The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain Part 3

LECTURE III

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL

[_Tuesday, May_ 22_nd_, 1900]

In the history of the religion of an imperial race, it is not only the development of the ideal within the consciousness of the race itself that we have to consider, but the advance or decline in its conceptions of the religions of the peoples within the zone of its influence or dominion. For such a study the materials are only in appearance less satisfactory than for the study of the political ideal of a race. It is penetratingly observed by La Rochefoucauld that the history of the Fronde can never be accurately written, because the persons in that drama were actuated by motives so base that even in the height of performance each actor of the deeds was striving to make a record of them impossible. The reflection might be extended to other political revolutions, and to other incidents than the Fronde. Ranke's indefatigable zeal, his anxiety "in history always to see the thing as in very deed it enacted itself," never carried him nearer his object than the impression of an impression. No State papers, no doc.u.ments, the most authentic, can take us further.

But in this very strife, this zeal for the True for ever baffled yet for ever renewed, one of the n.o.blest attributes of the present age discovers itself. Indisputable facts are often the sepulchres of thought, and truth after all, not certainty, is the historian's goal.

It might even be urged that the records of religion, the martyr's resolution, the saint's fervour, the reformer's aspiration, the prophet's faith, offer a surer hope of attaining this goal than the records of politics.

-- 1. RELIGION AND IMPERIALISM

Religion forms an integral part of a nation's life, and in the development of the ideal of Imperial Britain on its religious side, the same transforming forces, the same energy of the soul, the operation of the same law a.n.a.logous to the law of tragedy already described, which manifest themselves in politics, are here apparent. The persecuting intolerant England of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, after pa.s.sing through the Puritan struggle of the seventeenth, the scepticism or indifference of later times, appears at last in the closing years of the nineteenth century as the supreme representative, if not the creator, of an ideal hardly less humane than that of the Humanists themselves--who recognized in every cry of the heart a prayer, silent or spoken, to the G.o.d of all the earth, of all peoples, and of all times. The Rome of the Antonines had even in this sphere no loftier ideal, no fairer vision, than that which now seems to float before Imperial Britain, no wider sympathy, not merely with the sects of its own faith, but with the religions of other races within its dominions, once hostile to its own. By slow degrees England has arisen, first to the perception of the truth in other sects, and then to a perception of the truth in other faiths. In lesser creeds, and amongst decaying races, tolerance is sometimes the equivalent of irreligion, but the effort to recognize so far as possible the principle, implicit in Montesquieu, that a man is born of this religion or of that, has, in all ages, been the stamp of imperial races. Upon the character of the race and the character of its religion, depend the answer to the question whether by empire the religion of the imperial race shall be exalted or debased.

As in politics so in religion it is to the fifteenth century--the tragic insight born of defeat, disaster, and soul-anguish--that we must turn for the causes, for the origins of that transformation in the life of the nation which has resulted in the conscious ideal of the Britain of to-day. The "separation" from Rome fifty years after Bosworth had no conscious imperial purpose, but it rescued the rising empire of England from the taint of medievalism which sapped the empires of Spain, of the Bourbons, and of the Hapsburgs. The Reformation in England owes much of its character amongst the people at large, apart from the government, above all in the heroic age of the Reformation in England--the Puritan wars--to that earlier convulsion in the nation's consciousness, to the period of anguish and defeat of which we have spoken at some length already. But for the remoter origins and causes of the whole movement styled "the English Reformation" we must search not in any one period or occurrence, but in the character of the race itself. The English Reformation does not begin with Henry VIII any more than the Scottish Reformation begins with John Knox: it springs from the heart of the race, from the intensity, the tragic earnestness with which in all periods England has conceived the supreme questions of man's destiny, man's relation to the Divine, the "Whence?" and the "Whither?" of human life. And it is the seriousness with which England regards its own religion, and the imaginative sympathy which gives it the power of recognizing the sincerity of other religions beneath its sway, which distinguish Imperial Britain from the empires of the past.

-- 2. THE PLACE OF RELIGION IN ENGLISH HISTORY

In the Roman Empire, for instance, the tolerance of the Republic pa.s.ses swiftly into the disregard of the Caesars of the Julian line, into the capricious or ineffectual persecution of later dynasties. Rome never endeavours in this sphere to lead its subject peoples to any higher vision. When that effort is made, Rome itself is dying. Alaric and the fifth century have come. For Rome the drama of a thousand years is ended: Rome is moribund and has but strength to die greatly, tragically. Would you see the end of Rome as in a figure darkly? Over a dead Roman a Goth bends, and by the flare of a torch seeks to read on the still brow the secret of his own destiny.

