on of the penal laws against her,
until at last they found that they had in their intolerance been forging
chains for themselves. One thing alone, which our national jurists had
recognised in the fifteenth century as the cause and the sign of our
superiority over foreign States--the exclusion of the Roman code, and
the unbroken preservation of the common law--kept England from sinking
beneath a despotism as oppressive as that of France or Sweden.

As the Anglican Church under James and Charles was the bulwark of
arbitrary power, the popular resistance took the form of ecclesiastical
opposition. The Church continued to be so thoroughly committed to the
principle of unconditional submission to the power from which it derived
its existence, that James II. could reckon on this servile spirit as a
means of effecting the subversion of the Establishment; and Defoe
reproached the bishops with having by their flattery led on the king,
whom they abandoned in the moment of his need. The Revolution, which
reduced the royal prerogative, removed the oppressiveness of the royal
supremacy. The Established Church was not emancipated from the crown,
but the Nonconformists were emancipated from the tyranny of the
Established Church. Protestantism, which in the period of its power
dragged down by its servility the liberties of the nation, did
afterwards, in its decay and disorganisation, by the surrender of its
dogmatic as well as of its political principle, promote their recovery
and development. It lost its oppressiveness in proportion as it lost its
strength, and it ceased to be tyrannical when divines had been forced to
give up its fundamental doctrine, and when its unity had been dissolved
by the sects. The revival of those liberties which, in the Middle Ages,
had taken root under the influence of the Church, coincided with the
progress of the Protestant sects, and with the decay of the penal laws.
The contrast between the political character of those countries in which
Protestantism integrally prevailed, and that of those in which it was
divided against itself, and could neither establish its system nor work
out its consequences, is as strongly marked as the contrast between the
politics of Catholic times and those which were introduced by the
Reformation. The evil which it wrought in its strength was turned to
good by its decline.

Such is the sketch of the effects of the Protestant apostasy in the
political order, considered chief