; but in all other things the
greatest names in the world would not lead him without reason."

[Sidenote: Puritanism and the Crown.]

It was plain that an impassable gulf parted such a temper as this from
the temper of unquestioning devotion to the Crown which the Tudors
termed loyalty; for it was a temper not only legal, but even pedantic in
its legality, intolerant from its very sense of a moral order and law of
the lawlessness and disorder of a personal tyranny, a temper of
criticism, of judgement, and, if need be, of stubborn and unconquerable
resistance. The temper of the Puritan indeed was no temper of mere
revolt. His resistance, if he was forced to resist, would spring not
from any disdain of kingly authority, but from his devotion to an
authority higher and more sacred than that of kings. He had as firm a
faith as the nation at large in the divine right of the sovereign, in
the sacred character of the throne. It was in fact just because his
ruler's authority had a divine origin that he obeyed him. But the nation
about the throne seemed to the Puritan not less divinely ordered a thing
than the throne itself; it was the voice of God, inspiring and
directing, which spoke through its history and its laws; it was God that
guided to wisdom the hearts of Englishmen in Parliament assembled as He
guided to wisdom the hearts of kings. Never was the respect for positive
law so profound; never was the reverence for Parliaments so great as at
the death of Elizabeth. There was none of the modern longing for a king
that reigned without governing; no conscious desire shows itself
anywhere to meddle with the actual exercise of the royal administration.
But the Puritan could only conceive of the kingly power as of a power
based upon constitutional tradition, controlled by constitutional law,
and acting in willing harmony with that body of constitutional
counsellors in the two Houses, who represented the wisdom and the will
of the realm.

[Sidenote: Puritanism and society.]

It was in the creation of such a temper as this that Puritanism gave its
noblest gift to English politics. It gave a gift hardly less noble to
society at large in its conception of social equality. Their common
calling, their common brotherhood in Christ, annihilated in the mind of
the Puritans that overpowering sense of social distinctions which
characterized the age of Elizabeth. There was no open break with social
traditions; no open revolt against the