e sum of political forces which were still in process of
developement, but as a mass of fixed and co-ordinated institutions whose
form and mutual relations had been settled in some distant past. He had
opposed the Stuart tyranny because--as he held--it had broken down this
constitution to the profit of the Crown. He worked with the men of the
Long Parliament in what he regarded as the work of restoring it; he left
them the moment that he fancied they were themselves about to break it
down to the profit of the People. Years of exile had only hardened his
ideas. He came back with the fixed resolve to hold the State together at
the exact point where the first reforms of the Long Parliament had left
it. The power and prerogative of the Crown, the authority of the Church,
were to be jealously preserved, but they were to be preserved by the
free will and conviction of the Parliament. It was on this harmonious
co-operation of these three great institutions that Clarendon's system
hung. Its importance to future times lay in his regarding Parliament and
the Church, not as mere accidents or checks in the system of English
government, but as essential parts of it, parts which were as needful
for its healthy working as the Crown itself, and through which the power
of the Crown was to be exercised. Wholly to realize such a conception
it was necessary that the Parliament should be politically, the Church
religiously, representatives of the whole nation.

[Sidenote: Test and Corporation Act.]

The first of Clarendon's assumptions was not only a fact but a far
greater fact than he imagined. Hence it came about that his assembly of
the Parliament year after year, and the steady way in which he used it
to do the Crown's work by setting its stamp on every great political
measure, became of the highest importance in our constitutional
developement. The second was a fiction, for half England had passed from
the grasp of the Church, but it was to make it a fact that Clarendon
buckled himself to a desperate struggle with Nonconformity. It was under
his guidance that the Parliament turned to the carrying out of that
principle of uniformity in Church as well as in State on which the
minister was resolved. The chief obstacle to such a policy lay in the
Presbyterians, and the strongholds of the Presbyterians were the
corporations of the boroughs. In many of the boroughs the corporation
actually returned the borough members--in all they exercised