Church, who laid down their lives for the faith; two of them, Titus and Timothy, were scholars and disciples of St. Paul, the chosen apostle of the Gentiles; St. Polycarp was a disciple of St. John the evangelist; St. Hilary was a famous doctor of the church, bishop of Poictiers in France; St. John Chrysostom and St. Cyril, were also bishops and most learned doctors; St. Paul and St. Anthony, were recluses of the most mortified and abstemious life; St. Agnes, St. Anastasius, and St. Martina, were all noble virgins, and martyrs; yet all these undoubted and great saints, confessors, and soldiers of Christ are erased from the Calendar by John Fox, to make way for a motley list of hodge podge fanatics, who were not able to give an account of their own fancied opinions, but were deemed fit and proper saints because they had

the daring to deny the truth, and obstinacy to persist in their error, though consigned to death.

St Benedict Biscop, commonly called Bennet, was nobly descended, and was one of the great officers of the court of Oswi, the religious king of the Northumbers. At the age of 25 he bade adieu to the world, and taking a journey to Rome entered into a religious life. St. Bennet returned to his native country, and king Egfird bestowed on him some land to build a monastery, which the saint founded on the mouth of the river Were, whence it was called Weremouth. When the monastery was built, St. Bennet went over to France, and brought back with him skilful masons, who built the church for this monastery with stone, after the Roman fashion; for till this time stone buildings were very rare in Britain; even the church of Lindisfarne was of wood, and covered over with a thatch of straw and reeds, till bishop Eadbert procured both the roof and walls to be covered with sheets of lead, as Bede mentions. St. Bennet also brought over glaziers from France, for the art of makglass was then unknown in England.-He likewise furnished himself from Rome with a large stock of good books, a proof that even in that age learning was the pursuit of those calumniated men, the monks. He moreover enriched the country with holy pictures, many of which he placed in the church of St. Peter at Weremouth, and brought with him from Rome, on return from his last journey to that city, John, abbot of St. Martin's, precentor of St. Peter's church, to instruct his monks in the Gregorian notes, for divine office. This great benefactor of his country and of society is honoured by the English Benedictins as one of the patrons of their congregation, and he is mentioned in the Roman martyrology on the 12th of January, on which day Fox has canonized the apostate priest Whittle, to whom the devil made his appearance to induce him to recal his return to the Catnolic faith.

When Fox devised his new calendar, and published his Acts and Monuments of the Church, so anxious were the new gospellers to blot out from the remembrance of the people of this country every thing that reminded them of the ancient faith, that a copy of the ponderous lies of Fox was placed in every church in the kingdom as a fit companion for the bible, which, by the by, was a false translation, and therefore well worthy to match the Book of Martyrs, from which the parson read a lesson occasionally to edify his congregation. It cannot, therefore be a subject of surprise, that the reign of ignorance and prejudice has continued so long triumphant, when such means have been used to blind the mind and excite the passions of the multitude against the Catholics! It now remains for us to place another picture before the reader, and shew what has been done by those who have raised the cry of cruelty against queen Mary, while their path has been saturated with the blood of victims from the persecuted and calumniated Catholics.

NOTE.-The names printed in Italic characters in Fox's Calendar, are printed in red letters in the original copy of his work.

