MARTYRS COMMEMORATED.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 170, 20 July 1935, Page 2 (Supplement)

MARTYRS COMMEMORATED.

RESISTANCE TO DESPOTISM.

The following is an extract from a review of several books on John of Rochester and Sir Thomas More by Dr. Ernest Barker in a recent number of the London "Observer."

The Catholic world has been commemorating lately, with a deep justice, two martyrs (or, as the word means in its etymological origin, "witnesses"), who testified by their death to the sovereignty of a higher obligation which transcends the political obligation of the citizen to his State. Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More—now canonised as St. John of Rochester and St. Thomas More—refused to acknowledge the totalitarian State, incarnate in Henry VIII., as the last and ultimate authority; and they paid, without wavering, the price of their refusal.

Immediately, and in the first instance, they died for ttw Catholic Church, as they conceived it, believing it to be challenged in its essentials by the proclamation of Royal Headship over the Church in England. That is why they are commemorated to-day, with a particular loyalty, by the members of the Catholic "Church. But the ultimate principle for which they died is a principle which transcends any particular Church, and is common to all Christian Churches.

English Non-conformity, in its long and fine tradition of resistance to any assertion of State supremacy in matters of conscience, has testified to that principle equally with Roman Catholicism. As Professor Chamber's justly says, "the resistance to despotism which More began was bound to be carried on, from opposite sides both by Catholic and by Puritan." . We may go even further. We may say that' the ultimate principle for which Fisher and More both died transcends all Churches, and is the common inheritance of the universal moral conscience of man in all places and ages. What they said to Henry VIII. is what Sophocles had imagined Antigone saying to' Croon mni'v cent" l 'i'" a before the Christian revelation: ( 'I did not think thy decrees to be so strong that thou, a mortal, shonldst outrun the unwritten and unfailing ordinances of heaven.