WHILST Ireland was thus pitifully ruined by the quarrels of the chiefs both between themselves and with the royal crown, and the blood of ecclesiastics was spilled by the English, the chiefs, either worn out by their factions and now exhausted of their resources, or hostages, for many of them being in the hands of the English, seemed little likely to take up arms in defence of the Catholic religion. Hereupon a persecution broke out against the faith of Christ, and the tyrant, Queen Elizabeth, ordered that all should entirely abandon the Catholic faith, forsake the priests, accept the teachings and doctrines of heretical ministers, embrace the Queen's sect, and on holydays attend the services in the churches. And to this were they compelled by fear, terror, punishment and violence. This terrible attack on the Catholic faith was now the more severe and dangerous because just at this time more than ever since the reception of the faith, were Irishmen ignorant of theology, philosophy, and jurisprudence, so that they were unprepared for controversy and for preserving the people in the true religion of Christ Jesus, because through their factions, the confusion of affairs, and the barbarous fury of the heretics, their schools were gone to ruin and scarcely was there anyone able to teach publicly the higher studies. The holy communities of friars were for the most part scattered and banished, and in many places priests could not easily be found to baptise infants; in many places the younger folk knew only so much of the faith as they had learned from their mothers and nurses, and some, indeed, were so ignorant of the evidences of the faith that they knew not how to prove or explain anything beyond that they themselves firmly believed whatever the Roman Catholic Church believed; that with it was the true doctrine of the Catholic faith; and that they had very little trust in the doctrines of the English whom they believed to be ill-disposed to the faith. The royalist towns suffered more through this want of instruction and ignorance