persecuted by the State, never failed to assert their liberty. And temporal followed inevitably upon religious freedom. For, obviously, in declining spiritual allegiance to the State, Englishmen had secured their civil liberties. If the State could not force them to think to its liking in one sphere, it had clearly no position from which to dictate to them in another. The fighters who had repelled the State's attack upon their religious, necessarily gained their civil, independence.
Thus was brought into being that liberty which has constituted one half of the greatness of England. Liberty is that spirit which, in politics, repudiates absolutism, respects the minority, and weighs the protest of a single conscience with care; which, in jurisprudence, favours the common, limits the canon, and rejects the civil, law, suspecting those iron maxims to be the weapons of imperial wrong; that spirit which, in the judgment seat, assumes innocency and gives the benefit of the doubt; which, in social life, sides with weakness against strength, with the outcast against the oppressor; and which, in all conflicts of authority against reason, inclines to follow the inner guide.
Such, then, is that emancipation of the individual from the undue authority of his fellows which England sought to secure. This is the first of the two factors of her past greatness.
But we have to fear the aggression of Nature no less than of our own kind, and we tread ground menaced by social forces and by natural forces too.