In the Empire of Persia and the great days of the Sa.s.sanides, in Kurush, who destroys the Median Empire, and spreads wider the religion of the vanquished, the religion of Zerdusht, the symbolic worship of flame, loveliest of inanimate things--even there no sustained, no deliberate effort towards an ideal amongst the peoples beneath the Persian sway can be discovered. Islam starts with religious aspirations, the most lofty, the most beneficent, but the purity of her ideals dies with Ali. At Damascus and at Bagdad an autocratic system warped by contact with Rome infects the religious; the result is a theocracy in which the purposes of Mohammed, at least on their political side, are abandoned, lost at last in the gloomy and often ferocious despotism of the Ottoman Turks.

Consider in contrast with these empires the question--What is the distinction in this phase of human life of the Empire of Britain, of its history? Steadily growing from its first beginnings--shall I say, from that great battle of the Winwaed, where three Kings are in conflict and the slayer of two lies dead--steadily growing, on to the present hour, as in politics so in religion, the effort sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious, but persistent, continuous, towards an ever purer, higher, n.o.bler conception of man's relations to the Divine. From this effort arises the Reformation, from this effort arises in the way of a thousand years the Empire based on the higher justice, the imaginative justice, the higher freedom, the imaginative freedom.

Thus even in the earliest periods of our history, during the struggle between Christianism and the religion of Thor and Woden, England shows far more violence, more earnestness, more fury on both sides, than is found anywhere else in Europe. Glance, for instance, at this struggle in Germany. Witikind[1] the Saxon arises as the champion of the old G.o.ds against Christianity. Charlemagne with his Frankish cavalry comes down amongst the Saxons. His march surpa.s.ses the march of Caesar, or of Constantine against Rome. Witikind does rise to the heights of heroism against Charlemagne twice; but in the end he surrenders, gives in, and dies a hanger-on at the court of his conqueror. Mercia, the kingdom of the mid-English, that too produces its champion of the old G.o.ds against the religion of Christ--Penda. There is no surrender here; two kings, I repeat, he slays, and grown old in war, he rouses himself like a h.o.a.ry old lion of the forest to fight his last battle.

An _intransigeant_, an irreconcilable, this King Penda, fighting his last battle against this new and hated thing, this Christianism! He lies dead there--he becomes no hanger-on. There you have the spirit of the race. It displays itself in a form not less impressive in the well-known incident in the very era of Penda, described by Bede.

King Eadwine sits in council to discuss the message of Christ, the mansions that await the soul of man, the promise of a life beyond death; and Coifi, one of the councillors, rising, speaks thus: "So seemeth to me the life of man, O King, as when in winter-tide, seated with your thanes around you, out of the storm that rages without a sparrow flies into the hall, and fluttering hither and thither a little, in the warmth and light, pa.s.ses out again into the storm and darkness. Such is man's life, but whence it cometh and whither it goeth we know not." "We ne kunnen," as Alfred the Great, its first translator, ends the pa.s.sage. Who does not see--notwithstanding the difference of time, place, character, and all stage circ.u.mstance--who does not see rise before him the judgment-hall of Socrates, hear the solemn last words to his judges: "I go to death, and you to life, but which of us goeth to the better is known to G.o.d alone--+adelon pant plen e to theo+"?

Such is the stern and high manner in which this conflict in England between the religions of Woden and Christ is conducted. There in the seventh century is the depth of heart, the energy of soul, the pity and the insight which appear in other forms in after ages. The roll of English names in the _Acta Sanctorum_ is the living witness of the sincerity, the intensity with which the same men who fought to the death for Woden at the Winwaed, or speculated with Coifi on the eternal mystery, accepted the faith which Rome taught, the ideal from Galilee trans.m.u.ted by Roman imagination, Roman statesmanship. The Saintly Ideal lay on them like a spell: earth existed but to die in, life was given but to pray for death. Rome taught the Saxon and the Jute that all they had hitherto prayed for, glory in battle, earthly power and splendour, must be renounced, and become but as the sound of bells from a city buried deep beneath the ocean. Instead of defiance, Rome taught them reverence; instead of pride, self-abas.e.m.e.nt; instead of the worship of delight, the worship of sorrow. In this faith the Saxon and the Jute strove with tragic seriousness to live. But the old faith died hard, or lived on side by side with the new, far into the Middle Age. Literature reflects the inner struggles of the period: the war-song of Brunanburh, the mystic light which hangs upon the verses of Caedmon, the melancholy of Cynewulf's lyrics. Yet what a contrast is the England delineated by Bede with Visigothic Spain, with Lombard Italy, or Frankish Gaul, as delineated by Gregory of Tours!

