e it was Catholic, and the other only cared for it
because it was Protestant. Now, something had certainly happened to the
English quite inconceivable to the Scotch or the Irish. Masses of
common people loved the Church of England without having even decided
what it was. It had a hold different indeed from that of the mediaeval
Church, but also very different from the barren prestige of gentility
which clung to it in the succeeding century. Macaulay, with a widely
different purpose in mind, devotes some pages to proving that an
Anglican clergyman was socially a mere upper servant in the seventeenth
century. He is probably right; but he does not guess that this was but
the degenerate continuity of the more democratic priesthood of the
Middle Ages. A priest was not treated as a gentleman; but a peasant was
treated as a priest. And in England then, as in Europe now, many
entertained the fancy that priesthood was a higher thing than gentility.
In short, the national church was then at least really national, in a
fashion that was emotionally vivid though intellectually vague. When,
therefore, James II. seemed to menace this practising communion, he
aroused something at least more popular than the mere priggishness of
the Whig lords. To this must be added a fact generally forgotten. I mean
the fact that the influence then called Popish was then in a real sense
regarded as revolutionary. The Jesuit seemed to the English not merely a
conspirator but a sort of anarchist. There is something appalling about
abstract speculations to many Englishmen; and the abstract speculations
of Jesuits like Suarez dealt with extreme democracy and things
undreamed of here. The last Stuart proposals for toleration seemed thus
to many as vast and empty as atheism. The only seventeenth-century
Englishmen who had something of this transcendental abstraction were the
Quakers; and the cosy English compromise shuddered when the two things
shook hands. For it was something much more than a Stuart intrigue which
made these philosophical extremes meet, merely because they were
philosophical; and which brought the weary but humorous mind of Charles
II. into alliance with the subtle and detached spirit of William Penn.

Much of England, then, was really alarmed at the Stuart scheme of
toleration, sincere or insincere, because it seemed theoretical and
therefore fanciful. It was in advance of its age or (to use a more
intelligent language) too thin and ethere