Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 11.djvu/84

 63 REIGN OF ELIZABETH. [CH. 63. It was in fact a question of national life, a question whe- ther the ecclesiastical system of which the Pope was the head was to continue to rule without appeal over the entire destinies of mankind. To the Jesuit the tem- poral and spiritual power of the Papacy were related to one another as soul and body, one incapable of existing without the other. He did not see that the thing which he called heresy had a body also, the body of the State, which represented justice, which represented law, which represented those rights of conscience which ecclesiastics denied, and considered it a crime to claim. Carnpian saw the Catholic Church agreed upon a body of doctrine which had the prescription of ten centuries in its favour, which had been taught by the Fathers, and had shaped the spiritual thought of Christendom. He saw the he- retics split into a hundred sects, staggering like men walking on quicksands, and over their confusions and uncertainties he anticipated an easy victory. Heresy appeared to him in extremity of death, without defence of reason or authority of age. He wrote from his con- cealment to the council offering to dispute in public with any Protestant or Protestants who would encounter him. lie published a book which he and his admirers considered to have closed the controversy. It was as if an adversary of the Newtonian astronomy had thought to overset the modern theory of the celestial motions by an appeal to Ptolemy or Hipparchus ; or as if Julian or Porphyry had imagined that they had disproved Chris- tianity by showing that it was not to be found in the Theogonies or in the Zend Avesta. Time and accumu-