the entire political future of mankind was staked upon the questions that were at issue in England.  To keep the sacred flame of liberty alive required such a rare and wonderful concurrence of conditions that, had our forefathers then succumbed in the strife, it is hard to imagine how or where the failure could have been repaired.  Some of these conditions we have already considered; let us now observe one of the most important of all.  Let us note the part played by that most tremendous of social forces, religious sentiment, in its relation to the political circumstances which we have passed in review.  If we ask why it was that among modern nations absolute despotism was soonest and most completely established in Spain, we find it instructive to observe that the circumstances under which the Spanish monarchy grew up, during centuries of deadly struggle with the Mussulman, were such as to enlist the religious sentiment on the side of despotic methods in church and state.  It becomes interesting, then, to observe by contrast how it was that in England the dominant religious sentiment came to be enlisted on the side of political freedom. [Illustration:  Had it not been for the Puritans, political liberty would probably have disappeared from the world]

In such an inquiry we have nothing to do with the truth or falsity of any system of doctrines, whether Catholic or Protestant.  The legitimate purposes of the historian do not require him to intrude upon the province of the theologian.  Our business is to trace the sequence of political cause and effect.  Nor shall we get much help from crude sweeping statements which set forth Catholicism as invariably the enemy and Protestantism as invariably the ally of human liberty.  The Catholic has a right to be offended at statements which would involve a Hildebrand or a St. Francis in the same historical judgment with a Sigismund or a Torquemada.  The character of ecclesiastical as of all other institutions has varied with the character of the men who have worked them and the varying needs of the times and places in which they have been worked; and our intense feeling of the gratitude we owe to English Puritanism need in nowise diminish the enthusiasm with which we praise the glorious work of the mediaeval church.  It is the duty of the historian to learn how to limit and qualify his words of blame or approval; for so curiously is human nature compounded of strength and weakness that the best of human institutions are likely to be infected with some germs of vice or folly. [Sidenote:  Beginnings of Protestantism in the thirteenth century]