and momentary separation of it from the body.  There is, I think, no just ground on which to condemn conscientious Catholics on the score of persecution, except only this:  that as we are now convinced of the injustice of the persecuting laws, so among those who believed them to be just, there were some who were led by an instinctive protest of human feeling to be lenient in the execution of those laws; while others of harder nature and more narrow sympathies enforced them without reluctance, and even with exultation.  The heart, when it is rightly constituted, corrects the folly of the head; and wise good men, even though they entertain no conscious misgiving as to the soundness of their theories, may be delivered from the worst consequences of those theories, by trusting their more genial instincts.  And thus, and thus only, are we justified in censuring those whose names figure largely in the persecuting lists.  Their defence is impregnable to logic.  We blame them for the absence of that humanity which is deeper than logic, and which should have taught them to refuse the conclusions of their speculative creed.

Such, then, was the state of parties in the autumn of 1529.  The old conservatives, the political ecclesiastics, had ceased to exist, and the clergy as a body were paralysed by corruption.  There remained—­

The English party who had succeeded to power, and who were bent upon a secular revolt.

The papal party, composed of theoretic theologians, like Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, and represented on the council by Sir Thomas More.

And both of these were united in their aversion to the third party, that of the doctrinal Protestants, who were still called heretics.

These three substantially divided what was sound in England; the first composed of the mass of the people, representing the principles of prudence, justice, good sense, and the working faculties of social life:  the two last sharing between them the higher qualities of nobleness, enthusiasm, self-devotion; but in their faith being without discretion, and in their piety without understanding.  The problem of the Reformation was to reunite virtues which could be separated only to their mutual confusion; and to work out among them such inadequate reconciliation as the wilfulness of human nature would allow.

Before I close this chapter, which is intended as a general introduction, I have to say something of two prominent persons whose character antecedent to the actions in which we are to find them engaged it is desirable that we should understand; I mean Henry VIII. himself, and the lady whom he had selected to fill the place from which Catherine of Arragon was to be deposed.