It was by this device that Master Batman, at the beginning of the Puritan period, sought to present to the eye a summary of what the Reformation had accomplished, and what it had still to fear. Half a century before, Henry VIII. being still the Defender of the Faith, the various articles used in Master Batman's satirical picture were objects of religious veneration throughout Great Britain. They had now become the despised but dreaded rattle-traps of a suppressed idolatry. From the field of strife one of the victors gathered the scattered arms and implements, the gorgeous ensigns and trappings of the defeated, and piled them upon the plain, a trophy and a warning. There is no revolution that does not sweep away much that is good. The reformation in religion, chiefly wrought by Wycliffe, Huss, Luther, and Calvin, was a movement of absolute necessity to the further progress of our race. The intelligence of Christendom had reached a development which was incompatible with respect for the assumptions of the papacy, and with a belief in the fictions which the papacy had invented or adopted. The vase must have broken, or the oak planted in it must have ceased to grow. Nevertheless, those fictions had their beauty and their use. There was a good and pleasing side to that system of fables and ceremonies, which amused, absorbed, and satisfied the people of Europe for a thousand years. If we could concede that the mass of men must remain forever ignorant and very poor, we could also admit that nothing was ever invented by man better calculated to make them thoughtlessly contented with a dismal lot than the Roman Catholic Church as it existed in the fifteenth century, before the faith of the people had been shaken in its pretensions. There was something in it for every faculty of human nature except the intellect. It gave play to every propensity except the propensity of one mind in a thousand to ask radical questions. It relieved every kind of distress except that which came of using the reason. All human interests were provided for in it except the supreme interest of human advancement.