nd the ecclesiastical courts were
reinstated in authority to check unlicensed {p.188} extravagance of
opinion. Their restored power, however, was over opinion only;
wherever the pretensions of the church would come in collision with
the political constitution, wherever they menaced the independence of
the temporal magistrate or the tenure of property, there the progress
of restoration was checked by the rock, and could eat no further into
the soil. The pope and the clergy recovered their titular rank, and in
one direction unhappily they recovered the reality of power. But the
temporal spoils of the struggle remained with the laity, and if the
clergy lifted a hand to retake them, their weapons would be instantly
wrenched from their grasp.

If the genuine friends of human freedom had acquiesced without
resistance in this conclusion, if the nobility had contented
themselves with securing their worldly and political interests, and
had made no effort to restrain or modify the exercise of the authority
which they were giving back, they might be accused of having accepted
a dishonourable compromise. But they did what they could. They worked
with such legal means as were in their power, and for two parliaments
they succeeded in keeping persecution at bay; they failed in the
third, but failed only after a struggle. The Protestants themselves
had created, by their own misconduct, the difficulty of defending
them; and armed unconstitutional resistance was an expedient to be
resorted to, only when it had been seen how the clergy would conduct
themselves. English statesmen may be pardoned if they did not
anticipate the passions to which the guardians of orthodoxy were about
to abandon themselves. Parliament had maintained the independence of
the English courts of law. It had maintained the Premunire. It had
forbidden the succession to be tampered with. If this was not
everything, it was something--something which in the end would be the
undoing of all the rest.

The court and the bishops, however, were for the present absolute in
their own province. The persecuting acts were once more upon the
Statute Book; and when the realities of the debates in parliament had
disappeared, the cardinal and the queen could again give the rein to
their imagination. They had called up a phantom out of its grave, and
they persuaded themselves that they were witnessing the resurrection
of the spirit of truth, that heresy was about to vanish from off