and far from easy to
trace.

The Tudors had begun to persecute the old religion before they had
ceased to belong to it. That is one of the transitional complexities
that can only be conveyed by such contradictions. A person of the type
and time of Elizabeth would feel fundamentally, and even fiercely, that
priests should be celibate, while racking and rending anybody caught
talking to the only celibate priests. This mystery, which may be very
variously explained, covered the Church of England, and in a great
degree the people of England. Whether it be called the Catholic
continuity of Anglicanism or merely the slow extirpation of Catholicism,
there can be no doubt that a parson like Herrick, for instance, as late
as the Civil War, was stuffed with "superstitions" which were Catholic
in the extreme sense we should now call Continental. Yet many similar
parsons had already a parallel and opposite passion, and thought of
Continental Catholicism not even as the errant Church of Christ, but as
the consistent Church of Antichrist. It is, therefore, very hard now to
guess the proportion of Protestantism; but there is no doubt about its
presence, especially its presence in centres of importance like London.
By the time of Charles II., after the purge of the Puritan Terror, it
had become something at least more inherent and human than the mere
exclusiveness of Calvinist creeds or the craft of Tudor nobles. The
Monmouth rebellion showed that it had a popular, though an
insufficiently popular, backing. The "No Popery" force became the crowd
if it never became the people. It was, perhaps, increasingly an urban
crowd, and was subject to those epidemics of detailed delusion with
which sensational journalism plays on the urban crowds of to-day. One of
these scares and scoops (not to add the less technical name of lies) was
the Popish Plot, a storm weathered warily by Charles II. Another was the
Tale of the Warming Pan, or the bogus heir to the throne, a storm that
finally swept away James II.

The last blow, however, could hardly have fallen but for one of those
illogical but almost lovable localisms to which the English temperament
is prone. The debate about the Church of England, then and now, differs
from most debates in one vital point. It is not a debate about what an
institution ought to do, or whether that institution ought to alter, but
about what that institution actually is. One party, then as now, only
cared for it becaus