"He was quiet for a little while, and then he said slowly, 'I see what you mean! We will go to Miles and Cicely as soon as I can get my affairs settled.'"
"'Father will do that for you,' I said. 'Let us go away with baby as soon as we can get packed up.' Do you think I was right, Cicely? You see I had to think of father, too, for it would involve him in dreadful trouble if Walter was arrested; and if they had taken him I would have gone too, for we have been so happy the last year that I could not be parted from him now."
"How glad I am to hear this," breathed Lady Paton; but she could not help wondering whether trouble might not come to them through this uncompromising brother-in-law.
Mistress Marvin divined something of what was in her sister's mind, for she said, "Before we left Greenwich, Walter promised father that he would be guided entirely by what Miles said; and if he thought it would be his duty now to read the Bible without any disputation, he would give that up for baby's sake. Will you tell Miles this?"
"Yes, dear sister; and as he has proved in his own case that the Word of God is in itself sufficient to lead a man to the truth, and out of the errors of Rome, I think that ought to be sufficient."
Did this savour of cowardice? Many of those who went boldly to the stake left wife and children. Shall we dare to say that they might have chosen another and a more easy way? We do not know, we cannot judge what the time demanded, we only know by record that this infamous law brought many worthy men and women to the fires of Smithfield; and others, seeing their fortitude, went to the study of God's Word, and at length followed them through the fiery chrism. And at this awful cost was England's civil and religious liberty won back from Pope and King, who would have bound her in the fetters of ignorance and superstition for all time.
Here I must bring my story to a close. During the remaining years of Henry's life this "Act of Six Articles" claimed thousands of victims. During the reign of his daughter, Queen Mary, it claimed even more perhaps, but never again was the reading of God's Word prohibited in England, and though Cromwell made the Parliament of his time a tool for oppression, still the preservation of it was good. For when the time came that liberty was regained, the channel through which its life-giving stream should flow was ready to hand, and with an open Bible and a free Parliament, neither Tudor nor Stuart could long hold England in bondage.
THE END.