the coach and not the pilgrims; but at night, under a windy sky, if
you wander up the hill and linger about the Cathedral in the shadow of
the great Keep while the moon reels steeply up the heavens, you may
in early Spring at any rate return for a little to that age which
built such things as these, so that they have outlasted everything
that has followed them and put it under their feet. And yet their
heart was set upon no such victory, but in the heavens. It was the
great and self-forgetting act of an obscure baker, but a saint of
God, that built the mighty half abandoned church we see at Rochester,
nor was he for sure altogether forgotten when all England went by to
kneel and to pray beside Becket's shrine at Canterbury, raised there
in a heavenly cause, which must prevail in the end, though neither
Rochester nor Canterbury to-day might seem to bear out any such
certainty.

The modern pilgrim, knowing what he knows, will be fain to remember at
Rochester, on his way to St Thomas, one who died in the same cause,
but as it might seem, disastrously without success.

For the liberty of the Church St Thomas died, that neither the king
nor any civil power should control, or govern that which Christ had
founded long ago upon the rock of Peter. In that same cause died
Blessed John Fisher, the last Catholic Bishop of Rochester, in the year
1535. He was almost the first of Henry's victims, and he was beheaded,
as was Blessed Thomas More, for refusing to recognise the royal
supremacy. It was treason to deny the king's right to the title of
Supreme Governor of the Church in England; and though it be still
treason to deny it, a host to-day will gladly stand beside St Thomas
Becket and Blessed John Fisher of Rochester.