religious thought by the State. The government had often to compromise its purpose, and often to patch up temporary truces with its enemy. But it never lost sight of this, the culmination and crown of its domestic authority. It mattered not whether Catholicism or Calvinism held up its head against the monarchy; both should kneel at its feet. As regards Catholicism, the authority of the French government was very early established, and this control was so complete that the monarchy could utilise without fear the services of its long line of sacerdotal statesmen, Richelieu, Mazarin, Fleury, Dubois, Brienne. Calvinism, however, was so powerful and combative that the government could not master it, until, by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, it was almost abolished by one of the severest blows ever dealt by a nation at worthy subjects.
These two instances illustrate what it is that has necessitated the third phase of the struggle for liberty. In antiquity there was the identification of Church with State, in the Middle Ages there was the ascendency of Church over State, in modern times there was the domination of State over Church, to be combated. It was the effort to reject this latter absolutism and its consequences, that first evoked the energies, the vigour, the greatness of the English people.
In the first place, the English people, simultaneously with the French and the Spanish, were themselves confronted at home with a prolonged
