shines out, though a religious romance, amidst the dulness of the literature of the time. The Quakers, who represented in their 118 beginning the peaceable and religious side of the Levellers, arose and grew and flourished in spite of persecution; the Cameronians in Scotland made an ineffectual armed resistance to the dying out of enthusiasm; while across the Atlantic the descendants of the earlier Puritans carried on an almost theocratic government, which, among other things persecuted the Quakers most cruelly.
Little by little, however, all that was not quite commonplace and perfunctory died out in English Protestantism, and respectable indifferentism had carried all before it by the end of the century. Politics and religion had no longer any real bond of union, and the religious side of Puritanism, Evangelicanism, disappears here, to come to light again in the next century under the leadership of Whitfield.
English Puritanism had left behind it a respectable, habitual, and formal residuum strong enough to resent James II.’s Papistry, and to make its resentment felt; while at the same time the constitutionalism, which began the anti-absolutist opposition in 119 Charles I.'s time, and which had been interrupted by Cromwell's iron and Charles II.’s mud absolutism, gathered head again and soon assumed definite form. The Stuart monarchy, with its “divine right” of absolute sovereignty, was driven from England in the person of James II, a constitutional king was found in William of Orange, and constitutional party government began.
Thus, in spite of interruption, was carried out the middle-class revolution in England; like all other revolutions, it arrived at the point which it really set out to gain; but not until it had shaken off much which at one time helped forward its progress, and which was and still is mistaken for an essential part of it. Religious and Republican enthusiasm, although they (especially the former) played their part in