n with the
brilliant policy abroad, a portion of the ancient freedom. In Scotland,
the other home of pure Calvinism, where intolerance and religious
tyranny reached a pitch equalled only among the Puritans in America, the
perpetual troubles hindered the settlement of a fixed political system,
and the restoration of order after the union with England stripped the
Presbyterian system of its exclusive supremacy, and opened the way for
tolerance and freedom.

Although the political spirit of Anglicanism was as despotic as that of
every other Protestant system, circumstances prevented its full
development. The Catholic Church had bestowed on the English the great
elements of their political prosperity,--the charter of their liberties,
the fusion of the races, and the abolition of villeinage,--that is,
personal and general freedom, and national unity. Hence the people were
so thoroughly impregnated with Catholicism that the Reformation was
imposed on them by foreign troops in spite of an armed resistance; and
the imported manufacture of Geneva remained so strange and foreign to
them, that no English divine of the sixteenth century enriched it with a
single original idea. The new Church, unlike those of the Continent, was
the result of an endeavour to conciliate the Catholic disposition of the
people, by preserving as far as possible the externals to which they
were attached; whilst the queen--who was a Protestant rather by policy
than by conviction--desired no greater change than was necessary for her
purpose. But the divines whom she placed at the head of the new Church
were strict Calvinists, and differed from the Puritans only in their
submission to the court. The rapidly declining Catholic party accepted
Anglicanism as the lesser evil; while zealous Protestants deemed that
the outward forms ought to correspond to the inward substance, and that
Calvinistic doctrines required a Calvinistic constitution. Until the end
of the century there was no Anglican theology; and the attempt to devise
a system in harmony with the peculiar scheme and design of the
institution, began with Hooker. The monarch was absolute master in the
Church, which had been established as an instrument of royal influence;
and the divines acknowledged his right by the theory of passive
obedience. The consistent section of the Calvinists was won over, for a
time, by the share which the gentry obtained in the spoils of the
Church, and by the welcome concessi