of the Church and of the Crown
became identified with the restoration of legal government and with the
overthrow of a rule of brute force. And for such a restoration the vast
majority of the nation were longing more and more. The old enmities of
party and sect were forgotten in the common enmity of every party and
every sect to the tyranny of the sword. A new national unity was
revealing itself, as one jarring element after another came in to swell
the mass of the national opposition to the system of the Protectorate.
The moderate Royalist joined hands with the Cavalier, the steady
Presbyterian came to join the moderate Royalist, and their ranks were
swelled at last by the very founders of the Commonwealth. Nothing marked
more vividly the strength of the reaction against the Protector's system
than the union in a common enmity of Vane and Haselrig with the
partizans of the Stuart pretender.

[Sidenote: The Scientific Movement.]

It was the steady rise of this tide of opposition in which Cromwell saw
the doom of his cause. That it could permanently be upheld by the sword
he knew to be impossible. What he had hoped for was the gradual winning
of England to a sense of its worth. But every day the current of opinion
ran more strongly against it. The army stood alone in its purpose.
Papist and sceptic, mystic and ceremonialist, latitudinarian and
Presbyterian, all were hostile. The very pressure of Cromwell's system
gave birth to new forms of spiritual and intellectual revolt. Science,
rationalism, secularism, sprang for the first time into vivid life in
their protest against the forced concentration of human thought on the
single topic of religion, the effort to prison religion itself in a
system of dogma, and to narrow humanity with all its varied interests
within the sphere of the merely spiritual. Nothing is more significant,
though to Cromwell nothing would have been more unintelligible, than the
simple story which tells us how from the vexed problems, political and
religious, of the times, men turned to the peaceful study of the natural
world about them. Bacon had already called men with a trumpet-voice to
such studies; but in England at least Bacon stood before his age. The
beginnings of physical science were more slow and timid there than in
any country of Europe. Only two discoveries of any real value came from
English research before the Restoration: the first, Gilbert's discovery
of terrestrial magnetism in the