f Charles Martel had been defeated at the famous battle near
Tours, the creed of Islam would have overspread a great part of what
is now Christian Europe, and in that case it might have ruled over it
for centuries. No one can follow the history of the conversion of the
barbarians to Christianity without perceiving how often a religion has
been imposed in the first instance by the mere will of the ruler,
which gradually took such root that it became far too strong for any
political power to destroy. Persecution cannot annihilate a creed
which is firmly established, or maintain a creed which has been
thoroughly undermined, but there are intermediate stages in which its
influence on national beliefs has been enormously great. Even at the
Reformation, though more general causes were of capital importance,
political events had a very large part in defining the frontier line
between the rival creeds, and the divisions so created have for the
most part endured.

In secular politics numerous instances of the same kind will occur to
every thoughtful reader of history. If, as might easily have happened,
Hannibal after the battle of Cannae had taken and burned Rome, and
transferred the supremacy of the world to a maritime commercial State
upon the Mediterranean; if, instead of the Regency, Louis XV. and
Louis XVI., France had passed during the eighteenth century under
sovereigns of the stamp of the elder branch of the House of Orange or
of Henry IV., or of the Great Elector, or of Frederick the Great; if,
at the French Revolution, the supreme military genius had been
connected with the character of Washington rather than with the
character of Napoleon--who can doubt that the course of European
history would have been vastly changed? The causes that made
constitutional liberty succeed in England, while it failed in other
countries where its prospects seemed once at least as promising, are
many and complex; but no careful student of English history will doubt
the prominence among them of the accidental fact that James II., by
embracing Catholicism, had thrown the Church feeling at a very
critical moment into opposition to the monarchical feeling, and that
in the last days of Anne, when the question of the succession was
trembling most doubtfully in the balance, his son refused to conform
to the Anglican creed.

Laws are no doubt in a great degree inoperative when they do not
spring from and represent the opinion of the nation, but