uses
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.

Sec. 2. THE PLACE OF RELIGION IN ENGLISH HISTORY

In the Roman Empire, for instance, the tolerance of the Republic passes
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 Sassanides, 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