Had the King of England been a Bourbon—had the Church of England been a Genevan or a Roman one, that flood must have washed all landmarks away: and the fabric of Constitutional Liberty, which now attracts the admiration of all thinking men, could never have been constructed. Honour, then, to the martyrs of Law and of Religion, who, beneath this roof, built up the only barrier that has turned back the turbulent waves of modern barbarism! I stood, and thought of Charles, with sorrow for his grievous faults, but yet with gratitude for the manly recompense he offered here to a people whom he had unintentionally injured through their own antiquated laws, but whom he defended against the worse tyranny of lawless usurpation, by his majestic protest in this Hall, and by sealing it with his blood. Here, too, the seven bishops delivered the Church and State of England when they stood up against the treacherous son of Charles, and completed the triumph of the Church by proving it as true to the people, as it had been to the throne, on the same foundation of immutable principle. This was the roof that rang with the shouts of vindicated justice, when those fathers of the Church were set free! I looked up, and surveyed every beam and rafter with reverence. The angels, carved in the hammer-beams, were looking placidly down, each one with his shield upon his breast, like the guardian spirits of a nation, true to itself and to ancestral faith and order. The symbol is an appropriate one; for the frame-work of the British Constitution is like this roof of Richard in many respects, but in none more than this—that the strength and beauty of the whole are fitly framed together, with inseparable features of human wisdom and of divine truth; the latter being always conspicuous, and investing all with reverend dignity and grace.