ns,
but once more those loftier evidences which lay in the calm endurance by
heroic men of the extremities of suffering, and which touched--not the mind
with conviction, but the heart with admiring reverence.

In the concluding years of his administration Wolsey was embarrassed with
the divorce. Difficulties were gathering round him, from the failure of his
hopes abroad and the wreck of his popularity at home; and the activity of
the persecution was something relaxed, as the guiding mind of the great
minister ceased to have leisure to attend to it. The bishops, however,
continued, each in his own diocese, to act with such vigour as they
possessed. Their courts were unceasingly occupied with vexatious suits,
commenced without reason, and conducted without justice. They summoned
arbitrarily as suspected offenders whoever had the misfortune to have
provoked their dislike; either compelling them to criminate themselves by
questions on the intricacies of theology,[533] or allowing sentence to be
passed against them on the evidence of abandoned persons, who would not
have been admissible as witnesses before the secular tribunals.[534]

It might have been thought that the clear perception which was shown by the
House of Commons of the injustice with which the trials for heresy were
conducted, the disregard, shameless and flagrant, of the provisions of the
statutes under which the bishops were enabled to proceed, might have led
them to reconsider the equity of persecution in itself; or, at least, to
remove from the office of judges persons who had shown themselves so
signally unfit to exercise that office. It would have been indecent,
however, if not impossible, to transfer to a civil tribunal the cognisance
of opinion; and, on the other hand, there was as yet among the upper
classes of the laity no kind of disposition to be lenient towards those who
were really unorthodox. The desire so far was only to check the reckless
and random accusations of persons whose offence was to have criticised, not
the doctrine but the moral conduct, of the church authorities. The
Protestants, although from the date of the meeting of the parliament and
Wolsey's fall their ultimate triumph was certain, gained nothing in its
immediate consequences. They suffered rather from the eagerness of the
political reformers to clear themselves from complicity with heterodoxy;
and the bishops were even taunted with the spiritual dissensions of the
realm as an