alone but in combinations of the most various description—one or more in one direction being modified or overcome by the combined influence of others acting against them. Moreover, when a man has once chosen his party and taken his side, his convictions, as we see constantly in the example of a modern party politician, are very apt to deepen and harden with the effect of time and exercise. He becomes surrounded by a partisan atmosphere. He reads the publications of his own party, and listens to their conversation and their speeches; and when he hears a speech on the other side, he looks upon it as the mere one-sided harangue of a professional advocate, and fixes his own attention mainly on what there is to be said against it. Thus, after a time, he begins to act as if he believed, and sometimes even really to believe also, that his own party has an absolute monopoly of truth and right, and at last, if, as in the case before us, the contention concerns religion, that his own party are the servants of God, and their adversaries, therefore, the ministers of Satan. That party organisation tends to foster knavery may be admitted without qualification; but it does not necessarily follow that every party leader is therefore a conscious and deliberate knave.
The remaining principal transactions of the year 1549 are almost all of them connected directly not only with the change of religion, but also with the relations of Church and State. Thus the rebellions in Yorkshire and Devonshire were in some measure due to the unpopularity of the religious changes, though that in Norfolk appears to have been more of what we should call a socialistic character. But in all three cases alike they were considered as so many offences against the State, and were met and put down as such; and although, no
