"Even so "catholic" an intellectual as John Donne - who, it is surmised, kept a painting of the Virgin in his study - could preach in 1622 that by then, god had been "a hundred years" in his "repairing" of the Church, and had ordered "not a faint discontinuing of idolatry, but...utter destruction,: and not just mentally or spiritually but "the utter destruction of the very placce, not a seising of the riches of the place, but the place it self." What lay behind the reformers' uneasiness about the place of the Virgin was not an upsurge of entirely new views. As Beattie comments, they believed indignantly that "the ancient goddesses and their female devotees still whisper[ed] and beckon[ed] in the cult of Mary," and saw their attacks as a return to the principles of the early Church."