act against the gipsies especially,
illustrates one of the most remarkable features of the times. The air was
impregnated with superstition; in a half consciousness of the impending
changes, all men were listening with wide ears to rumours and prophecies
and fantastic fore-shadowings of the future; and fanaticism, half deceiving
and half itself deceived, was grasping the lever of the popular excitement
to work out its own ends.[304] The power which had ruled the hearts of
mankind for ten centuries was shaking suddenly to its foundation. The
Infallible guidance of the Church was failing; its light gone out, or
pronounced to be but a mere deceitful ignis fatuus; and men found
themselves wandering in darkness, unknowing where to turn or what to think
or believe. It was easy to clamour against the spiritual courts. From men
smarting under the barefaced oppression of that iniquitous jurisdiction,
the immediate outcry rose without ulterior thought; but unexpectedly the
frail edifice of the church itself threatened under the attack to crumble
into ruins; and many gentle hearts began to tremble and recoil when they
saw what was likely to follow on their light beginnings. It was true that
the measures as yet taken by the parliament and the crown professed to be
directed, not to the overthrow of the church, but to the re-establishment
of its strength. But the exulting triumph of the Protestants, the promotion
of Latimer to a royal chaplaincy, the quarrel with the papacy, and a dim
but sure perception of the direction in which the stream was flowing,
foretold to earnest Catholics a widely different issue; and the simplest of
them knew better than the court knew, that they were drifting from the sure
moorings of the faith into the broad ocean of uncertainty. There seems,
indeed, to be in religious men, whatever be their creed, and however
limited their intellectual power, a prophetic faculty of insight into the
true bearings of outward things,--an insight which puts to shame the
sagacity of statesmen, and claims for the sons of God, and only for them,
the wisdom even of the world. Those only read the world's future truly who
have faith in principle, as opposed to faith in human dexterity; who feel
that in human things there lies really and truly a spiritual nature, a
spiritual connection, a spiritual tendency, which the wisdom of the serpent
cannot alter, and scarcely can affect.

Excitement, nevertheless, is no guarantee for the un