ish to protect those who are really heretical.]

[Sidenote: The Protestants rather lose than gain in the revolution which
followed on the fall of Wolsey.]

[Sidenote: Sir Thomas More's chancellorship.]

[Sidenote: The true test of sincerity in a Catholic.]

It might have been thought that the clear perception which was shown by
the House of Commons of the injustice with which the trials for heresy
were conducted, the disregard, shameless and flagrant, of the provisions
of the statutes under which the bishops were enabled to proceed, might
have led them to reconsider the equity of persecution in itself; or, at
least, to remove from the office of judges persons who had shown
themselves so signally unfit to exercise that office. It would have been
indecent, however, if not impossible, to transfer to a civil tribunal
the cognizance of opinion; and, on the other hand, there was as yet
among the upper classes of the laity no kind of disposition to be
lenient towards those who were really unorthodox. The desire so far was
only to check the reckless and random accusations of persons whose
offence was to have criticised, not the doctrine, but the moral conduct
of the church authorities. The Protestants, although from the date of
the meeting of the parliament and Wolsey's fall their ultimate triumph
was certain, gained nothing in its immediate consequences. They suffered
rather from the eagerness of the political reformers to clear themselves
from complicity with heterodoxy; and the bishops were even taunted with
the spiritual dissensions of the realm as an evidence of their indolence
and misconduct.[87] Language of this kind boded ill for the "Christian
Brethren"; and the choice of Wolsey's successor for the office of
chancellor soon confirmed their apprehensions: Wolsey had chastised them
with whips; Sir Thomas More would chastise them with scorpions; and the
philosopher of the _Utopia_, the friend of Erasmus, whose life was of
blameless beauty, whose genius was cultivated to the highest attainable
perfection, was to prove to the world that the spirit of persecution is
no peculiar attribute of the pedant, the bigot, or the fanatic, but may
coexist with the fairest graces of the human character. The lives of
remarkable men usually illustrate some emphatic truth. Sir Thomas More
may be said to have lived to illustrate the necessary tendencies of
Romanism in an honest mind convinced of its truth; to show that the test
of sincer