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.