ho are men of an "idea;" and unable to accept human
things as they are, are passionate loyalists, passionate churchmen,
passionate revolutionists, as the accidents of their age may
determine. Happily for the welfare of mankind, persons so constituted
rarely arrive at power: should power come to them, they use it, as
Pole used it, to defeat the ends which are nearest to their hearts.

The teachers who finally converted the English nation to Protestantism
were not the declaimers from the pulpit, nor the voluminous
controversialists with the pen. These, indeed, could produce arguments
which, to those who were already convinced, seemed as if they ought to
produce conviction; but conviction did not follow till the fruits of
the doctrine bore witness to the spirit from which it came. The
evangelical teachers, caring only to be allowed to develop their own
opinions, and persecute their opponents, had walked hand in hand with
men who had spared neither tomb nor altar, who had stripped the lead
from the church roofs, and stolen the bells from the church towers;
and between them they had so outraged such plain honest minds as
remained in England, that had Mary been content with mild repression,
had she left the pope to those who loved him, and married, instead of
Philip, some English lord, the mass would have retained its place, the
clergy in moderate form would have resumed their old authority, and
the Reformation would have waited for a century. In an evil hour, the
queen listened to the unwise advisers, who told her that moderation in
religion was the sin of the Laodicaeans; and while the fanatics who had
brought scandal on the Reforming cause, either truckled, like Shaxton,
or stole abroad to wrangle over surplices and forms of prayer, the
true and the good atoned with their lives for the crimes of others,
and vindicated a noble cause by nobly dying for it.

{p.320} And while among the Reformers that which was most bright and
excellent shone out with preternatural lustre, so were the Catholics
permitted to exhibit also the preternatural features of the creed
which was expiring.

Although Pole and Mary could have laid their hands on earl and baron,
knight and gentleman, whose heresy was notorious, although in the
queen's own guard there were many who never listened to a mass,[662]
they dared not strike where there was danger that they would be struck
in return. They went out into the highways and hedges; they gathered
up th