Page:History of Freedom.djvu/252

 208

ESSAYS ON LIBERTY

appear that she has derived greater benefits from them than she may be said to have done from the revolution itself, which in France, for instance in 1848, gave to the Church, at least for a season, that liberty and dignity for which she had struggled in vain during the constitutional period which had preceded. The political character of our own country bears hardly more resemblance to the Liberal Governments of the Continent,-which have copied only what is valueless in our institutions,-than to the superstitious despotism of the East, or to the analogous tyranny which in the Far vVest is mocked with the name of freedom. Here, as else\vhere, the progress of the constitution, which it was the work of the Catholic Ages to build up, on the principles common to all the nations of the Teutonic stock, ,vas interrupted by the attraction which the growth of absolutism abroad excited, and by the Reformation's transferring the ecclesiastical power to the Crown. The Stuarts justified their abuse of power by the same precepts and the same examples by which the Puritans justified their resistance to it. The liberty aimed at by the Levellers was as remote from that which the Middle Ages had handed down, as the power of the Stuarts from the mediæval monarchy. The Revolution of 1688 destroyed one without favouring the other. Unlike the rebellion against Charles 1., that \vhich overthrew his son did not fall into a contrary extreme. It was a restoration in some sort of the principles of government, which had been alternately assailed by absolute monarchy and by a fanatical democracy. But, as it was directed against the abuse of kingly and ecclesiastical authority, neither the Crown nor the established Church recovered their ancient position; and a jealousy of both has ever since subsisted There can be no question but that the remnants of the old system of polity-the utter disappearance of which keeps the rest of Christendom in a state of continual futile revolution-exist more copiously in this country than in any other. Instead of the revolutions and the religious wars by which, in other Protestant countries,