and unscrupulously slandered. He was a good Churchman, and a good man for his times. He was a man more sinned against than sinning, and his bad acts of policy were not bad in intention. He was murdered by the Puritans as much out of hatred at his episcopal beliefs as through his influence against the Puritans. He had strong principles, but his fault was that he used wrong methods to enforce them. We must make allowances, however, for the time in which he lived, and we should remark that his enemies used more arbitrary measures than he used, to put down the teaching of men of Laud's school.
Southey, in his "Book of the Church," speaks very highly of Laud. He says, [1]"His love of learning, his liberal temper, his munificence, and his magnanimity would have made him an honour and a blessing to the Church in its happiest ages; his ardent, incautious, sincere, uncompromising spirit, were ill adapted to that in which his lot had fallen. But the circumstances which brought on, together with his destruction, the overthrow of the Church and State, the murder of the king and the long miseries of the nation, were many and widely various; some of remote and foreign origin, others recent and of home growth."
It was not Laud's desire to be domineering and absolute. He did not court popularity; that was given to him without his own desire for it. Mr. Lane says of him, [2]"He never wavered in his determination to do what he felt to be just and right when persons of high position were charged before him."
Laud spoke at his trial of the way he viewed his own
