In the first place, looking at it from the Protestant side, the Protestants felt very bitterly the evil conduct which they saw in the establishments of the Church. They protested against these evils, and also against the authority claimed by the Pope. The Puritans in England, for nearly the same reasons, were in protest against what we may call the High Church Protestants and against the authority claimed by the Crown as head of that Church. On the Catholic side, the Pope and all the authorities were naturally incensed against any who protested against his authority, because it was essentially part of his claim, as Pope, that he was infallible, that he could do no wrong, and that therefore it was a sin to protest against anything he might choose to do or affirm. And inevitably, since he was spiritual ruler of the Catholic kings, he used his immense influence to induce them to put down this defiance of his authority by their subjects. Then that spirit of inquiry and of protest, which was directed first against the Pope and his commands, very easily led men into criticism of the authority of the kings themselves and into protest against their actions: and this was a kind of protest which was not at all agreeable to the despotic kings of that day. Finally, we should note this point most particularly--that men had lately begun to read for themselves, for the first time, the Bible, and that in the Old Testament they found that the Lord punished Israel and Judah--whole nations at a time--because certain sections of those nations deviated from His true service. Thence they derived the conviction that if any section of a modern nation deviated and went astray from the practice of the true religion, that nation as a whole {84} was liable to divine punishment. We must get that conviction of theirs into our minds, and see all that is implied by it, if we would understand how it was that they were so fiercely intolerant of these religious differences. It explains a great deal of what is otherwise obscure and difficult about persecution done in the name of religion. It explains why the nations were so ready to send out of their midst any section that so differed from the majority in their religious beliefs: and it explains also why these sections were so very willing to go. The English Puritans who went to America, both at the time of the Pilgrim Fathers in 1620, and again later, must have felt that they were getting away from the society of wicked men in whose punishment they might expect to be included; and similarly the rest of the nation would be only too pleased to see them go--for the same reason, that the majority feared lest the wrath of Heaven should fall upon the whole mass of the people, because of the wickedness (that is to say, of the difference of religious belief and practice which they looked upon as wickedness) of this small section. [Sidenote: Cavaliers and Puritans]