THE HISTORY OF PROGRESS IN GREAT BRITAIN. BY ROBERT KEMP PHILP. WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATION S, BY W. NEWMAN, C. MELVILLE, H. SAUNDERS, ETC. PREFACE. HC253 1859 IN endeavouring to review in these pages some of the more interesting facts and characteristics of the national progress, we have devoted a considerable portion of our space to that one deeply-interesting subject, which includes in its influence almost every other subject with which the annalists of progress can have to deal-Liberty! or, to express that word in its more common and dual aspect, Civil and Religious Liberty! Without that priceless possession all other possessions are of little value; with it, all other needful things must come in time. Perhaps the most striking and pertinent illustration that we can here give of the eternal interest and value that inheres in such questions, is to recall for a moment the nature of certain passing events which have had almost a dramatic fitness to the current of our publication. While we were writing of Wycliffe, and the Pope's temporal power, and the dawn of the Reformation in England (all matters that Englishmen considered as settled so long ago and done with, that they could now possess only a mild historical and antiquarian interest), Europe was again resounding with the anguished cries of the Papacy,-threatened with the loss of its temporal dominion, and reagitating, in the hope of worldly salvation, the old fallacies and old superstitions, and claiming, with its old audacity, the power of infallible judgment, and the privilege of complete immunity from the usual principles and duties of enlightened government. While we were speaking of the precautions our (Catholic) forefathers had found it necessary to take against the kidnapping of children by Catholic monks, the existing Catholic priesthood was busy with the Mortara while we were showing how, in the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, Romanism, by refusing to purify itself, and by denying that it could be otherwise than pure, brought forth Protestantism, its true and noble, but not loved or cherished child;-while we were showing these things, that same Romanism was proving itself ready and M367978 |