Page:Church and State under the Tudors.djvu/236

 Another matter which touches the skirts of my subject rather than properly belongs to it, but which it is impossible entirely to omit, may be noticed here—viz., the question whether the deaths of the Jesuits and others executed under Elizabeth can rightly be used, as by Roman Catholic writers they always have been, as a set-off to the burning of the Protestants under Mary.

In considering such a question as this, in order to arrive at a reasonably fair conclusion, it is absolutely necessary to take into account the different views which prevail at different periods; and by this I mean, not only what we may be pleased to consider the moral advance which would enable us in these days to condemn all political assassination in the lump, and which has given occasion to a good deal of very ill-founded self-complacency in some modern historians, but also that more subtle result of political and religious action and reaction, which gives rise to a tendency in each successive generation to take a different, and a more or less antagonistic, view of any subject from that held by its predecessor, and this the more strongly in proportion as the previous opinion has been firm and general.