no just ground on which to condemn conscientious Catholics on the score of
persecution, except only this: that as we are now convinced of the
injustice of the persecuting laws, so among those who believed them to be
just, there were some who were led by an instinctive protest of human
feeling to be lenient in the execution of those laws; while others of
harder nature and more narrow sympathies enforced them without reluctance,
and even with exultation. The heart, when it is rightly constituted,
corrects the folly of the head; and wise good men, even though they
entertain no conscious misgiving as to the soundness of their theories, may
be delivered from the worst consequences of those theories, by trusting
their more genial instincts. And thus, and thus only, are we justified in
censuring those whose names figure largely in the persecuting lists. Their
defence is impregnable to logic. We blame them for the absence of that
humanity which is deeper than logic, and which should have taught them to
refuse the conclusions of their speculative creed.

Such, then, was the state of parties in the autumn of 1529. The old
conservatives, the political ecclesiastics, had ceased to exist, and the
clergy as a body were paralysed by corruption. There remained--

The English party who had succeeded to power, and who were bent upon a
secular revolt.

The papal party, composed of theoretic theologians, like Fisher, Bishop of
Rochester, and represented on the council by Sir Thomas More.

And both of these were united in their aversion to the third party, that of
the doctrinal Protestants, who were still called heretics.

These three substantially divided what was sound in England; the first
composed of the mass of the people, representing the principles of
prudence, justice, good sense, and the working faculties of social life:
the two last sharing between them the higher qualities of nobleness,
enthusiasm, self-devotion; but in their faith being without discretion, and
in their piety without understanding. The problem of the Reformation was to
reunite virtues which could be separated only to their mutual confusion;
and to work out among them such inadequate reconciliation as the wilfulness
of human nature would allow.

Before I close this chapter, which is intended as a general introduction, I
have to say something of two prominent persons whose character antecedent
to the actions in which we are to find them engaged it is desirable