This exceeding boldness of the catholic party, and their success in conversions, which were, in fact, less remarkable for their number than for the condition of the persons, roused the primate himself to some apprehension. He preferred a formal complaint to the king in council against the resort of papists to the queen's chapel, and the insolence of some active zealots about the court.[131] Henrietta, who had courted his friendship, and probably relied on his connivance, if not support, seems never to have forgiven this unexpected attack. Laud gave another testimony of his unabated hostility to popery by republishing with additions his celebrated conference with the jesuit Fisher, a work reckoned the great monument of his learning and controversial acumen. This conference had taken place many years before, at the desire and in the presence of the Countess of Buckingham, the duke's mother. Those who are conversant with literary and ecclesiastical anecdote must be aware that nothing was more usual in the seventeenth century than such single combats under the eye of some fair lady whose religious faith was to depend upon the victory. The wily and polished jesuits had great advantages in these duels, which almost always, I believe, ended in their favour. After fatiguing their gentle arbitress for a time with the tedious fencing of text and citation, till she felt her own inability to award the palm, they came with their prejudices already engaged, to the necessity of an infallible judge; and as their adversaries of the English church had generally left themselves vulnerable on this side, there was little difficulty in obtaining success. Like Hector in the spoils of Patroclus, our clergy had assumed to themselves the celestial armour of authority; but found that, however it might intimidate the multitude, it fitted them too ill to repel the spear that had been wrought in the same furnace. A writer of this school in the age of Charles the First, and incomparably superior to any of the churchmen belonging to it, in the brightness and originality of his genius, Sir Thomas Brown, whose varied talents wanted nothing but the controlling supremacy of good sense to place him in the highest rank of our literature, will furnish a better instance of the prevailing bias than merely theological writings. He united a most acute and sceptical understanding with strong devotional sensibility, the temperament so conspicuous in Pascal and Johnson, and which has a peculiar tendency to seek the repose of implicit faith. "Where the Scripture is silent," says Brown in his _Religio Medici_, "the church is my text; where it speaks, 'tis but my comment." That jesuit must have been a disgrace to his order, who would have asked more than such a concession to secure a proselyte--the right of interpreting whatever was written, and of supplying whatever was not.