DÖLLINGER ON THE TEMPORAL POWER 331
continued to be so thoroughly committed to the principle of unconditional submission to the power from which it derived its existence, that J ames I I. could reckon on this servile spirit as a meañs of effecting the subversion of the Establishment; and Defoe reproached the bishops with having by their flattery led on the king, whom they aban- doned in the moment of his need. The Revolution, which reduced the royal prerogative, removed the oppressiveness of the royal supremacy. The Established Church was not emancipated from the crown, but the Nonconformists were emancipated from the tyranny of the Established Church. Protestantism, which in the period of its power dragged down by its servility the liberties of the nation, did afterwards, in its decay and disorganisation, by the surrender of its dogmatic as well as of its political prin- ciple, promote their recovery and development. It lost its oppressiveness in proportion as it lost its strength, and it ceased to be tyrannical when divines had been forced to give up its fundamental doctrine, and when its unity had been dissolved by the sects. The revival of those liberties which, in the Middle Ages, had taken root under the influence of the Church, coincided with the progress of the Protestant sects, and with the decay of the penal laws. The contrast behveen the political character of those countries in which Protestantism integrally prevailed, and that of those in which it was divided against itself, and could neither establish its system nor work out its consequences, is as strongly marked as the contrast between the politics of Catholic times and those which were introduced by the Reformation. The evil which it \vrought in its strength was turned to good by its decline. Such is the sketch of the effects of the Protestant apostasy in the political order, considered chiefly in rela- tion to the absence of a supreme ecclesiastical authority independent of political control. It would require far more space to exhibit the positive influence of heretical principles on the social foundations of political life; and the picture \vould not be complete without showing the contrast exhibited by Catholic States, and tracing their
