played by that most tremendous of social forces, religious sentiment,
in its relation to the political circumstances which we have passed
in review. If we ask why it was that among modern nations absolute
despotism was soonest and most completely established in Spain, we find
it instructive to observe that the circumstances under which the
Spanish monarchy grew up, during centuries of deadly struggle with the
Mussulman, were such as to enlist the religious sentiment on the side of
despotic methods in church and state. It becomes interesting, then, to
observe by contrast how it was that in England the dominant religious
sentiment came to be enlisted on the side of political freedom.
[Illustration: Had it not been for the Puritans, political liberty would
probably have disappeared from the world]

In such an inquiry we have nothing to do with the truth or falsity of
any system of doctrines, whether Catholic or Protestant. The legitimate
purposes of the historian do not require him to intrude upon the
province of the theologian. Our business is to trace the sequence of
political cause and effect. Nor shall we get much help from crude
sweeping statements which set forth Catholicism as invariably the enemy
and Protestantism as invariably the ally of human liberty. The Catholic
has a right to be offended at statements which would involve a
Hildebrand or a St. Francis in the same historical judgment with a
Sigismund or a Torquemada. The character of ecclesiastical as of all
other institutions has varied with the character of the men who have
worked them and the varying needs of the times and places in which they
have been worked; and our intense feeling of the gratitude we owe to
English Puritanism need in nowise diminish the enthusiasm with which we
praise the glorious work of the mediaeval church. It is the duty of
the historian to learn how to limit and qualify his words of blame or
approval; for so curiously is human nature compounded of strength and