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Inquisition had existed from the time when reason meddled with what is holy, and from the very commencement of scepticism and innovation; but it was in the middle of the thirteenth century, after some examples of apostasy had alarmed the hierarchy, that Innocent III. first erected for it a peculiar tribunal, and separated, in an unnatural manner, ecclesiastical superintendence and instruction from its judicial and retributive office.
In countries where progress is to be bought only at the price of apostasy, they shut themselves up in their synagogues, and raise the wall of extreme separateness between themselves and their Gentile neighbors. There is never a Jewish community without its scholars, but where Jews may not be both intellectuals and Jews, they prefer to remain Jews.
Monmouth's friends hoped, that the exclusion of that prince would make way for their patron. The resentment against the duke's apostasy, the love of liberty, the zeal for religion, the attachment to faction; all these motives incited the country party.
And particularly, because the British united constitution is such as involves the whole land, and all ranks therein, in the dreadful guilt of idolatry, communicating with idolators, apostasy, perjury, &c. They declare they can have no communion therewith; but that it is such an association as that God's call to his people, concerning it, is, "Come out from among them.
Of course the original reference is to national apostasy, which was aggravated by the national covenant, and avenged by national disasters, which are interpreted and urged by the prophet as God's merciful pleading with men. But the text is true in reference to individuals. I. The universal indictment. This is not so much a charge of isolated overt acts, as of departure from God.
If it has done us good, assuredly the fact is not yet demonstrable. In old England, democracy is a thing so alien to our traditions and rooted sentiment that the line of its progress seems hitherto a mere track of ruin. In the very word is something from which we shrink; it seems to signify nothing less than a national apostasy, a denial of the faith in which we won our glory.
That apostasy from the political creed of the Pallisers had been a blow, much more felt than the loss of the seventy thousand pounds; but even under that blow he had consoled himself by thinking that a Conservative patriotic nobleman may serve his country, even as a Conservative. In the midst of this he had felt that the surest resource for his son against evil would be in an early marriage.
This scandalous apostasy could not but heighten the interest with which the nation looked forward to the day when the fate of the seven brave confessors of the English Church was to be decided. To pack a jury was now the great object of the King. The crown lawyers were ordered to make strict inquiry as to the sentiments of the persons who were registered in the freeholders' book.
The imputation of inconsistency is one to which every sound politician and every honest thinker must sooner or later subject himself. Fools and dead men are the only people who never change their opinions or their course of action. The course of great statesmen resembles that of navigable rivers, avoiding immovable obstacles with noble bends of concession, seeking the broad levels of opinion on which men soonest settle and longest dwell, following and marking the almost imperceptible slope of national tendency, yet forever recruited from sources nearer heaven, from summits where the gathered purity of ages lies encamped, and sometimes bursting open paths of progress and civilisation through what seem the eternal barriers of both. It is a loyalty to great ends, an anchored cling to solid principles, which knows how to swing with the tide, but not to be carried away by it, that we demand in public men, and not persistence in prejudice, sameness of policy, or stolid antagonism to the inevitable. But we demand also that they shall not too lightly accept Wrong instead of Right, as inevitable; and there is a kind of change that is suspicious because it is sudden, and detrimental to the character in proportion as it is of advantage to the man; and the judgment of mankind allows a well-founded distinction between an alteration of policy compelled by events, and an abandonment of professed principles tainted with any suspicion of self-interest. We hold that a Representative is a trustee for those who elected him, that his political apostasy only so far deserves the name of conversion as it is a conversion of what was not his to his own use and benefit; and we have a right to be impatient of instruction in duty from those whom the hope of promotion could nerve to make the irrevocable leap from a defeated party to a triumphant one, and who can serve either side, if so they only serve themselves. It is this kind of freedom from prejudice that has brought down our politics to the gambling level of the stock-market; it is this kind of unlucky success, and the readiness of the multitude to forgive and even to applaud it, that justify the old sarcasm, Patibulum inter et statuam qu
The loss of so much property was a small loss; the gain for the discipline of unborn generations was unspeakably great. The overthrow of the city in which the rebels dwelt would make children's children shudder at the thought of apostasy. The sacrifice of a material interest in order to afford sanction to moral laws is the highest wisdom of government, both human and divine.
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