tion of Christianity itself,--were
to be hurled back into their proper barbarism.[131] These magnificent
visions fell from him in conversations with the Bishop of Bayonne, and may
be gathered from hints and fragments of his correspondence. Extravagant as
they seem, the prospect of realising them was, humanly speaking, neither
chimerical nor even improbable. He had but made the common mistake of men
of the world who are the representatives of an old order of things at the
time when that order is doomed and dying. He could not read the signs of
the times; and confounded the barrenness of death with the barrenness of a
winter which might be followed by a new spring and summer; he believed that
the old life-tree of Catholicism, which in fact was but cumbering the
ground, might bloom again in its old beauty. The thing which he called
heresy was the fire of Almighty God, which no politic congregation of
princes, no state machinery, though it were never so active, could trample
out; and as in the early years of Christianity the meanest slave who was
thrown to the wild beasts for his presence at the forbidden mysteries of
the gospel, saw deeper, in the divine power of his faith, into the future
even of this earthly world than the sagest of his imperial persecutors, so
a truer political prophet than Wolsey would have been found in the most
ignorant of those poor men, for whom his myrmidons were searching in the
purlieus of London, who were risking death and torture in disseminating the
pernicious volumes of the English Testament.

If we look at the matter, however, from a more earthly point of view, the
causes which immediately defeated Wolsey's policy were not such as human
foresight could have anticipated. We ourselves, surveying the various
parties in Europe with the light of our knowledge of the actual sequel, are
perhaps able to understand their real relations; but if in 1527 a political
astrologer had foretold that within two years of that time the pope and the
emperor who had imprisoned him would be cordial allies, that the positions
of England and Spain toward the papacy would be diametrically reversed, and
that the two countries were on the point of taking their posts, which they
would ever afterwards maintain, as the champions respectively of the
opposite principles to those which at that time they seemed to represent,
the prophecy would have been held scarcely less insane than a prophecy six
or even three years before t