Page:History of England (Macaulay) Vol 3.djvu/243

 was indeed eminently qualified by his situation as well as by his personal qualities to be the umpire in that great contention. He was the King of a prelatical kingdom. He was the Prime Minister of a presbyterian republic. His unwillingness to offend the Anglican Church of which he was the head, and his unwillingness to offend the reformed Churches of the Continent which regarded him as a champion divinely sent to protect them against the French tyranny, balanced each other, and kept him from leaning unduly to either side. His conscience was perfectly neutral. For it was his deliberate opinion that no form of ecclesiastical polity was of divine institution. He dissented equally from the school of Laud and from the school of Cameron, from the men who held that there could not be a Christian Church without Bishops, and from the men who held that there could not be a Christian Church without synods. Which form of government should be adopted was in his judgment a question of mere expediency. He would probably have preferred a temper between the two rival systems, a hierarchy in which the chief spiritual functionaries should have been something more than moderators and something less than prelates. But he was far too wise a man to think of settling such a matter according to his own personal tastes. He determined therefore that, if there was on both sides a disposition to compromise, he would act as mediator. But, if it should prove that the public mind of England and the public mind of Scotland had taken the ply strongly in opposite directions, he would not attempt to force either nation into conformity with the opinion of the other. He would suffer each to have its own church, and would content himself with restraining both churches from persecuting nonconformists, and from encroaching on the functions of the civil magistrate.

The language which he held to those Scottish Episcopalians who complained to him of their sufferings and implored his protection was well weighed and well guarded, but clear and ingenuous. He wished, he said, to preserve, if possible, the institution to which they were so much attached, and to grant at the same time entire liberty of conscience to that party