Nor was it only the intolerance of the Church which exasperated the people, its secular intermeddling did so likewise. Before the Reformation Churchmen had held the highest offices in the State, indeed, had controlled all civil affairs; and Laud was now imitating the Cardinals of an earlier age. But the English Reformation had shaken off from itself the civil power of the Church; laymen, not the clergy, now claimed to guide the helm. The Puritanism of the seventeenth century, and the civil war which grew out of it, were practical protests against the attempts of Charles, Strafford, and Laud to revive what the Reformation in this country had destroyed. The modern spirit of civilization was seen rebelling against the intrusion of the spiritual on the secular power. It was a stage in the great European conflict which ended in the French Revolution; it was an assault upon a system which has now expired everywhere except in the city of Rome. As was only consistent, the party supporting ecclesiastical intolerance also supported civil despotism. Never since the English Constitution had grown up were the liberties of the people so threatened as during the earlier part of the seventeenth century. The two checks on the tyranny of the Crown, the aristocracy and the Church, had long been enfeebled--the aristocracy by the wars of the Roses; the Church by the loss of independence at the Reformation. The nobles of England had wasted their strength in the fifteenth century; the Church of England had prostrated herself before the throne in the sixteenth. Neither of them had now the power, any more than they had now the will, to defend popular freedom against the invasions of regal prerogative. It is true, that the same causes, which weakened them as the possible friends of the people, weakened them also as actual friends of the Sovereign. What they did for the Crown in the Civil Wars, was far less than they might have done at an earlier period: even as what remained in their power to accomplish on behalf of popular rights was far less. But the malign aspect of the Church, then the chief power next the throne, towards the nation at large, and the Commons in particular, was most manifest and most alarming at the epoch under consideration. Old English liberties indeed had never been extinguished. The spirit of English self-government asserted under the house of Lancaster, though seemingly held in abeyance in the times of the Tudors, so far from expiring, had come out with renewed youth in the days of the Stuarts, through the parliamentary career of those eminent statesmen who formed the vanguard of the Commonwealth army. But against the illustrious Sir John Eliot, with his noble compeers, High Church contemporaries stood in defiant hostility. That kings are the fountains of all power; that they reign "by the grace of God," in the sense of divine right; that they are feudal lords--the soil their property, and the people their