memories of those for whom we have been praying today, and who were in a true sense the builders of St. Gregory's-of St. Gregory's as we see it to-day.

Let us go back to the beginnings. Three hundred years ago that is, in 1605-here in England the Elizabethan form of religion was fully and legally established as one consequence of that Queen's long reign. Sixteen hundred and five, as all will remember, was the year of the Gunpowder Plot-an event, whatever its origin in design and detail, which tended to make the lot of the poor persecuted Catholic, if possible, even more unbearable than it was before. In that year some Benedictines of English nationality, who had found in Spain that liberty to serve God as monks which was denied to them in England, determined, with the leave of their foreign superiors, to establish a house of their Order in which these English men and English monks might work in a more special way for their own country than was possible in a foreign monastery. There was, it must be allowed, reason in their yearnings. England had been -nay, was still, pre-eminently the Benedictine vineyard -the Benedictine Apostolate. Their ancestor, St. Augustine, sent by the Benedictine Gregory, had established his peculiarly Roman Order in the Primatial See of Canterbury, and everywhere throughout the length and breadth of the land, when, but seventy years before this time, the overthrow of religion had come, their monasteries were existing, and for centuries had been spreading blessings abroad. Westminster, St. Albans, Glastonbury, Evesham, Bury and Tewkesbury, with the rest of those great and solemn abbeys as they were called, with Canterbury and Durham, Winchester and Coventry, Ely and Bath, and the other great Cathedral priories, were

ample witnesses of Benedictine activity in the past and of the identification of the Order with the Catholic Church in England. All these were, indeed, lost for ever, but with the courage their forefathers in religion had ever displayed in the earlier days of the conversion and civilisation of Europe, there was no thought of repining, no time or place for useless regrets. What Cardinal Newman has said of the spirit of the early sons of St. Benedict, was true of them. "Down in the dust lay the labours and civilisation of centuries-churches, colleges, cloisters, libraries—and nothing was left to them but to begin all over again; but this they did without grudging, so promptly, cheerfully and tranquilly, as if it were by some law of Nature that the Restoration came, and they were like the flowers and shrubs and fruit trees which they reared, and which, when ill-treated, do not take vengeance or remember evil, but give forth fresh branches, leaves or blossoms, perhaps in greater profusion, or with richer quality for the very reason that the old were broken off."

In this spirit our monastery of St. Gregory was begun. As with all beginnings, there has been something perhaps of obscurity and some elements of doubt about it, but out of all, these facts appear to be clear and certain. Just three centuries ago, when St. Gregory's was in the making, across the seas at Douay, its very foundations were in God's loving kindness sanctified and, I may say, laved in the life-blood of our Benedictine martyrs. First and foremost in the band of those builders of St. Gregory's, who were called upon to give the supreme testimony of their faith and who washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb, stands, of course, the Venerable John Roberts. It was to him, apparently, that the idea

of establishing the English monks at Douay first came. Exiled for his priesthood from England, he and Father Augustine Bradshaw or White, obtained permission to open a small house in the Low Countries for the English Fathers of the Spanish Congregation. It is difficult, and, indeed, useless and idle, to try to divide the honours between these two monks. We Gregorians ever desire to look upon both as jointly our founders; but according to one account at least, it was the future martyr who was the first Superior or Prior of St. Gregory's, and the name of the Venerable John Roberts is carved on yonder shield as the first of Gregorian builders. Of him and of Father Bradshaw we are proud, and, as we think, justly proud; of the Venerable John Roberts, inasmuch as when he went forth from the first lowly walls that sheltered the English monks at Douay, to labour again in the vineyard of souls in England, he went, as indeed all his brethren in those days went, with his life in his hands. I have no need to tell his story. He was arrested, tried for his priesthood, condemned to death, and on 10th December 1610 he died as a hero and a martyr on the Tyburn gallows, glorying, as he said, in being “a priest and a monk of the Holy Order of St. Benedict, as were also St. Augustine, St. Lawrence, St. Paulinus and St. Mellitus. As those monks converted our country from unbelief, so," said he to his judge, “I have done what little I could to liberate it from heresy; I leave it to you, Mr. Recorder, and the rest of you, to judge whether this is high treason." The Venerable John Roberts, then, is our first glory. He may be regarded as the main and principal cause of the existence of St. Gregory's, and until the catastrophe of the French Revolution his quartered remains, snatched from an un

hallowed grave, rested beneath our monastic altar at Douay.

Before John Roberts, however, in point of time, to offer the supreme witness of the faith in martyrdom, was another Gregorian, Father George Gervase, who must be commemorated to-day. As a secular priest, who had worked on the Apostolic Mission, Father Gervase received the Benedictine habit at Douay in 1606, the first year after its foundation. There was at this time an urgent call for priests, and so, returning to England, Father George Gervase suffered death for his faith on 11th April 1608. A third of this noble band of martyrs for religion was Father Maurus Scott. Although a professed monk of the Spanish Congregation, he was nevertheless both affiliated to the new house at Douay, and lived in it for a time as a conventual. He was in prison with the Venerable John Roberts, and was one of those who were charged with kissing the martyr's feet, the night before he suffered. It was on Whitsun Eve, 30th May 1612, that Father Scott was also himself dragged on a hurdle through the streets of London to Tyburn, and there received his martyr's crown.

But even these three heroic sons of St. Gregory's, destined by Providence to suffer death for their faith in the first decade of its existence, were but the first of our Gregorian martyrs. Not to mention the Venerable Mark Barkworth and the Venerable Thomas Tunstall, who, though not connected directly with Douay, were brethren of our other martyrs in the Spanish Congregation, and whose portraits, along with Roberts, Gervase and Scott, adorn the Charter of Abbot Caverel-not to mention these as Gregorians, we have others who in their time witnessed to the faith by their blood. Let us take them

in order first there is Father Ambrose Barlow, the anniversary of whose death on the scaffold, as a martyr for religion and conscience, by an unforeseen grace of Providence we to-day commemorate. He was professed at Douay in 1616, and laid down his life for the faith on 20th September 1641. Secondly, there is Father Philip Powel (or Morgan or Prosser), who took the habit at St. Gregory's in 1619, and received the martyr's crown on 30th June 1646; and lastly, in this category, must be named the gentle, humble Brother Thomas Pickering, our lay-brother martyr, whose life was sworn away by the infamous Titus Oates.

Even to this long roll of heroic sons of St. Gregory's we must claim to add two others. One is Father William Ildephonsus Hesketh, who was professed at Douay in 1615, who was worried to death by the Parliamentarian troops in Yorkshire, and expired on the roadside on 26th July 1644; the other is the well-known Father Arthur Francis Bell, the Franciscan friar, who for two years before going on the mission, studied his theology under our fathers at St. Gregory's. Father Bell was executed at Tyburn for being a priest, on 11th December 1643.

Of these first beginnings-these first-fruits-these makers of St. Gregory's, we who live in happier times are as justly proud as were our forefathers in religion, who at the time of their martyrdom were engaged in laying the first foundations of St. Gregory's, and who looked on the blood of their martyred brethren as their best surety of success, as the best pledge that the seed they planted would grow to maturity and bring forth much fruit in the service of God. For us, too, it is surely no empty grace to count so many martyrs among our