Principles of western civilisation

324 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

of Charles II. was alone made possible—was, that the predominance of Parliament in the Church and over the bishops had been in turn substituted for that of the king. This was the beginning of the final stage. In the second Revolution, completed twentyeight years later with the flight of James II., and producing as its result the Toleration Act and the Bill of Rights, there began in England the modern era of parliamentary government by the system of mutually opposing parties. In this final transition, the steps of which carry us down into our own time, the inevitable end was already in sight. For it had become at last only a matter of time when there must necessarily be accomplished in England the emancipation, now in turn, of the religious consciousness from the control of Parliament, in a parliamentary system in which all the leading parties in the State were necessarily represented.

It was amongst the English-speaking peoples, although not in England, that the final stages of this immense drama of progress was first reached in the course of inevitable development. In one of the most interesting chapters in modern history, enacted in the English-speaking settlements in America, the progress of events, free from the local disturbing causes which had operated in England, was more rapid and more definite. In English-speaking America nearly every colony began, to use Mr. Bryce’s words, “with an establishment and endowment of religion by the civil power. After the American Revolution had turned the colonies into States, every State in which such

1 Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, Intro. xxxviii. and Ixvil.

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