Page:Historical Lectures and Addresses.djvu/190

 seemed inconclusive, poor, feeble, and doomed to failure. Yet where in either of them was there place for the aspirations of the devout scholar, of the man who reverenced liberty, who believed in progressive enlightenment, who longed for an intelligent order of things in which the Christian consciousness should seek for spiritual truth? It was not merely by accident that the great scholar Isaac Casaubon ended his days in England, made happy by the society of Andrewes. It is significant of the temper of the times that the Puritans pelted him with stones in the street when they found that he was not a partisan on their side. Still, despite this, Casaubon, with his vast learning and his wide experience of the Continent, found peace for his soul in England, which he called "the isle of the blessed". In it, despite all drawbacks, still lingered a reverence for knowledge, a love of truth, and a sense of the problems of the future.

Now, herein lies Laud's claim to greatness, that he recognised the possibilities of the English Church, not merely for England itself, but as the guardian of all that was best and most fruitful for the future of religious progress. "This poor Church of England," he said in his speech upon the scaffold, "hath flourished, and hath been a shelter to other neighbouring Churches when storms have driven upon them." Laud had at heart the ideal of a united England, with a Church at once Catholic, Scriptural, Apostolic, free from superstition, yet reverently retaining all that was primitive; a resting-place for all men of enlightenment; a model of piety and devotion to a distracted world; strong in its capacity for mediating