Standards of Persecution
SIR,—I am not sure whether Miss Macaulay is attributing to me the view that our age is more cruel than past ages. I did not say or imply this. I understood her to be comparing the persecution under which John Gerard suffered in Elizabethan England with the methods of torture and extermination practised in the world today. My comment was limited to this comparison, to which references to earlier periods of Russian history and to the Duke of iAlva do not seem to me to be relevant.
Miss Macaulay thinks the Elizabethans more brutal than our contem- poraries, and I think our own age can match both their brutality and their heroism. No doubt we Alinst be content to differ ; but I am grateful to you, Sir, for allowing me to draw attention to the current, persecution of the Church, to which there was—rather oddly, I think, having regard to the subject of the review—no reference in the paragraph under discus-
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