ty.
It was probably from a nervous fear of doing wrong that, at this great
conjuncture, he did nothing: but he should have known that, situated as
he was, to do nothing was to do wrong. A man who is too scrupulous to
take on himself a grave responsibility at an important crisis ought to
be too scrupulous to accept the place of first minister of the Church
and first peer of the realm.

It is not strange, however, that Sancroft's mind should have been ill at
case; for he could hardly be blind to the obvious truth that the scheme
which he had recommended to his friends was utterly inconsistent with
all that he and his brethren had been teaching during many years. That
the King had a divine and indefeasible right to the regal power, and
that the regal power, even when most grossly abused, could not without
sin, be resisted, was the doctrine in which the Anglican Church had long
gloried. Did this doctrine then really mean only that the King had a
divine and indefeasible right to have his effigy and name cut on a seal
which was to be daily employed in despite of him for the purpose of
commissioning his enemies to levy war on him, and of sending his friends
to the gallows for obeying him? Did the whole duty of a good subject
consist in using the word King? If so, Fairfax at Naseby and Bradshaw in
the High Court of justice had performed all the duty of good subjects.
For Charles had been designated by the generals who commanded against
him, and even by the judges who condemned him, as King. Nothing in the
conduct of the Long Parliament had been more severely blamed by the
Church than the ingenious device of using the name of Charles against
himself. Every one of her ministers had been required to sign a
declaration condemning as traitorous the fiction by which the authority
of the sovereign had been separated from his person. [647] Yet this
traitorous fiction was now considered by the Primate and by many of his
suffragans as the only basis on which they could, in strict conformity
with Christian principles, erect a government.

The distinction which Sancroft had borrowed from the Roundheads of
the preceding generation subverted from the foundation that system of
politics which the Church and the Universities pretended to have learned
from Saint Paul. The Holy Spirit, it had been a thousand times repeated,
had commanded the Romans to be subject to Nero. The meaning of the
precept now appeared to be only that the Romans were to