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ESSAYS ON LIBERTY

Catholicism that the Reformation \vas imposed on them by foreign troops in spite of an armed resistance; and the imported manufacture of Geneva remained so strange and foreign to them, that no English divine of the sixteenth century enriched it with a single original idea. The new' Church, unlike those of the Continent, was the result of an endeavour to conciliate the Catholic disposition of the people, by preserving as far as possible the externals to which they were attached; whilst the queen-who was a Protestant rather by policy thqn by conviction-desired no greater change than was necessary for her purpose. But the divines whom she placed at the head of the new Church were strict Calvinists, and differed from the Puritans only in their submission to the court. The I rapidly declining Catholic party accepted Anglicanism as the lesser evil; while zealous Protestants deemed that the outward forms ought to correspond to the in\vard sub- stance, and that Calvinistic doctrines required a Calvinistic constitution. Until the end of the century there was no Anglican theology; and the attempt to devise a system in harmony with the peculiar scheme and design of the institution, began \vith Hooker. The monarch was ab- solute master in the Church, which had been established as an -instrument of royal influence; and the divines acknowledged his right by the theory of passive obedience. The consistent section of the Calvinists was won over, for a time, by the share \vhich the gentry obtained in the spoils of the Church, and by the welcome concession of the penal laws against her, until at last they found that they had in their intolerance been forging chains for them- selves. One thing alone, which our national jurists had recognised in the fifteenth century as the cause and the sign of our superiority over foreign States-the exclusion of the Roman code, and the un broken preservation of the common law-kept Englat1d from sinking beneath a despotism as oppressive as that of France or Sweden. As the Anglican Church under James and Charles was the bulwark of arbitrary po\ver, the popular resistance took the form of ecclesiastical opposition. The Church