biography is one perpetual disclosure, led him first to seek prominence and next to secure notoriety. It is not surprising that he became a conspicuous expounder of the "new doctrines," cast off his religious obedience and his monk's frock, violated his solemn vows and married, posed as a martyr and fled to the Continent. We might suppose that as Henry VIII. was himself the Joshua leading his people into the Promised Land of liberty and plenty, Bale could have stayed at home and claimed his share in the general enfranchisement from the Counsels and in the portioning of monastic spoils. But for once he showed his wisdom in keeping the salt sea and several dykes between himself and the founder of the new faith. It was impossible to predict from day to day upon whom might fall the shadow of royal displeasure, and under the Tudors such shadows had a trick of materializing into ponderous substance. The mixture of the old and new creeds required a nicety in theological cooks as exquisite as the blending of ingredients in a Spanish omelette, where the presence of garlic is to be detected only by the perception that its absence would leave the whole compound insipid.

Holland and Flanders gave Bale hospitality in his first exile, and in Amsterdam his religious belief assumed a certain Dutch solidity conspicuously lacking in the Protestantism of England. In fact, the King kept consciences and dogmas at home in such continual agitation that they had no time to cool into consistency. Henry's death came as a mercy of Providence to Protestants and Catholics alike. When Bale learned for a certainty that by the fall of the Supreme Head of his church in England his own more precious head would be safe on his shoulders, he gladly returned to the fair land he had reluctantly abandoned. His reputation for zeal and learning established him so favorably at the court of the boy King that he was numbered among the royal tutors. But his Protestantism, commendable for its ferocity, was objectionable for its rigor and proved inconvenient to the ministers, who wished to manipulate in their own interest the feeble King and his distracted realm. It seemed advisable to move the intractable extremist farther away under the honorable pretext of moving him higher up.

At the time of this unwelcome promotion Bale was enjoying the rich benefice of Bishopstoke, in the most inviting region of fertile Hampshire, a few miles from Southampton, on the way to London. Truly did it appear to John that the Lord had led him into green pastures and that nothing was wanting to him. Many a time, no doubt, he thanked a benign Providence that in bringing away from the Low Countries their pure faith and seemly manners, he had left behind forever their narrow streets, sandy dunes, murky fogs and uncouth tongues. With his beloved wife and family, treasured books and prolific pen, he felt that his lines had fallen in pleasant places and suffered the fires of controversy to burn low. So was it with him when, lo, a voice came calling him to do battle against the Scarlet Abomination. John's vocation came and took him by the throat, and, alas, it was a vocation to Ireland. Yea, to wrestle with the grewsome dragon of Popery, and if so it might be, slay it in its most sheltered lair. There is no reason to doubt honest John's assurance that it was with reluctance he accepted the See of Ossory, which the King and Council then at Southampton had thrust upon him as a reward. Around the episcopal dignity still shone in England something of feudal splendor, but Bale shrewdly surmised that in the semi-barbarous isle across the channel if honors were easy, living was hard.

The veteran captain received his unwelcome call to the new apostolate on the feast of Our Lady's Assumption, 1552, he being then in his fifty-eighth year. The King parted with him affectionately; the royal Ministers instructed him in the political bearings of his mission, furnishing him with discouraging hints as to the civil and religious state of the land he was going to evangelize. Henry's reformed doctrines had never been clearly understood in Ireland; not indeed from lack of energy in the royal methods of instruction, but rather because the new catechism was chiefly contained in acts of Parliament, which formed such problems in cancellation that it was impossible to tell in the solution which factor remained intact. The catechists whose teaching bore the force of unanswerable logic were the English troops. Plundered churches, ruined monasteries, slaughtered herds and burning cabins formed a dogmatic system at once obvious and irrefutable. Brown in Dublin and Goodacre in Armagh were working hard in favor of the new order. It was hoped that with the aid of Bale at Ossory they would be able to rid Ireland forever of Popery and its attendant superstitions.

With no comprehension of the difficulties before him and without either wisdom to grasp or tact to avoid them, Bale, like many of his countrymen before and since, sailed for a land which he held in profound contempt, but which reserved a lesson for his instruction. Upon his arrival he found, to his horror, that the "communion service" was still performed in Waterford Cathedral "in the old idolatrous manner," and that the people, to use his own forcible phrases, "wawled over their dead with prodigious howlings and putterings, as though souls had not been quieted in Christ!" He was everywhere, he says, scandalized at their "heathenish behayviours!" He left Waterford with the melancholy conviction that the incumbent of that see, though professing the pure interpretation of the Word, was "no true Bishop of Christ," a title to which, judging from his memoirs, he alone among the British hierarchy could pretend. He further notes his suspicion that his host, the Mayor of the city, "was no true subject of King Edward." Altogether the state of affairs in Waterford appalled the conscientious stranger and gave him his first premonition of coming peril.

From this town, which he left under the ban of heaven, the Bishop-elect proceeded to Dublin, where his consecration was to take place. The Chancellor, Sir Thomas Cusack, welcomed him with every mark of honor, and his old friend Goodacre, the new Archbishop of Armagh, cheered his heart by "comfortable speech." The feast of Our Lady's Purification had been set as the day for the ceremony. The very date was an irritation; it seemed a plain concession to Popish prejudice. Besides, Brown, the consecrating prelate, with the Bishops of Down and Kildare as assistants, proposed to conduct the function according to the ancient, that is, the Roman ritual. Bale felt that the time had come for him to speak out. He swore that he would turn back at the altar steps unless the pure and simple forms of the new Church were maintained in all their severity. As it was evident that the consecration of a Bishop could not be carried on without a Bishop to be consecrated, his companions of necessity yielded. The function was performed with all the solemnity consistent with a general ignorance of the new ritual on the part of all engaged in it. When the moment of Communion came, Bale perceived with dismay a host "in the form of a Roman wafer." He stopped the ceremony at once and announced in a voice of thunder that not another step would he take until the idolatrous symbol was removed and common table bread substituted. All, he says, "were struck with consternation at his terrific aspect and resounding voice," and the rite was hastily concluded.

