V THE CALL TO COME UP HIGHER: DOUAY, PRAGUE: 1571-1573

IN Allen’s Apology for Seminaries there is a beautiful account of the ideals of Douay. “The first thought of the founders of the College had been to attract the young 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 the rising generation in England a succession of learned Catholics, especially of clergy, to take the place of those removed by old age, imprisonment, and persecution. Their design then was to draw together out of England the ‘best wits’ from the following classes; those inclined to Catholicism; those who desired a more exact education than could be then obtained at Oxford[54] or Cambridge, ‘where no art, holy or profane, was thoroughly studied, and some not touched at all;’ those who were scrupulous about taking the Oath of the Queen’s supremacy; those who disliked to be forced, as they were in some Colleges of the English Universities, to enter the ministry; . . . and those who were doubtful which religion was the true one, and were disgusted that they were forced into one without being allowed opportunity of inquiring 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 three volumes folio. This was discovered in 1887 by Canon Didiot of Lille, and it is now at the Roehampton Noviciate. Several features make it a particularly interesting relic: Campion’s signature, with the date of his purchase, on the flyleaf; various beautifully executed little drawings, underlinings, and a host of marginal notes in Latin. By far the most touching of these relates to what St. Thomas quotes from Gennadius on the baptism of blood. Blessed Edmund Campion wrote in a tall, bold hand, over against this passage, the one musing word, “Martyrdom.” Canon Didiot, with that intimate touch of French sympathy, calls it “mot radieux et prophétique.”

For nearly two years Campion followed the course of scholastic theology, taking his degree of Bachelor in January, 1573. He then received Minor Orders, and was ordained Sub-deacon. All went happily for him at Douay. He was again at his old work, and, as ever, he won the highest opinions from those among whom he moved. In his Oxford days he had always[56] held lofty standards before his pupils: “never to deliquesce into sloth, nor to dance away your time, nor to live for rioting and pleasure . . . but to give yourselves up to virtue and learning, and to reckon this the one, great, glorious and royal road.” But the feeling in the exhortations of his later life is tenfold deeper, and strikes a far more haunting note of duty towards England, and towards the 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, then, my dearest young scholars and friends, that we lose none of this precious time, but carry hence a plentiful and rich crop, enough to supply the public want, and to gain for ourselves the reward of dutiful sons.” One of those who listened to these words was destined to become the proto-martyr of the English Continental Seminaries: Cuthbert Mayne, a dear pupil of Campion’s, who as a Devon lad had come up to Oxford and St. John’s, had first conformed to the new regulations, and served as College Chaplain, then awakened from his delusion, and fled over seas for conscience’ sake, “not to escape danger, but to be prepared for it,” in response to one of Campion’s burning letters. This letter was intercepted, but its purport had reached him, and decided him.

In the spring of 1573, Campion found himself driven to a course he had not contemplated on coming to Douay. As he slowly saw his way, he followed it, to horizon beyond horizon. He had many steps to take, because in his thirst for perfection[58] he had far to travel. He told Dr. Allen he wished to leave his present life, go on pilgrimage, in the spirit of penance, to the Tomb of the Apostles at 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 as yet had few English members! It was inexplicable. But Allen, like the great-hearted and broad-minded commander-in-chief he was, let him go without protest. He little foresaw that far from losing his most promising champion, he was but lending him to better masters of the interior life than himself, and would receive his trained strength again in the English Mission’s spiritual day of battle.

Campion set out on foot across the Continent for Rome, along that road “trodden by many a Saxon king and English saint,[59] to the Apostles’ shrine.” His companions walked with him all the first day; but the next morning he sent them back, and pushed on alone. Solitude was henceforth his choice, whenever duty permitted. He must have had many strange adventures during that spring journey. We know of one of them, though not from him. At some point of the route, probably on the northern Italian border, he came face to face with an old friend, an Oxonian, and 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,” which greatly moved him: and “us also,” adds Robert[60] Parsons of Balliol, “that remained yet in Oxford, when the report came to our ears.” A strange tale it must have seemed to those who knew their Master of Arts and all his old fastidiousness! He was by now a saint in the making, and they were fast losing touch with him. Personal holiness is, so to speak, a mining country: its progress and its wealth are underground, unguessed-at by the careless passer-by. A saint is a mystery because he walks so closely in the shadow of God, who is the Great Mystery.

When Campion reached Rome, and had paid his devotions to the holy places, he went to call upon Cardinal Gesualdi, who, as he stated afterwards, “having some liking of me, would have been the means to prefer me . . . but I, resolved what course to take, answered that I meant not to serve any man, but to enter into the Society of Jesus, thereof to vow and to be professed.” With this intention, Campion sought out the newly-elected head of that Society, Father Everard of Liège, whose surname was generally Latinized into Mercurianus, from Merc?ur, his native village.[61] He was fourth in his office, having 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 money,” which had been supplied since he came to Rome. He speaks of himself as “one whom you knew never could repay you, but who was at the point, so to speak, of death. . . . You were munificent to me when I was going to enter the sepulchral rest of religion.” The aid he would not accept for himself on his journey from one friend, he had accepted in the city (and spent, no doubt, in almsgiving) from another.[62] Perhaps Bavand was abroad, and heard of that incident which came to pass on the road: certainly, he was one from whom Campion could not in chivalry refuse whatever he chose to share with him.

The Society of Jesus had been founded only six years before Campion was born. It had as yet no English “Province,” that is, no members living under the English flag with a domestic government of their own. But Edmund Campion was already well known to the Provincials on the Continent, who had a warm contest over him, every one of them wishing to add such a promising soldier to his own wing of the army of the Lord. As it fell out, Bohemia 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: the great University had perished: and all this was due to the ruin, moral and material, produced by the preaching, at the dawn of the fifteenth century, of John Hus. That Hus got his Socialistic ideas from Wyclif was a fact never out of Campion’s mind while in Bohemia: for he thought that England owed some reparation to a country which she had helped to spoil, and he was more than willing to pay his part of that debt.