people within its pale by persecution. She supported it by severe
penal laws, not because she thought conformity to its discipline
necessary to salvation; but because it was the fastness which
arbitrary power was making strong for itself, because she
expected a more profound obedience from those who saw in her both
their civil and their ecclesiastical chief than from those who,
like the Papists, ascribed spiritual authority to the Pope, or
from those who, like some of the Puritans, ascribed it only to
Heaven. To dissent from her establishment was to dissent from an
institution founded with an express view to the maintenance and
extension of the royal prerogative.

This great Queen and her successors, by considering conformity
and loyalty as identical at length made them so. With respect to
the Catholics, indeed, the rigour of persecution abated after her
death. James soon found that they were unable to injure him, and
that the animosity which the Puritan party felt towards them
drove them of necessity to take refuge under his throne. During
the subsequent conflict, their fault was anything but disloyalty.
On the other hand, James hated the Puritans with more than the
hatred of Elizabeth. Her aversion to them was political; his was
personal. The sect had plagued him in Scotland, where he was
weak; and he was determined to be even with them in England,
where he was powerful. Persecution gradually changed a sect into
a faction. That there was anything in the religious opinions of
the Puritans which rendered them hostile to monarchy has never
been proved to our satisfaction. After our civil contests, it
became the fashion to say that Presbyterianism was connected with
Republicanism; just as it has been the fashion to say, since the
time of the French Revolution, that Infidelity is connected with