Thus these Angles, Jutes, and Saxons, slowly disciplining themselves to the new ideal--to them in the ninth century come the Vikings. They are not less conspicuous in valour, nor less profoundly sensitive to the wonder and mystery of life, the poets in other lands of the Eddas and of the Northern Myths. England as we know it is not yet formed.

Amongst the formative influences of English religion and English freedom, and ultimately of this ideal of modern times, must be reckoned the Viking and the Norseman, the followers of Guthrum, of Ivar, of Hrolf, not less than the followers of Cerdic and of Cymric. To the religious consciousness of the Jutes, Angles and Saxons, the Vikings bring a religious consciousness as deep and serious. The struggle against the Danes and Normans is not a struggle of English against foreigners; it is a conflict for political supremacy amongst men of the same race, who ultimately grow together into the England of the fourteenth century. In the light of the future, the struggle of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries does but continue the conflicts of the Heptarchic kings. To this land of England the Vikings have the right which the followers of Cerdic and Cynric had--the right of supremacy, the right which the _will_ to possess it and the resolution to die for that will, confers.

-- 3. DISTINCTION OF THE RELIGION OF THE VIKINGS

The religion of the Vikings was the converse of their courage.

Aristotle remarks profoundly that the race which cannot quit itself like a man in war cannot do any great thing in philosophy. Religion is the philosophy of the warrior. And the scanty records of the Vikings, the character of Knut, for instance, or that of the Conqueror, attest the principle that the thoughts of the valiant about G.o.d penetrate more deeply than the thoughts of the dastard. The Normans, who close the English _Welt-wanderung_, who close the merely formative period of England, ill.u.s.trate this conspicuously. If the sombre fury of the Winwaed displays the stern depths of religious conviction in the vanguard of our race, if the Eddas and Myths argue a religious earnestness not less deep in the Vikings, the high seriousness of the religious emotion of the Norseman is not less clearly attested. Europe of the eleventh century holds three men, each of heroic proportions, each a Teuton in blood--Hildebrand, Robert Guiscard, and William the Conqueror. In intellectual vision, in spiritual insight, Hildebrand has few parallels in history. He is the founder of the Mediaeval Papacy, realizing in its orders of monks, priests, and crusaders a State not without singular resemblances to that which Plato pondered.

Like Napoleon and like Buonarroti, Hildebrand had the power, during the execution of one gigantic design, of producing others of not less astonishing vastness, to reinforce or supplant the first should it fail. One of his designs originated in the impression which Norman genius made upon him. It was to transform this race, the tyrants of the Baltic and the English seas, the dominators of the Mediterranean and the Aegean, into omnipresent emissaries and soldiers of the theocratic State whose centre was Rome. But the vastness of his original design broke even the mighty will of Hildebrand; his purpose with regard to the Norseman remains like some abandoned sketch by Buonarroti or Tintoretto. Yet no ruler of men had a profounder knowledge of character, and with the Viking nature circ.u.mstance had rendered him peculiarly familiar. The judgment of Orderic and of William of Malmesbury confirms the impression of Hildebrand. But the Normans have been their own witnesses, the cathedrals which they raised from the Seine to the Tyne are epics in stone, inspired by no earthly muse, fit emblems of the rock-like endurance and soaring valour of our race.

There is a way of writing the history of Senlac which Voltaire, Thierry, Michelet, and Guizot dote upon, infecting certain English historians with their complacency, as if the Norse Vikings were the descendants of Chlodovech, and the conquest of England were the glory of France. The absurdity was crowned in 1804, when Napoleon turned the attention of his subjects to the history of 1066, as an auspicious study for the partners of his great enterprise against the England of Pitt! How many Franks, one asks, followed the red banner of the b.a.s.t.a.r.d to Senlac, or, leaning on their shields, watched the coronation at Westminster? Nor was it in the valley of the Seine that the Nors.e.m.e.n acquired their genius for religion, for government, for art.

