Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name | Page 2

lovable character, and he possessed the gift of eloquence in
no ordinary degree. For the rest, his natural qualities and acquired
accomplishments were above the ordinary level, without reaching an
extraordinary height. He was a man who never ceased working, and
whose temper was always angelic, though he sometimes suffered from
severe depression. He was adored by his pupils both at Oxford and in
Bohemia. His memory was always bright, and his conversation always
sparkled with fresh thoughts and poetical ideas. He composed with
extraordinary facility in Latin prose and verse; but the extant fragments
of these literary exercises do not strike us as being of unusual
excellence, though genuinely admired in their day. He was certainly an
ideal missioner: saintly, inspired, eloquent, untireable, patient,
consumed with the desire for the success of his undertaking, and
unfaltering in his faith that success would follow by the providential
action of God, despite the obvious fact that all appearances were
against him.
Campion landed at Dover late in June, 1580, and reached London at the
end of the month. There was an immediate rush to hear him, and Lord

Paget was persuaded to lend his great hall at Paget House in Smithfield
to accommodate a congregation for the feast of Saints Peter and Paul.
The sermon was delivered on the text from the Gospel of the day, _Tu
es Christus, Filius Dei vivi_. The hall was filled, and the impression
caused by the sermon was profound; but the number of hearers had
been imprudently large. Though no arrests followed, the persecutors
took the alarm, and increased their activity to such an extent that large
gatherings had for ever to be abandoned; and after a couple of weeks
both Campion and Persons left London to escape the notice of the
pursuivants, whose raids and inquisitorial searches were making the lot
of Catholics in town unbearable, whereas in the country the pursuit was
far less active, and could be much more easily avoided. The two
Fathers met for the last time at Hoxton, then a village outside London,
to concert their plans for the next couple of months, and were on the
point of starting, each for his own destination, when a Catholic of some
note rode up from London. This was Thomas Pounde, of Belmont or
Beaumont, near Bedhampton, a landed gentleman of means, an
enthusiastic Catholic, and for the last five years or so a prisoner for
religion. Mr. Pounde's message in effect was this. "You are going into
the proximate danger of capture, and if captured you must expect not
justice, but every refinement of misrepresentation. You will be asked
crooked questions, and your answers to them will be published in some
debased form. Be sure that whatever then comes through to the outer
world will come out poisoned and perverted. Let me therefore urge you
to write now, and to leave in safe custody, what you would wish to
have published then, in case infamous rumours should be put about
during your incarceration, rumours which you will then not be able to
answer or to repudiate." Father Persons seems to have agreed at once.
Campion at first raised objections, but soon, with his ever obliging
temper, sat down at the end of the table and wrote off in half an hour an
open letter _To the Lords of Her Majesty's Privy Council_, afterwards
so well known as _Campion's Challenge._
3. THE CHALLENGE.
Campion, after finishing his letter and taking copy for himself, had
consigned the other copy to Pounde. Persons had done the same; but
whereas the latter took the precaution to seal his letter, Campion had
handed over his unfastened. Then the company broke up. Persons made

a wide circle from Northampton round to Gloucester, while Campion
made a smaller circle from Oxfordshire up to Northampton. When they
got back to town in September, they found all the world discussing "the
Challenge." What had happened was that proceedings had been taken
by the Ecclesiastical Commission against Pounde, and he had been
committed to solitary confinement in the ruinous castle of Bishop's
Stortford. Before he left London he began to communicate the letter to
others, lest it should be altogether lost, and as soon as it was thus
published it attracted everyone's attention, and his adversaries had
ironically christened it the challenge. The word was indeed one which
Campion had used, but he had employed it precisely in order to avoid
any charge that might have arisen, of being combative and
presumptuous.
Thus in the course of three months Campion, as it were in spite of
himself, had filled England with his name and with the message he had
come to announce, and he had reduced his adversaries to a very
ridiculous position. They had been dared to meet him in disputation,