d at once by freedom
and by faith.

The very ardour of the belief of the race in the ideal from Rome--a
Semitic ideal, transmuted by Roman genius and policy--swept the
Teutonic imagination beyond the ideal, seeking its sources where Rome
herself had sought them. This is the impulse which binds the whole
English Reformation, the whole movement of English religious thought
from Wyclif to Cromwell and Milton, to Wordsworth and Carlyle. It is
this common impulse of the race which Henry VIII relies upon, and
because he is in this their leader the English people forgets his
absolutism, his cruel anger, his bloody revenges.

The character of the English Reformation after the first tumultuous
conflicts, the fierce essays of royal theocracy and Jesuit reactionism,
set steadily towards Liberty of Conscience.

This spirit is glorified in Puritanism, the true heroic age of the
Reformation. It appears, for example, in Oliver Cromwell himself.
Cromwell is one of the disputed figures in our history, and every
English historian has drawn his own Cromwell. But to foreign
historians we may look for a judgment less partial, less personal. Dr.
Doellinger, for instance, to whom wide sympathy and long and profound
study of history have given the right, which can only be acquired by
vigil and fasting, to speak about the characters of the past--he who by
his position as Romanist is no pledged admirer, describes Cromwell as
the "prophet of Liberty of Conscience."[2] This is the deliberate
judgment of Doellinger. It was the judgment of the peasants of the
Vaudois two hundred and fifty years ago! Somewhat the same impression
was made by Cromwell upon Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Guizot.

Again in the seventeenth century, in the _Irene_ of Drummond, and in
the remarkable work of Barclay, the _Argenis_,[3] in its whole
conception of the religious {72} life, of monasticism, as in its
idealization of the character of the great Henri Quatre, you find the
same desire for a wider ideal, not less in religion than in politics.
We encounter it later in Shaftesbury and in Locke. It is the essential
thought of the work of Thomas Hobbes. It is supremely and beautifully
expressed in Algernon Sidney, the martyr of constitutional freedom and
of tolerance.

And what is the faith of Algernon Sidney? One who knew him well,
though opposed to his party, said of him, "He regards Christianity as a
kind of divine philosophy of the mind." Community of rel