lidity of distinctions and demanding
fair play, found militant expression in Bacon's Rebellion. The episode
was an early instance of that struggle between rich and poor, between
exploiter and exploited, of that stubborn insistence upon equal
opportunity which have so often characterized the more decisive periods
of American history.

II

The origin of New England is inseparably connected with the Protestant
Reformation, that many-sided movement of which no formula is adequate to
convey the full meaning. From one point of view it was the
nationalization of the Church, the subjection of the ecclesiastical to
the lay power. In the end the principle of territorial sovereignty
everywhere prevailed, in Catholic no less than in Protestant countries:
whether Lutheran or Gallican or Anglican, whether completely separated
from Rome or retaining a spiritual communion with it, the Church
submitted to the principle of _cujus regio ejus religio_, and became an
instrument in the hands of kings for erecting the lay and territorial
absolutism on the ruins of the universal church-state. James I spoke for
all his kind when he cried out, "No Bishop no King!" The lay prince
wished not to destroy the Church, but to use it; the sum of his purpose
was to transfer the ultimate authority in conduct and thought from the
divinely appointed priest to the divinely appointed king.

But the Reformation was far more than resistance to Rome. It did not
cease when the king triumphed over the Pope. The "dissidence of dissent
and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion" was as incompatible
with royal as with priestly authority. In this "reformation of the
Reformation" the strength of the movement was everywhere in the towns.
It was generally true, and nowhere more so than in England, that
Protestantism was the result of a middle-class revolt against the
existing regime, a denial of established standards in politics and
morality, the determined attempt to effect a transvaluation of all
customary values.

The quarrel of the middle-class man with the world as he found it was of
long standing. In the feudal-ecclesiastical structure, fairly complete
in the eleventh century and to outward seeming still intact in the
fifteenth, there was no prepared niche for the _bourgeois_. The peasant
to obey and serve; the noble to fight and rule; the priest to instruct
and pray:--these, all in their different ways respected and respectable
careers, completed the