He gloried in this first great triumph without foreseeing that it was to be his last. Archbishop Brown, though himself a stentorian denouncer of Popery, was disgusted with his rough guest. Archbishop Goodacre, though Bale's best and wisest friend, was grieved by the violence of his language. But John went on his way rejoicing. Of Archbishop Brown he formed a most unflattering estimate, which later experience rendered still more unfavorable. Of his right reverend host he finally bequeathed this silhouette, in which it must be remembered the charcoal was supplied by Brown's political enemies: "I thought nothing less at that time than to pour out the precious pearls of the Gospel afore so brockish a swine he was. And as touching learning, whereof he much boasted in his cups, I know none in which he is exercised save that of vice." Bale was not so obtuse as to be blind to the fact that his Dublin entertainers were more anxious to see him set out for his see than he was to take possession of it. Accordingly, with his wife and family he journeyed by easy stages to Kilkenny.

To his great mortification he found but a cold reception in the city of Strongbow, whither his fiery fame had preceded him. The ancient Cathedral of St. Canice or St. Kenny's, a magnificent monument of the faith of the Middle Ages, was the pride of clergy and people. Bale observed with anger the universal reluctance to see this venerable edifice employed for any other form of worship than that by which it had been hallowed for centuries. He declaimed against such perversity; the sacred walls resounded with vituperations of people and clergy. Lest what was thundered in English might be lost, he was careful to give the clerics the benefit of his opinion in Latin, and for the entire security of the people caused each compliment to be finally translated into Irish. He was thus satisfied that by means of the three languages all had come to know precisely what he thought of them. On his own testimony he bestirred himself in season and out of season to place before them the idolatry of their worship, the stupidity of their minds, the brutality of their manners, the depravity of their morals and the certainty of their eternal perdition.

He then began with delightful simplicity to conjecture that it was Satan only who enkindled in these misguided people an unaccountable and preternatural hatred of him, their lawful Bishop and appointed instructor. Through the machinations of the evil spirit he became, he honestly avows, an object of general abhorrence. And yet even after this date his memoirs exhibit amusing fluctuations of dismay and self-conplacency. Sometimes he shuddered to think that he was equally dreaded and despised; at other times he transcribed proofs of the love and esteem of his people. Sometimes he pronounced their abominations ineradicable, and again he thanked God that he was beginning to reap an abundant harvest of souls.

But in the month of July came tidings of dire import for the godly Bishop of Ossory. Edward was dead and Mary Tudor was Queen of England. Lord Mountgarret and the chief officials of Kilkenny hastened to the Cathedral and insisted on the celebration of a Mass according to the Roman rite. The clergy complied, under the very eyes of the fuming and helpless Anglican Bishop. A fleeting ray of hope pierced the gloom during Lady Jane Gray's brief usurpation, but that light went out and evil days fell upon the righteous ones of the Lord.

On the 20th of August, to the Bishop's unspeakable anguish, Kilkenny celebrated Queen Mary's accession. There were, he records with disgust, such rejoicings as had never before been witnessed by the eye of man. "They proclaimed her with the greatest solemnity that could be devised of processions, musters and disguisings; what ado I had that day about wearing the cope, crosier and mitre it were too much to write." The staunch old reformer stoutly declared that, let who would be King, Queen or Emperor, he would take no part in Popish mummeries nor would a Popish trapping be seen on his orthodox back. "But," he narrates, "they did find a way to carry out their papistical fantasies, for in the meantime had the other prelates got two disguised priests, one to bear the mitre before me and another the crosier, making thereby three pageants instead of one."

But this was not all. It came to his ears that his enemies were "bruiting a humor" that he would soon retract in his pulpit the antiPopery sermons no longer acceptable to the ruling powers and begin to tread in the paths of the ancient observance. This was indeed a cruel slander. On Thursday, August 24, feast of St. Bartholomew, he mounted the pulpit with honorable hardihood and on the text "I am not ashamed of the Gospel" he held forth in his last Irish sermon. It was long; it was both exhausting and exhaustive. It covered the whole question between Rome and England and reviewed his whole episcopate of six months. It anathematized clergy and people and consigned Pope and Cardinals to endless detention in that secure abode whose existence Bale's modern followers deny. This sermon did not produce the humiliation and dismay he had expected; rather was there such an ebullition of popular indignation that he took counsel of discretion and hurried away to his country seat at Holiness Court on the following day.

"As soon as the townspeople knew I had gone to the country," he relates, "they restored in my (?) Cathedral the whole heap of the superstitions of the Bishop of Rome. They rang all the bells in that Cathedral, in the minster, and in the parish churches. They flung up their caps to the battlements of the great temple with smilings and laughings most dissolutely, the justice himself being therewith offended. They brought forth their copes, candlesticks, holy water stocks, crosses and censers; they mustered forth in general processions most gorgeously all the town over with Sancta Maria, Ora pro nobis, and the rest of the Latin litanies. They chattered it, they chaunted it with great noise and devotion. They banqueted all the day after my going, because they were delivered from the grace of God into a warm sun!"

Hitherto the stirring drama of Master John Bale's vocation to Ireland had been a farce rather than a comedy. Now it became a real tragedy. One of the "Romish fantasies" against which he set his face was the observance of Our Lady's festival days. The feast of her Nativity, September 8, was especially dear to the people. Its