To the followers of Hrolf the empire of Charlemagne had the halo which the Empire of Rome had to the followers of Alaric, and in that spirit they adopted its language and turned its laws to their own purposes.

But Jutes and Angles and Saxons, Ostmen and Danes, were, if less a.s.siduous, not less earnest pupils in the same school as the Nors.e.m.e.n: to all alike, the remnant of the Frankish realm of Charles lay nearest, representing Rome and the glory of the Caesars. Nature and her affinities drew the Normans to the West, across the salt plains whither for six hundred years the most adventurous of their own blood had preceded them. They closed the movement towards the sunset which Jute and Saxon began; they are the last, the youngest, and in politics the most richly gifted; yet in other departments of human activity not more richly gifted than their kindred who produced Cynewulf and Caedmon, Aidan and Bede, Coifi and Dunstan. And who shall affirm from what branch of the stock the architects of the sky-searching cathedrals sprang?

Senlac is thus in the line of Heptarchic battles; it is the last struggle for the political supremacy over all England amongst those various sections of the Northern races who in the way of six hundred years make England, and who in their religious and political character lay the unseen foundations of Imperial Britain.

Two traits of the Norman character impress the greatest of their contemporary historians, William of Malmesbury--the Norman love of battle and the Norman love of G.o.d. Upon these two ideas the history of the Middle Age turns. The crusader, the monk, the troubadour, the priest, the mystic, the dreamer and the saint, the wandering scholar and the scholastic philosopher, all derive thence. Chivalry is born.

The knight beholds in his lady's face on earth the image of Our Lady in Heaven, the Virgin-Mother of the Redeemer of men. From the grave of his dead mistress Ramon Lull withdraws to a hermit's cell to ponder the beauty that is imperishable; and over the grave of Beatrice, Dante rears a shrine, a temple more awful, more sublime than any which even that age has carved in stone.

Into this theatre of tossing life, the nation which the followers of Cerdic and Knut and of William the Conqueror have formed enters greatly. In thought, in action, in art, something of the mighty role which the future centuries reserve for her is portended. The immortal energy, the love of war, the deep religious fervour of England find in the Crusades, as by G.o.d's own a.s.signment, the task of her heart's desire. We have but to turn to the churches of England, to study the Templars carved upon their sepulchres, to know that in that great tournament of the world the part of the Franks, if the noisier and more continuous, was not more earnest. How singular is the chance, if it be chance, which confronts the followers of the new faith with a Penda, and the followers of the crescent with a Richard Lion-heart! Upon the shifting Arabic imagination he alone of the infidels exercises enduring sway. The hero of Ta.s.so has no place in Arab history, but the memory of Richard is there imperishably. Richard's services to England are not the theme of common praise, yet, if we estimate the greatness of a king by another standard than roods of conquered earth, or roods of parchment blackened with unregarded statutes, Richard I, crusader and poet, must be reckoned amongst the greatest of his great line, and his name to the Europe of the Middle Age was like the blast of a trumpet announcing the England of the years to come.

-- 4. WORLD-HISTORIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ENGLISH REFORMATION

The crusader of the twelfth century follows the saint of an earlier age, and in the thirteenth, England, made one in political and const.i.tutional ideals, attains a source of profounder religious unity.

The consciousness that not to Rome, but to Galilee itself she may turn for the way, the truth, the light, has arisen. In the steady development, in the ever-deepening power of this consciousness, lies the unwritten history of the English Reformation. The race resolves no more to trust to other witness, but with its own eyes to look upon the truth.

Political history has its effect upon the growth of this conviction.

In the fourteenth century, for instance, the Papacy is at Avignon.

Edward I in the beginning of that century withstands Boniface VIII, the last great pontiff in whom the temper and resolution of Hildebrand appear, as William the Conqueror had withstood Gregory VII. The statute of _praemunire_, a generation later, prepares the way for Wyclif. The Papacy is now but an appanage of the Valois monarchs. How shall England, conqueror of those monarchs at Crecy and on other fields, reverence Rome, the dependent of a defeated antagonist?

