in, and stood up; her eyes were blinded with
tears; but they were not all for grief.

Then Mistress Margaret came in from the inner room, and led the girl out;
and the mother came in once more to her son for the ten minutes before he
was to leave her.

CHAPTER XII

A STRIFE OF TONGUES

Anthony now settled down rather drearily to the study of religious
controversy. The continual contrasts that seemed forced upon him by the
rival systems of England and Rome (so far as England might be said to
have a coherent system at this time), all tended to show him that there
were these two sharply-divided schemes, each claiming to represent
Christ's Institution, and each exclusive of the other. Was it of Christ's
institution that His Church should be a department of the National Life;
and that the civil prince should be its final arbiter and ruler, however
little he might interfere in its ordinary administration? This was
Elizabeth's idea. Or was the Church, as Mr. Buxton had explained it, a
huge unnational Society, dependent, it must of course be, to some extent
on local circumstances, but essentially unrestricted by limit of
nationality or of racial tendencies? This was the claim of Rome. Of
course an immense number of other arguments circled round this--in fact,
most of the arguments that are familiar to controversialists at the
present day; but the centre of all, to Anthony's mind, as indeed it was
to the mind of the civil and religious authorities of the time, was the
question of supremacy--Elizabeth or Gregory?

He read a certain number of books; and it will be remembered that he had
followed, with a good deal of intelligence, Campion's arguments. Anthony
was no theologian, and therefore missed perhaps the deep, subtle
arguments; but he had a normal mind, and was able to appreciate and
remember some salient points.

For example, he was impressed greatly by the negative character of
Protestantism in such books as Nicholl's "Pilgrimage." In this work a man
was held up as a type to be imitated whose whole religion to all
appearances consisted of holding the Pope to be Antichrist, and his
Church the synagogue of Satan, of disliking the doctrines of merit and of
justification by works, of denying the Real Presence, and of holding
nothing but what could be proved to his own satisfaction by the
Scriptures.

Then he read as much as he could of the great Jewell contro