urn for a little to that age which
built such things as these, so that they have outlasted everything
that has followed them and put it under their feet. And yet their
heart was set upon no such victory, but in the heavens. It was the
great and self-forgetting act of an obscure baker, but a saint of
God, that built the mighty half abandoned church we see at Rochester,
nor was he for sure altogether forgotten when all England went by to
kneel and to pray beside Becket's shrine at Canterbury, raised there
in a heavenly cause, which must prevail in the end, though neither
Rochester nor Canterbury to-day might seem to bear out any such
certainty.

The modern pilgrim, knowing what he knows, will be fain to remember at
Rochester, on his way to St Thomas, one who died in the same cause,
but as it might seem, disastrously without success.

For the liberty of the Church St Thomas died, that neither the king
nor any civil power should control, or govern that which Christ had
founded long ago upon the rock of Peter. In that same cause died
Blessed John Fisher, the last Catholic Bishop of Rochester, in the year
1535. He was almost the first of Henry's victims, and he was beheaded,
as was Blessed Thomas More, for refusing to recognise the royal
supremacy. It was treason to deny the king's right to the title of
Supreme Governor of the Church in England; and though it be still
treason to deny it, a host to-day will gladly stand beside St Thomas
Becket and Blessed John Fisher of Rochester.

This quarrel need never have arisen had not Henry, perjured and
adulterous, desired to make the Pope his accomplice in putting away
his lawful wife in order that he might marry Anne Boleyn. Because the
Pope refused to aid him in this crime Henry destroyed the Catholic
Church in England, and he and his successors founded the so-called
Church of England, with himself as first Supreme Governor.

Among those who had most strenuously opposed the claim for divorce was
Blessed John Fisher of Rochester, and with equally unflinching
firmness he opposed the doctrine of the royal supremacy. He asserted
that "The acceptance of such a principle would cause the clergy of
England to be hissed out of the society of God's Holy Catholic
Church." He was right, his prophecy has come true, and he nearly won.
His opposition so far prevailed that a saving clause was added to the
oath of convocation, "so far as the law of God allows." This Henry
refused. The King pers