Book, and had vilified it in all kinds of ways--that very Prayer Book which now, with certain alterations, they would not decline to use. They had persecuted some of the very persons to whose candour and generosity they now appealed; also, they had been Commissioners for casting out scandalous ministers, and had assisted to expel some, from whom now, they were asking the privilege of continued ministration, with its emoluments, as an act of strict justice, or, at least, of reasonable favour. Besides, the Anglicans charged the Puritans with narrow-mindedness, with sticking at trifles, with making mountains of mole-hills, with cherishing scruples about points which involved no principle--in short, with being under the influence of prejudice and obstinacy. And then, beyond all other things which separated Episcopalians from their brethren, was a certain element of feeling in some--not in Sheldon, but in Cosin and Thorndike, and Heylyn,--which gave a mystical tinge to their views of matter in relation to mind, and which was the soul of their distinctive sacramental theology.[135] [Sidenote: 1660.] Such were the religious, theological, and ecclesiastical differences between the two parties, to which must be added strong political antagonism for the last twenty years. That antagonism has been described in my former volumes. It will reappear in these. Thus the two parties looked upon the question in dispute from their own point of view, influenced by past circumstances and by personal prejudices, after the manner of most controversialists. Both are chargeable with faults of reasoning, and faults of temper. Each made too much of little things: one in enforcing them for the sake of order, the other in objecting to them as sins against God. The strong despised the weak. The weak condemned the strong. Neither mastered the lessons of St. Paul.[136] Yet the two were by no means equally blameable. More of Christian consideration and charity is discernible on the Puritan than on the other side, although even the Puritans had not attained to the exercise of that rare sympathy by which one man penetrates into the soul of another, making him as it were a second self,--by which process alone can a man subdue prejudice and win his brother over to that which he believes to be the truth. [Sidenote: THE CONTROVERSY.]