In fact, taking things together, faith has been strong, and conscience has displayed itself with energy in Protestant countries, in spite of the doubtful lines of demarcation between the two domains, and the too frequent intervention of the civil power in religious matters. This is because the civil power has never made religious matters its chief concern. Politics, governments, properly so called, have absorbed its attention and power. Sooner or later, it has ended by leaving consciences to themselves; it has, at all events, left the reins more loose and the field more free than has been the case in Catholic countries, where there has been a power devoted to the sole task of ruling spiritual society. Thus, too, there is in every society, political or religious, a certain intimate and permanent tendency which gets the better of all forms of organization and all accidents of situation. Protestantism sprang from free enquiry. It is her standard. It has never been abandoned by her, whatever share she may have taken in the civil rule; I will go so far as to say, the civil despotism. In short, human thought, in religion as in every other matter, has displayed itself with infinite activity and freedom in Protestant countries. {96} Do we forget, besides, the first and most powerful cause of spiritual independence? It is that Protestantism,--she cannot avoid it,--admits into her bosom great differences of faith and practice, dissents, separations, sects in short. She may have often condemned and persecuted them, but she has never deemed herself obliged to curse and extirpate them. They have lived and multiplied under Protestantism, in the teeth of the national church; ill-treated, humiliated, but never forced from some last retreat; always, to a certain degree, protected by the spirit of free enquiry, its examples and recollections. This affords a strong pledge for liberty of conscience, and opens an asylum to all who may have been attacked or vexed on account of their faith by the civil power. If the Anglican church has, with some justice, though much exaggeration, been accused of complaisance towards the temporal sovereign, the English dissenters have, on the other hand, unceasingly proclaimed their haughty independence of her. The shield which the Catholic church has found in the separation of the spiritual and temporal, has been found by Protestantism in the freedom, even though incomplete, of religious dissent and the multiplicity of sects.