Sir Edward Dering's course has been described. We have seen him to be one of those men, who, after looking at both sides of a question, and endeavouring to keep the mean between extremes, at length come to look at one side so much more than the other, that they unconsciously swerve in a direction divergent from their original career, and then, with exquisite simplicity, wonder that they are charged with vacillation. Such persons are also apt to be impetuous, and to speak unguardedly in the heat of debate; and, while honestly hating the character of turn-coats, they expose themselves to that odious accusation. Sir Edward had looked at Anglicanism and at Nonconformity, trying to steer a middle course; but circumstances of late having brought before him most prominently the dangers of schism, he now inveighed against it with the same zeal, which, in the spring and summer of 1641, had inflamed his anti-prelatical orations. It is very easy to make good against this honest but shallow politician the charge of self-contradiction. It is curious to see in his "Defence" how one who courted popularity winced under the accusation of being an apostate, and how he parried the charge of going over to the enemy's camp. At an hour when parties were plunging into a mortal struggle, a much wiser man, counselling moderation, would have had little chance of making himself heard; and certainly Dering's laboured distinction between ruin and reform did as little toward preventing the first as promoting the second; and it could only produce a grim smile in the iron face of a Puritan, when the recent church reformer cautioned his friends, in classic phrase, against "breaking asunder that well ordered chain of government, which from the chair of Jupiter reacheth down by several golden even links to the protection of the poorest creature that now lives among us."[276] [Sidenote: _Secessions from the Popular Party._] [Sidenote: 1641-2.]