The same bright energy of the soul, the same awe, rooted in the blood of our race, which manifest themselves in the early and Middle Ages, determine the character of the religious history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the fifteenth century, suffering and the presence of suffering, the law of tragedy of which we have spoken, add their transforming power to spiritual life. As in political life the sympathy with the wrongs of others grows into imaginative justice, so sympathy with the faiths of others, which springs from the consciousness of the first great illusion lost, and sorrow for a vanished ideal, grows into tolerance for the creeds and religions of others. For only a race deep-centred in its own faith, yet sensitive to the faith that is in others, can understand the religion of others; only such a race can found an empire characterized at once by freedom and by faith.

The very ardour of the belief of the race in the ideal from Rome--a Semitic ideal, trans.m.u.ted by Roman genius and policy--swept the Teutonic imagination beyond the ideal, seeking its sources where Rome herself had sought them. This is the impulse which binds the whole English Reformation, the whole movement of English religious thought from Wyclif to Cromwell and Milton, to Wordsworth and Carlyle. It is this common impulse of the race which Henry VIII relies upon, and because he is in this their leader the English people forgets his absolutism, his cruel anger, his b.l.o.o.d.y revenges.

The character of the English Reformation after the first tumultuous conflicts, the fierce essays of royal theocracy and Jesuit reactionism, set steadily towards Liberty of Conscience.

This spirit is glorified in Puritanism, the true heroic age of the Reformation. It appears, for example, in Oliver Cromwell himself.

Cromwell is one of the disputed figures in our history, and every English historian has drawn his own Cromwell. But to foreign historians we may look for a judgment less partial, less personal. Dr.

Dollinger, for instance, to whom wide sympathy and long and profound study of history have given the right, which can only be acquired by vigil and fasting, to speak about the characters of the past--he who by his position as Romanist is no pledged admirer, describes Cromwell as the "prophet of Liberty of Conscience."[2] This is the deliberate judgment of Dollinger. It was the judgment of the peasants of the Vaudois two hundred and fifty years ago! Somewhat the same impression was made by Cromwell upon Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Guizot.

Again in the seventeenth century, in the _Irene_ of Drummond, and in the remarkable work of Barclay, the _Argenis_,[3] in its whole conception of the religious {72} life, of monasticism, as in its idealization of the character of the great Henri Quatre, you find the same desire for a wider ideal, not less in religion than in politics.

We encounter it later in Shaftesbury and in Locke. It is the essential thought of the work of Thomas Hobbes. It is supremely and beautifully expressed in Algernon Sidney, the martyr of const.i.tutional freedom and of tolerance.

And what is the faith of Algernon Sidney? One who knew him well, though opposed to his party, said of him, "He regards Christianity as a kind of divine philosophy of the mind." Community of religious not less than of political aims binds closer the friendship of Locke and Shaftesbury. In the preparation of a const.i.tution for the Carolinas they found the opportunity which Corsica offered to Rousseau. In the _Letters on Toleration_[4] Locke did but expand the principles upon which, with Shaftesbury's aid, he elaborated the government of the new State. The Record Office has no more precious doc.u.ment than the draught of that work, the margins covered with corrections in the handwriting of these two men, the one the greatest of the Restoration statesmen, the other ranking amongst the greatest speculative thinkers of his own or any age. One suggested formula after another is traceable there, till at length the decision is made, that from the citizens of the new State shall be exacted, not adherence to this creed or to that, but simply the declaration, "There is a G.o.d." Algernon Sidney aids Penn in performing a similar task for Pennsylvania, and their joint work is informed by the same spirit as the "Const.i.tutions"

of Locke and Shaftesbury.

Thus in religion the men of the seventeenth century occupy a position a.n.a.logous to their position in politics, already delineated. In politics, as we have seen, they establish a const.i.tutional government, and make sure the path to the wider freedom of the future. In religion they fix the principles of that philosophic tolerance which the later centuries develop and apply. Both in politics and in religion they turn aside from the mediaeval imperialism of Bourbon and Hapsburg, consciously or unconsciously preparing the foundations of the Imperialism of to-day.

