with varying details it was carried out in every town
and village from the Tweed to the Land's End. I dwell on the stories of
individual suffering, not to colour the narrative, or to reawaken
feelings of bitterness which may well rest now and sleep for ever, but
because, through the years in which it was struggling for recognition,
the history of Protestantism is the history of its martyrs. No rival
theology, as I have said, had as yet shaped itself into formulas. We
have not to trace any slow growing elaboration of opinion.
Protestantism, before it became an establishment, was a refusal to live
any longer in a lie. It was a falling back upon the undefined
untheoretic rules of truth and piety which lay upon the surface of the
Bible, and a determination rather to die than to mock with unreality any
longer the Almighty Maker of the world. We do not look in the dawning
manifestations of such a spirit for subtleties of intellect. Intellect,
as it ever does, followed in the wake of the higher virtues of manly
honesty and truthfulness. And the evidences which were to effect the
world's conversion were no cunningly arranged syllogistic
demonstrations, but once more those loftier evidences which lay in the
calm endurance by heroic men of the extremities of suffering, and which
touched, not the mind with conviction, but the heart with admiring
reverence.

[Sidenote: Wolsey falls, but the persecution is continued by the
bishops.]

In the concluding years of his administration, Wolsey was embarrassed
with the divorce. Difficulties were gathering round him, from the
failure of his hopes abroad and the wreck of his popularity at home; and
the activity of the persecution was something relaxed, as the guiding
mind of the great minister ceased to have leisure to attend to it. The
bishops, however, continued, each in his own diocese, to act with such
vigour as they possessed. Their courts were unceasingly occupied with
vexatious suits, commenced without reason, and conducted without
justice. They summoned arbitrarily as suspected offenders whoever had
the misfortune to have provoked their dislike; either compelling them to
criminate themselves by questions on the intricacies of theology,[85] or
allowing sentence to be passed against them on the evidence of abandoned
persons, who would not have been admissible as witnesses before the
secular tribunals.[86]

[Sidenote: The House of Commons, in checking causeless prosecutions, has
no w