Translator’s Preface
This is no dry controversial divinity, but a sort of illuminated copy of theses, the call of a knight’s trumpet challenging his antagonist to come forth. The Ten Reasons represent the ten theses, which Edmund Campion would fain have maintained in the Divinity School at Oxford against all comers, sharing, as he did to the full, the passion which his age felt and seems entirely to have lost, for such intellectual tournaments, as the natural means to bring out the truth and compose religious differences. The reader, then, must not be surprised to find in this little work quite as much of rhetoric as of logic; if he is unfriendly, he may say considerably more. Nor, if he knows anything of the controversial methods of the sixteenth century, will he be surprised at the vehemence of the language. Compared with his opponents, Luther for example, Edmund Campion is mere milk and honey. His book made a great stir: it is what a successful book must be, instinct with the spirit of the age in which and for which it was written.
The Protestant answer to the Ten Reasons was not given in the Divinity School at Oxford. It was the rack in the Tower, and the gibbet at Tyburn; and that answer was returned ere the year was out.