for the Pope, and had been willing to embrace Henry's ideal scheme of a Church which should throw off the authority of the Pope, but retain the accepted doctrines of Catholicism with little or no alteration; and many more would have submitted to it for a time, while they turned their eyes to that coming General Council which was the centre of so much hope on the part of good and single-minded men, anxious for the purification of the Church and not for its destruction. But in revolutionary times moderate parties rarely produce much effect. A moderate man may be, and often is, the best-informed, the most rational, the most highly-gifted man of his time, but his very virtues, moral and intellectual alike, tend to disqualify him for the position of a great party leader. For this the requisite is enthusiasm, real or pretended; and for enthusiasm the first condition, in most cases, is either an intellectual incapacity for seeing more than one side of a question, or a moral obliquity which prevents a man from acknowledging another when he does see it. In such times men, even of the coolest tempers and the fairest and clearest judgments, find themselves compelled either to take a side and keep to it, often in defiance of their convictions and their conscience, or else to stand on one side and leave society, including themselves and all that are nearest and dearest to them, to be victimised by leaders less clear-sighted or more unscrupulous than themselves. If they choose the latter, they sink out of sight, and history knows them no more; if the former, we see them gradually losing the clearness of their intellectual vision, and rubbing the bloom off their moral natures, till they sink gradually into something not much better, but only very often less efficient, than the coarser natures who have plunged blindly or unscrupulously
