and as England needed a united front and a resolute bearing to face its manifold foes, discussion was prohibited. The intention was not so much to suppress opinion but to attempt to make the State the arbiter of the limits within which the expression of opinion was permissible. The State was tolerant in so far that it did not aim at enforcing unity, but it demanded a minimum of uniformity, the extent of which it claimed the right of defining. Thus the Church tended to lose the appearance of a free and self-governing body, and seemed to be an instrument of the policy of the State. Its pleadings and its arguments lost half their weight because they were backed by coercive authority. The dangerous formula, "Obey the law," was introduced into the settlement of questions which concerned the relations of the individual conscience and God: a dangerous formula, because it seemed to admit the existence of a body of enlightened opinion which was struggling against the decisions of expediency and could not be met upon the open ground of truth and the reasonableness of the thing in itself.
Moreover, this uniformity of the sixteenth century was essentially retrograde. We are in the habit of looking on the mediæval Church as a great engine for the repression of opinion; but this is scarcely true. It allowed the formation of opposing bodies of philosophic opinion; men ranged themselves under the banners of conflicting teachers; many questions which have since been closed by the Church of Rome were then open for discussion. The peasant in the country village was not left entirely at the mercy of his parish priest, but was aroused by the stirring mission