If the divines, scholars, poets, and wits who met and talked under the roof of the young Lord Falkland at Tew represent in their religious and civil perplexities the spirit of the seventeenth century, within the intersecting circles of Pope and Bolingbroke, Swift and Addison, may be found in one form or another all the varied impulses of the eighteenth--intellectual, political, scientific, literary, or religious. England had succeeded to the place which Holland filled in the days of Descartes and Spinoza--the refuge of the oppressed, the home of political and religious freedom, the study of Montesquieu, the asylum of Voltaire.[5] Yet between the England of the eighteenth and the England of the seventeenth century there is no such deep gulf fixed as Carlyle at one period of his literary activity imagined. The one is the organic inevitable growth of the other. The England which fought at Blenheim, Fontenoy, and Quebec is the same England as fought at Marston Moor and Dunbar. Chatham rescued it from a deeper abas.e.m.e.nt than that into which it had fallen in the days of the Cavalier parliaments, and it followed him to heights unrecked of by Cromwell.

Nor is the religious character of the century less profound, less earnestly reverent, when rightly studied. Even its scepticism, its fiery denials, or vehement inquiry--a Woolston's, for instance, or a Cudworth's, like a Sh.e.l.ley's or a James Thomson's[6] long afterwards--spring from no love of darkness, but from the immortal ardour for the light, for Truth, even if there come with it silence and utter death. And from this same ardour arises that extraordinary outburst of varied intellectual and religious effort, critical or constructive, which makes the Revolutionary and the Georgian eras comparable in energy, if not in height of speculative inquiry, to the great period of the _Aufklarung_ in Germany. Kant acknowledged his indebtedness to Hume. Rousseau, Voltaire, Condillac, and Helvetius are in philosophic theory but pupils of Locke.

Towards the close of the century appeared Gibbon's great work, the _Decline and Fall_, a prose epic in seventy-one books, upon the last victories, the last triumphs, and the long, reluctant death-struggles of the Roman Empire, the insidious advance of inner decay, the ever-renewed a.s.saults of foreign violence, the Goth, the Saracen, the Mongol, and at the close, the leaguering lines of Mahomet, the farewell to the Greeks of the last of the Constantines, the Ottomans in the palaces of the Caesars, and the melancholy musings of an Italian scholar over the ruins on the Seven Hills. An epic in prose--and every one of its books might be compared to the gem-encrusted hilt of a sword, and each wonderfully wrought jewel is a sentence; but the point of the sword, like that of the cherubim, is everywhere turned against superst.i.tion, bigotry, and religious wrong.

David Hume's philosophy was more read[7] in France than in Scotland or England, but Hume wrote one book here widely read, his _History of England_. It has been superseded, but it did what it aimed at doing.

There are certain books which, when they have done their work, are forgotten, the _Dialectique_ of Ramus, for instance. This is not to be regretted. Hume's _History of England_ is one of these books. For nearly four generations it was the only History of England that English men and women read. It was impossible that a man like Hume, the central principle of whose life was the same as that of Locke, Shaftesbury, Gibbon--the desire for a larger freedom for man's thought--it was impossible for him to write without saturating every page with that purpose, and it was impossible that three generations could read that _History_ without being insensibly, unconsciously transformed, their aspirations elevated, their judgments moulded by contact with such a mind as that of Hume.

Recently the work of the great intellects of these two centuries bears fruit in our changed att.i.tude towards Ireland, in the emanc.i.p.ation of the Catholics there; in our changed att.i.tude towards the Jews, towards the peoples of India, towards Islam. Edward Gibbon and Hume laid the foundation of that college which is rising at Khartoum for the teaching of Mohammedanism under the Queen. It was not only Lord Kitchener who built it; John Locke, John Milton built it.

The saint, the crusader, the monk, reformer, puritan, and nonjuror lead in unbroken succession to the critic, the speculative thinker, the a.n.a.lytic or synthetic philosopher of the eighteenth and the nineteenth century, these representing Imperial Britain, as the former represent national or feudal England. Erigena in the ninth century surveying all things as from a tall rock, Dunstan, Roger Bacon wasting in a prison "through the incurable stupidity of the world," as he briefly explains it, Michael Scott, Hooker, Bacon, Glanvil, Milton, and Locke, formed by England, these men have in turn guided or informed the highest aspirations, the very heart of the race. The greatest empire in the annals of mankind is at once the most earnestly religious and the most tolerant. Her power is deep-based as the foundations of the rocks, her glance wide as the boundaries of the world, far-searching as the aeons of time.

Yet it is not only from within, but from without, that this transformation in the spirit of England has been effected; not only from within by the work of a Sidney, a Gibbon, but from without by the influence, imperceptible yet sure, of the faiths and creeds of the Oriental peoples she conquers. The work of the Arabists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such men as the Poc.o.c.kes,[8]