slack might have been in recent times the application of it.  That it was accepted, not on one side only, but on all, was soon to be shown by the subsequent course of events.  No one suffered more severely and more persistently from its application than the Tractarians; no one was more ready to apply it to them than Dr. Hampden with his friends; no one approved and encouraged its vigorous enforcement against them more than Dr. Whately.  The idle distinction set up, that they were not merely unsound but dishonest, was a mere insolent pretext to save trouble in argument, and to heighten the charge against them; no one could seriously doubt that they wrote in good faith as much as Dr. Whately or Dr. Faussett.  But unless acts like Dr. Pusey’s suspension, and the long proscription that went on for years after it, were mere instances of vindictive retaliation, the reproach of persecution must be shared by all parties then, and by none more than by the party which in general terms most denounced it.  Those who think the Hampden agitation unique in its injustice ought to ask themselves what their party would have done if at any time between 1836 and 1843 Mr. Newman had been placed in Dr. Hampden’s seat.

People in our days mean by religious persecution what happens when the same sort of repressive policy is applied to a religious party as is applied to vaccination recusants, or to the “Peculiar People.”  All religious persecution, from the days of Socrates, has taken a legal form, and justified itself on legal grounds.  It is the action of authority, or of strong social judgments backed by authority, against a set of opinions, or the expression of them in word or act—­usually innovating opinions, but not by any means necessarily such.  The disciples of M. Monod, the “Momiers” of Geneva, were persecuted by the Liberals of Geneva, not because they broke away from the creed of Calvin, but because they adhered to it.  The word is not properly applied to the incidental effects in the way of disadvantage, resulting from some broad constitutional settlement—­from the government of the Church being Episcopal and not Presbyterian, or its creed Nicene and not Arian—­any more than it is persecution for a nation to change its government, or for a legitimist to have to live under a republic, or for a Christian to have to live in an infidel state, though persecution may follow from these conditions.  But the privilegium passed against Dr. Hampden was an act of persecution, though a mild one compared with what afterwards fell on his opponents with his full sanction.  Persecution is the natural impulse, in those who think a certain thing right and important or worth guarding, to disable those who, thinking it wrong, are trying to discredit and upset it, and to substitute something different.  It implies a state of war, and the resort to the most available weapons to inflict damage on those who are regarded as rebellious and dangerous.  These weapons were formidable enough once:  they are not without