21. =Laud's Intellectual Position. 1629-1633.=--For all matters relating to the Church Charles's principal adviser was William Laud, now Bishop of London. As far as doctrine was concerned Laud carried on the teaching of Cranmer and Hooker. He held that the basis of belief was the Bible, but that the Bible was to be interpreted by the tradition of the early church, and that all doubtful points were to be subjected, not to heated arguments in the pulpits, but to sober discussion by learned men. His mind, in short, like those of the earlier English reformers, combined the Protestant reliance on the Scriptures with reverence for ancient tradition and with the critical spirit of the Renascence. Laud's difficulty lay, as theirs had lain, in the impossibility of gaining over any large number of his fellow-countrymen. Intelligent criticism and intelligent study were only for the few. Laud, as he himself plaintively declared, was in danger of being crushed between the upper and lower mill-stones of Puritanism and the Papacy. 22. =Laud as the Upholder of Uniformity.=--In all this there was nothing peculiar to Laud. What was peculiar to him was his perception that intellectual religion could not maintain itself by intellect alone. Hooker's appeals to Church history and to the supremacy of reason had rolled over the heads of men who knew nothing about Church history, and who did not reason. Laud fell back upon the influence of ceremonial. "I laboured nothing more," he afterwards said, "than that the external public worship of God--too much slighted in most parts of the kingdom--might be preserved, and that with as much decency and uniformity as might be; being still of opinion that unity cannot long continue in the Church when uniformity is shut out of the Church door." He, like Eliot and the Parliamentarians, was convinced that there could be but one Church in the nation. As they sought to retain their hold on it by the enforcement of uniformity of doctrine, Laud sought to retain his hold on it by enforcing uniformity of worship. To do this he attempted to put in force the existing law of the Church as opposed to the existing practice. What he urged men to do he believed to be wholly right. He himself clung with all his heart to the doctrine of the divine right of episcopacy, of the efficacy of the Sacraments, and to the sobering influence of appointed prayers and appointed ceremonies. What he lacked was broad human sympathy and respect for the endeavour of each earnest man to grow towards perfection in the way which seems to him to be best. Men were to obey for their own good, and to hold their tongues. The king was the supreme governor, and with his authority, as exercised in the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission, Laud hoped to rescue England from Pope and Puritan. [Illustration: Archbishop Laud: from a copy in the National Portrait Gallery by Henry Stone, from the Van Dyck at Lambeth.]