y of prolonged conflict, when even the energy of
antagonistic assurance abated somewhat, and the controversial
spirit began to make room for the scientific; and as the storm
subsided, and the area of settled questions emerged, much of the
dispute was abandoned to the serene and soothing touch of
historians, invested as they are with the prerogative of
redeeming the cause of religion from many unjust reproaches, and
from the graver evils of reproaches that are just. Ranke used to
say that Church interests prevailed in politics until the Seven
Years' War, and marked a phase of society that ended when the
hosts of Brandenburg went into action at Leuthen, chaunting their
Lutheran hymns #29. That bold proposition would be disputed even if
applied to the present age. After Sir Robert Peel had broken up
his party, the leaders who followed him declared that no popery
was the only basis on which it could be reconstructed #30. On the
other side may be urged that, in July 1870, at the outbreak of
the French war, the only government that insisted on the
abolition of the temporal power was Austria; and since then we
have witnessed the fall of Castelar, because he attempted to
reconcile Spain with Rome.

Soon after 1850 several of the most intelligent men in France,
struck by the arrested increase of their own population and by
the telling statistics from Further Britain, foretold the coming
preponderance of the English race. They did not foretell, what
none could then foresee, the still more sudden growth of Prussia,
or that the three most important countries of the globe would, by
the end of the century, be those that chiefly belonged to the
conquests of the Reformation. So that in Religion, as in so many
things, the product of these centuries has favoured the new
elements; and the centre of gravity, moving from the Mediterranean
nations to the Oceanic, from the Latin to the Teuton, has also
passed from the Catholic to the Protestant #31.

Out of these controversies proceeded political as well as
historical science. It was in the Puritan phase, before the
restoration of the Stuarts, that theology, blending with
politics, effected a fundamental change. The essentially English
reformation of the seventeenth century was less a struggle
between churches than between sects, often subdivided by
questions of discipline and self-regulation rather than by dogma.
The sectaries cherished no purpose or prospect of prevailing over