Excerpt from The Life of Mary Ward, Vol. 1: 1585-1645 See of St. Peter, that the religious traditions of the country should have been preserved in com munities of Englishmen and Englishwomen, even when it was necessary for this that the members of such communities should leave the land of their birth and become exiles under the ban of the law. What we owe to the intercession for England of so many of her own sons and daughters, whom her rulers considered and treated as convicts and traitors, will never be known until the last day. It is a ground for hope for the future, amid the many discouragements of the days in which we live, that Providence should in so many cases have given us back the beauties and glories of the religious life, not from foreign institutions or foun dations, but from the very communities of English birth which had kept up for us elsewhere those glories and beauties when they were proscribed at home. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.