CATHOLIC MARTYRS, &c. UNDER PROTESTANT LAWS,

Mr. WATERSON was born at London, and on arriving at man's estate, he travelled into Turkey, where a rich Turk, taking a liking to him, he offered Mr. Waterson his daughter in marriage, on condition that he would renounce the Christian religion. This proposition Mr. W. rejected with horror, though at that time no Catholic. On his return home from Turkey he took Rome on his way, and was there instructed in, and reconciled to, the Catholic church, by Mr. Richard Smith, afterwards bishop of Chalcedon, and viear apostolic of England and Scotland, then living in the English college in that city. From Rome he went to Rheims, and was admitted a student in that college, where he lived for some years a pattern of humility, penance and other virtues. He had an ardent desire for the salvation of souls, and panted to be sent on the English mission. He was accordingly ordained priest on the Saturday after Midlent Sunday, in the year 1592, and was sent to England the Whitsunday following. He was but a short time, however, in this country before he was apprehended, tried, and condemned for being made a priest by the same authority as ordained and commissioned St. Augustin to undertake the conversion of our Pagan ancestors to Catholicism, and paved the way for those excellent laws and institutions matured and established by a virtuous Catholic king, Alfred the great.Had the Pagan Saxon king Ethelbert been under the influence of the same malignant spirit as governed the Christian virgin queen Elizabeth, this island might still have been uncivilized and enveloped in the darkness of heathenism. But Ethelbert listened to the voice of truth, and was induced to embrace it; Elizabeth, on the contrary, preferred/the dictates of error, and resolved to maintain its dominion by laws more odious and sanguinary than the decrees of the Roman persecuting emperors in the primitive ages of the church. The fault of Mary's advisers was, the acting on a wrong principle in the support of truth.→ They conceived the sin of heresy to be more henious than the crime of rebellion and sedition; the one being an offence against the majesty of God, the other against the majesty of the State; they, therefore, punished the malecontents for the first offence, though they were guilty of both, thinking it would awe others infected with the same evil principles; whereas they should have chastised the refractory for disobedience to the temporal laws, and left the affair of conscience to the just judgment of God. The statute under which Fox's Martyrs were executed, defined the offence to be an intention to SUBVERT the LAW of the realm as well as the law of God and the Church, and it would consequently have been a less invasion of conscience, to have tried them for a breach of the peace, than for a theory of doctrine. Elizabeth's laws, however, were a direct infringement on conscience, and levelled at the ancient religion of the country; the religion which, as we before observed, had been planted by St. Augustin nine hundred years previous to Elizabeth's reign. She had driven out all the Catholic priests from the island, and had taken

care that no means of instructing or ordaining any in England should be possible; how then was this religion to be preserved and truth maintained, if priests were not to be had to administer the sacraments and inform the ignorant of the divine mysteries of faith. There could be no other means than by being taught and ordained abroad, and these means were resorted to. Saint Augustin and his holy companions were taught abroad, and Ethelbert raised no objection to their foreign education.Truth is always the same, whether learned in France, Spain, or Germany, or imparted by Italians, Swiss, or Danes. But here were Englishmen anxious to sow the seeds of divine faith, and therefore it was made TREASON in England for Englishmen to exercise the right of conscience.The man who went over to a foreign country to become a priest of the Catholic church, and returned with the same pious view as St. Augustin came to visit our Saxon ancestors, no sooner set his foot on English ground, than he became a TRAITOR TO THE STATE!!! No plotting to subvert the laws, or conspiring the death of the sovereign was necessary now to be a traitor; no overt act of rebellion was now required-the pure religious ceremony of being ordained a priest by the same authority as the apostles of Christ exercised, and coming into England to exercise the spiritual powers conferred by that authority, was now an act of HIGH TREASON, and subjected the missionary to all the penalties inflicted on those who actually meditated and have attempted the life of the sovereign and the overthrow of all law and property. Such was the NEW act of treason enacted by the virgin queen Bess's parliament, and under this law did Mr. Waterson suffer. He received the sentence of death with joy, and suffered with great constancy at Newcastle-uponTyne, on the 7th of January, 1593.

11. William Carter, Printer.

Mr. CARTER was indicted for printing a Treatise on Schism, to prevent Catholics from going to Protestant churches, which some of the weaker sort were in the habit of doing, to avoid the penalty of twenty pounds a month imposed on all persons above sixteen years of age, who should absent themselves from church. In this work a paragraph touching Judith and Holofernes, was interpreted, by a forced construction, to be an exhortation to murder the queen, and Mr. Bell was accordingly convicted and sentenced to death. Here we have Two NEW CRIMES from the forge of Protestantism. When Henry the 8th assumed the supremacy of the Church, he was so conscious of his inability to sustain the usurpation against the attacks that would be made on his new dignity, that he had a law passed making it treason to PRINT any work that might be written to bring his Popeship into contempt. So, when Elizabeth came to the crown, this law, which had been repealed by her predecessor Mary, was re-enacted, and Mr. Carter was prosecuted under it. But then there was nothing positive to shew that he had violated the provisions of the act; to prevent, therefore, his escaping from the hands of his persecutors, a passage of the work was CONSTRUED into treason, and on this ground, flimsy enough to be sure, was he brought in guilty by his jury. For this ingenious doctrine we are indebted to sir Matthew Hale and the reign of Elizabeth; for until this period such a crime was unknown in England as constructive treason.

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