the charges laid to his account, nor will any attempt here be made to
do so; but even the worst that can be proved against him, when
considered impartially with the circumstances of his position and the
spirit of the time, will, I think, be found to take a very different
complexion from that which has been somewhat too confidently given to
them.[7]

When Charles the Second was restored to the throne of his fathers he was
hailed in Scotland with the same tumultuous joy that greeted him in
England. The Scottish nation was indeed weary of the past. It was weary
alike of the yoke of Cromwell and of the yoke of the Covenant. The first
Covenant--the Covenant of 1557--had been a protest against the tyranny
of the Pope: the Covenant of 1643 was a protest against the tyranny of
the Crown. It was the Scottish supplement, framed in the religious
spirit and temperament of the Scottish nation, to the English protest
against ship-money. The voice, first sounded among the rich valleys and
pleasant woods of Buckinghamshire, was echoed in the churchyard of the
Grey Friars at Edinburgh. Six months later the triumph of
Presbyterianism was completed, when in the church of Saint Margaret's at
Westminster the Commons of England ratified the Solemn League and
Covenant of Scotland. Over the wild time which followed it will be
unnecessary for our purpose to linger. The work was done: then followed
the reaction. In both countries the oppressed became in turn the
oppressors. The champions of religious liberty became as bigoted and
intolerant as those whose intolerance and bigotry had first goaded them
into rebellion. The old Presbyterian saw the rise of new modes of
worship with the same horror that he had shown at the ritual of Laud.
Milton protested that the "new Presbyter is but old Priest writ large."
Within only four years of the outbreak of the civil war no less than
sixteen religious sects were found existing in open defiance of the
principles of faith which that war was pledged to uphold. One common
bond, indeed, united these sects in sympathy: one and all repudiated
with equal energy the authority of the Church to prescribe a fixed form
of worship: a national Church was, in their eyes, as odious and
impossible a tyranny as the divine right of kings. But this common
hatred of the interference of a Mother Church could not teach them
tolerance for each other. Cardinal Newman has described the enthusiasm
of Saint Anthony as calm, manly, and