hese 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 attitude towards Ireland, in the emancipation of
the Catholics there; in our changed attitude 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
analytic 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 Pocockes,[8]
father and son, Ockley and Sale, supplements or expands the teaching of
Locke