of the East, or to the analogous tyranny which in the Far West
is mocked with the name of freedom. Here, as elsewhere, the progress of
the constitution, which it was the work of the Catholic Ages to build
up, on the principles common to all the nations of the Teutonic stock,
was interrupted by the attraction which the growth of absolutism abroad
excited, and by the Reformation's transferring the ecclesiastical power
to the Crown. The Stuarts justified their abuse of power by the same
precepts and the same examples by which the Puritans justified their
resistance to it. The liberty aimed at by the Levellers was as remote
from that which the Middle Ages had handed down, as the power of the
Stuarts from the mediaeval monarchy. The Revolution of 1688 destroyed one
without favouring the other. Unlike the rebellion against Charles I.,
that which overthrew his son did not fall into a contrary extreme. It
was a restoration in some sort of the principles of government, which
had been alternately assailed by absolute monarchy and by a fanatical
democracy. But, as it was directed against the abuse of kingly and
ecclesiastical authority, neither the Crown nor the established Church
recovered their ancient position; and a jealousy of both has ever since
subsisted. There can be no question but that the remnants of the old
system of polity--the utter disappearance of which keeps the rest of
Christendom in a state of continual futile revolution--exist more
copiously in this country than in any other. Instead of the revolutions
and the religious wars by which, in other Protestant countries,
Catholics have obtained toleration, they have obtained it in England by
the force of the very principles of the constitution. "I should think
myself inconsistent," says the chief expounder of our political system,
"in not applying my ideas of civil liberty to religious." And speaking
of the relaxation of the penal laws, he says: "To the great liberality
and enlarged sentiments of those who are the furthest in the world from
you in religious tenets, and the furthest from acting with the party
which, it is thought, the greater part of the Roman Catholics are
disposed to espouse, it is that you owe the whole, or very nearly the
whole, of what has been done both here and in Ireland."[321] The danger
which menaces the continuance of our constitution proceeds simply from
the oblivion of those Christian ideas by which it was originally
inspired. It should se