Atheism could never have become, as it did, the national opinion, and that the consequent solution of the social system in blood could never have happened? The Jansenist, and the inmates of Port Royal, and many of their favorers, displayed a constancy that would doubtless have carried them through the fires of martyrdom. But the intellectual courage necessary to bear them fearlessly through an examination of the errors of the papal superstition could have sprung only from a healthy force of mind, utterly incompatible with the dotings of religious abstraction, with the petty solicitudes of sackclothed abstinence, with the trivial ceremonials of the daily ritual, with the prim niceties of behavior that pin down the body and soul of a Romish regular to his parchment-pattern of artificial sanctity. The Jansenists had not such courage; if they worshipped not the beast, they cringed before him; he planted his dragon-foot upon their necks, and their wisdom and their virtues were lost forever to France! The monk of Wittemberg had taken a bolder and a better course. When he began to find fault with Rome, he rejected, not only its own flagrant and recent corruptions: but the many delusions it had inherited from the ancient Church; and after a short struggle with the prejudices of his education, he became, not only no papist, but no monk. Full fraught with the principles and spirit of the Bible, he denounced, as well the venerable errors of the fathers, as the scarlet sins of the mother of impurities; and was as little a disciple of Jerom, of Gregory, and of Basil, as of the doctors of the Vatican. The English reformers trod the ground of theological inquiry with the same manly step; and that firm step shook the monasteries to the dust. Those great and good men went back to the Scriptures, where they found at once the great realities of religion—a condemning law, a justifying Gospel, and a provision of grace for a life of true holiness. With these substantial principles in their hearts, they spurned whatever was trivial and spurious, and amid the fires of persecution, they reared the structure—a structure still unshaken—of religion for England, upon "the foundation of the apostles and prophets." Had there existed a taste for mysticism, a fondness for penitential austerities, a cringing deference to the fathers, among the divines of the time of Edward VI., such a disposition must, so far as known causes are to be calculated upon, have utterly spoiled the reformation in England; or have postponed it a hundred years.