In the beginning of the seventeenth century the Reformation was brought to the verge of destruction. When Wallenstein sat down before Stralsund everything was gone but England, Holland, Sweden, and some cantons of Switzerland. In England the stream of reaction was running strong; Holland could not have stood by herself; Sweden was nothing as a power, though it turned out that she had a man. Fortunately the Lambeth Popedom and the Royal Supremacy prevented the English division of the army of Reaction from getting into line with the other divisions and compelled it to accept decisive battle on a separate field against the most formidable soldiers of the Reformation. These soldiers saved Protestantism, which was their first object, and they saved English liberty into the bargain. We who have come after can stand by the battlefield, pouncet-box in hand, and sniff and sneer as much as we will. Great Tew was an anticipation, for ever beautiful and memorable, of the time when all swords shall be sheathed, and the world shall have entered into final peace. But in its philosophy there were, as the world then was, two defects; it did not reach the people, and it was incapable of protecting its own existence. Laud himself did not care to crush it; he was an ecclesiastical despot rather than a theological bigot; he had a genuine respect for learned men; he preferred winning them by gracious words and preferment to coercing them with the pillory and the shears. But had Laud's system prevailed, there would soon have been an end of the philosophy of Great Tew. Mr. Arnold points to the free thought of Bacon. Nobody in those days scented mischief in the inductive philosophy, while in politics and religion Bacon was scrupulously orthodox. Cromwell's faith was a narrower and coarser thing by far than that of the inmates of the "college in a purer air;" but it brought religion and morality--not the most genial or rational morality, but still morality--into the cottage as well as into the manor-house, and it was able to protect its own existence When it had mounted to power in the person of its chief, the opinions of Great Tew, and all opinions that would abstain from trying to overthrow the Government and restore the tyranny, enjoyed practically larger and more assured liberty than they had ever enjoyed in England before or were destined to enjoy for many a year to come. Falkland, says Mr. Arnold, was in the grasp of _fatality, hence the transcendent interest that attaches to him_. Cromwell, happily for his cause and for his country, was, or felt himself to be, not in the grasp of fatality but in the hand of God.