Private morals likewise were scanned and marked by these vigilant legislators.[21] Their policy, as we have said before, was intended to supply a defect consequent upon the abolition of the old Church courts, proceeding as it did upon the idea handed down for ages, that penal laws sufficed to extinguish individual vice, as well as to suppress social crime--an idea now, after an uninterrupted continuance of failures, almost universally regarded as utterly delusive. The Long Parliament in these, its last days, threatened incest with death without benefit of clergy; it marked adultery as felonious, and it punished fornication with three months' imprisonment. A common bawd was to be whipped, set in the pillory, branded with a hot iron, and committed to the House of Correction for three years: a repetition of the offence was to be treated as a capital crime. Henry Marten, looking at the subject from what was then the common point of view, justly observed, in the course of the debate to which the measure gave rise, that such severity only served to increase transgression, inasmuch as merciful people would shrink from bringing offenders to justice, and offenders escaping with impunity would be encouraged in sin. The laws which we have just enumerated were passed in the spring and summer of 1650; and it was about that time, indeed shortly before the speech just noticed, that the influence of Marten passed its zenith, and he descended from the high position he had occupied in the rule of the Commonwealth. The cause of that event, partly political and partly personal, is to be found in his stern republicanism, and in his disputes with Oliver Cromwell. An enquiry into that subject does not come within the scope of our history, nor do the consequences of it concern us further than this, that they indirectly touched the state of ecclesiastical affairs: for Marten's exclusion from the Council of State in February, 1650, and the inconsiderable part which he took in public business after his re-admission, amounted, according to the view which we have taken, to the dismissal or the withdrawal of one of the memorable _triumvirate_ who had wielded for a time supreme authority in the Church as well as the State. Vane's power was of longer duration, but his disappearance from the lofty sphere he had occupied is an event which we shall speedily have to notice--an event which will be found to have left the government of England in the hands of that one man, who, as the greatest general and statesman of his age, was alone competent to rule his country in the hour of its peril, and the crisis of its fate. [Sidenote: _Moral Legislation._]