committed.  Immense masses of property were confiscated.  Every part of Europe swarmed with exiles.  In moody and turbulent spirits zeal soured into malignity, or foamed into madness.  From the political agitation of the eighteenth century sprang the Jacobins.  From the religious agitation of the sixteenth century sprang the Anabaptists.  The partisans of Robespierre robbed and murdered in the name of fraternity and equality.  The followers of Kniperdoling robbed and murdered in the name of Christian liberty.  The feeling of patriotism was in many parts of Europe, almost wholly extinguished.  All the old maxims of foreign policy were changed.  Physical boundaries were superseded by moral boundaries.  Nations made war on each other with new arms, with arms which no fortifications, however strong by nature or, by art, could resist, with arms before which rivers parted like the Jordan, and ramparts fell down like the walls of Jericho.  The great masters of fleets and armies were often reduced to confess, like Milton’s warlike angel, how hard they found it

“—­To exclude Spiritual substance with corporeal bar.”

Europe was divided, as Greece had been divided during the period concerning which Thucydides wrote.  The conflict was not, as it is in ordinary times, between state and state, but between two omnipresent factions, each of which was in some places dominant and in other places oppressed, but which, openly or covertly, carried on their strife in the bosom of every society.  No man asked whether another belonged to the same country with himself, but whether he belonged to the same sect.  Party-spirit seemed to justify and consecrate acts which, in any other times, would have been considered as the foulest of treasons.  The French emigrant saw nothing disgraceful in bringing Austrian and Prussian hussars to Paris.  The Irish or Italian democrat saw no impropriety in serving the French Directory against his own native government.  So, in the sixteenth century, the fury of theological factions suspended all national animosities and jealousies.  The Spaniards were invited into France by the League; the English were invited into France by the Huguenots.

We by no means intend to underrate or to palliate the crimes and excesses which, during the last generation, were produced by the spirit of democracy.  But, when we hear men zealous for the Protestant religion, constantly represent the French Revolution as radically and essentially evil on account of those crimes and excesses, we cannot but remember that the deliverance of our ancestors from the house of their spiritual bondage was effected “by plagues and by signs, by wonders and by war.”  We cannot but remember that, as in the case of the French Revolution, so also in the case of the Reformation, those who rose up against tyranny were themselves deeply tainted with the vices which tyranny engenders.  We cannot but remember that libels scarcely less scandalous than those of