In conclusion, if, in this picture of the Catholic glories of the sixteenth century, it were necessary also to find place for men of the sword and men of law, are there many figures more martial than that of Bayard, the chevalier "without fear and without reproach," or those of the admirable Knights-Hospitallers of Malta, who, in 1585, under the orders of their grand-master, La Valette, stood as a living rampart, against which all the forces of Islamism dashed and broke themselves, and who did for Christian Europe in the sixteenth century what, a century later, the immortal Sobieski had to do with his brave Polanders?
As to men of law, Catholic France has the right to name with pride the grand-chancellor Hôpital; and Protestant England has not the right to claim Thomas More. It was this courageous magistrate who refused to subscribe to the divorce of Henry VIII., and who, when entreated by his wife not to expose himself to capital punishment by opposing the king's wishes, replied in these beautiful words: "What! Would you have me compromise my eternity for the sake of twenty years which yet perhaps remain for me to live?" He died upon the scaffold, the 6th of July, 1535, with the constancy of a martyr; worthy precursor of that long and illustrious generation of witnesses to the faith, who, during all the second half of the sixteenth century, watered with purest of blood the soil of England, and did more honor, it seems to me, to the ancient renown of "The Isle of Saints" than a Cranmer, the courtly and apostate archbishop, or an Essex, one of the numerous lovers of that princess who foully stained with mire and blood the throne upon which she sat, and that state church of which she made a mere vassal of that throne.
After having rectified and completed, so far as it has been given me to do, this painting, so original and vigorous, but at the same time so manifestly devoted to a preconceived and systematized idea, I arrive at a conclusion which is applicable not to the sixteenth century only, but to all the epochs of history.
It is that, after the likeness of man himself, each phase of the life of humanity bears in it two souls, and, as it were, two humanities. These are the twins that struggled together in the womb of Rebecca, and on the occasion of which the Lord responded to the troubled mother: "Two nations are in thy womb, and two peoples shall be divided out of thy womb, and one people shall overcome the other." (Gen. xxv. 23.)