which seemed to lean to Romanism. But
the grandeur and the permanence of the movement were in a return to the
faith of the primitive Church and a purer national morality, and to the
unrestricted study of the Bible, and the exaltation of preaching and
Christian instruction over forms and liturgies and antiphonal chants;
above all, the exaltation of reason and learning in the interpretation
of revealed truth, and the education of the people in all matters which
concern their temporal or religious interests, so that a true and rapid
progress was inaugurated in civilization itself, which has peculiarly
marked all Protestant countries having religious liberty. Underneath all
these apparently insignificant squabbles and dissensions there were two
things of immense historical importance: first, a spirit of intolerance
on the part of government and of church dignitaries,--the State allied
with the Church forcing uniformity with their decrees, and severely
punishing those who did not accept them,--in matters beyond all worldly
authority; and, secondly, a rising spirit of religious liberty,
determined to assert its glorious rights at any cost or hazard, and
especially defended by the most religious and earnest part of the
clergy, who were becoming Calvinistic in their creed, and were pushing
the ideas of the Reformation to their utmost logical sequence. This
spirit was suppressed during the reign of Elizabeth, out of general
respect and love for her as a Queen, and the external dangers to which
the realm was exposed from Spain and France, which diverted the national
mind. But it burst out fiercely in the next reigns, under James and
Charles, about the beginning of the seventeenth century. And this is the
last development of the Reformation in England to which I can
allude,--the great Puritan contest for liberty of worship, running, when
opposed unjustly and cruelly, into a contest for civil liberty; that is,
the right to change forms and institutions of civil government, even to
the dethronement of kings, when it was the expressed and declared will
of the people, in whom was vested the ultimate source of sovereignty.

But here I must be brief. I tread on familiar ground, made familiar by
all our literature, especially by the most brilliant writer of modern
times, though not the greatest philosopher: I mean that great artist
and word-painter Macaulay, whose chief excellence is in making clear
and interesting and vivid, by a world o