Passing to the more indirect influence of Laud on his times, we can observe a narrowness of mind and aim which separates him from a man of such high imagination and idealism as Strafford, however closely identified their policies may have been for the moment. The chief feature of Laud's administration is attention to countless details, to the most trivial of which he attached excessive importance, and which are uninspired by any great underlying principle. His view was always essentially material. The one element in the church which to him was all essential was its visibility. This was the source of his intense dislike of the Puritan and Nonconformist conception of the church, which afforded no tangible or definite form. Hence the necessity for outward conformity, and the importance attached to ritual and ceremony, unity in which must be established at all costs, in contrast to dogma and doctrine, in which he showed himself lenient and large-minded, winning over Hales by friendly discussion, and encouraging the publication of Chillingworth's _Religion of Protestants_. He was not a bigot, but a martinet. The external form was with him the essential feature of religion, preceding the spiritual conception, and in Laud's opinion being the real foundation of it. In his last words on the scaffold he alludes to the dangers and slanders he had endured labouring to keep an uniformity in the external service of God; and Bacon's conception of a spiritual union founded on variety and liberty was one completely beyond his comprehension.
This narrow materialism was the true cause of his fatal influence both in church and state. In his own character it produced the somewhat blunted moral sense which led to the few incidents in his career which need moral defence, his performance of the marriage ceremony between his first patron Lord Devonshire and the latter's mistress, the divorced wife of Lord Rich, an act completely at variance with his principles; his strange intimacy with Buckingham; his love of power and place. Indistinguishable from his personal ambition was his passion for the aggrandisement of the church and its predominance in the state. He was greatly delighted at the foolish appointment of Bishop Juxon as lord treasurer in 1636. "No churchman had it," he cries exultingly, "since Henry VII.'s time, ... and now if the church will not hold up themselves under God, I can do no more." Spiritual influence, in Laud's opinion, was not enough for the church. The church as the guide of the nation in duty and godliness, even extending its activity into state affairs as a mediator and a moderator, was not sufficient. Its power must be material and visible, embodied in great places of secular administration and enthroned in high offices of state. Thus the church, descending into the political arena, became identified with the doctrines of one political party in the state--doctrines odious to the majority of the nation--and at the same time became associated with acts of violence and injustice, losing at once its influence and its reputation. Equally disastrous to the state was the identification of the king's administration with one party in the church, and that with the party in an immense minority not only in the nation but even among the clergy themselves.
