“Now concerning the professors of our faith… We need not to range far for examples of good life. For God be thanked, even our adversaries themselves are so persuaded of our good behavior that if a man in company be modest and grave in countenance, if he used no swearing, foul or unseemly speech, if he refuses to join in lewd company and dishonest actions, he is straight suspected for a Papist: and on the other side, if there be any ruffianly, querulous, foul-spoken or lewdly conditioned, he is never mistrusted as a Papist but taken for a very sound Protestant. Let also the records of assizes [trial sessions]and sessions be searched and let it be but showed among so many hundred Protestants as are yearly executed for felonies, murders, rapes, extortions, forgeries, and such like crimes, how few recusants [those who refused to attend Protestant services] have been ever in so many years attached justly with such like offences. But let the neighbors of Catholic and Protestant gentlemen be witnesses who live best and are readiest to all good deeds and works of charity. Let the jailers and keepers of prisons report what difference they find in the lives of Catholic and Protestant prisoners. And if all these say, as the truth is, that we go beyond the other in Christian duty, then may we by their own testimonies, avouch the tree of our religion to be good, seeing that, as Christ saith, ‘an evil tree cannot bring forth good fruit.’”
Saint Robert Southwell (c. 1561 – 21 February 1595) was hanged at Tyburn. In 1970, he was canonized by Pope Paul VI as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.