y of the soul, the operation of
the same law analogous 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
passing 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 God 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 ca