eautiful truth for the Czar,
though only a blasphemous jest for his rascally allies, Metternich and
Castlereagh. Austria, though she had lately fallen to a somewhat
treasonable toying with heathens and heretics of Turkey and Prussia,
still retained something of the old Catholic comfort for the soul.
Priests still bore witness to that mighty mediaeval institution which
even its enemies concede to be a noble nightmare. All their hoary
political iniquities had not deprived them of that dignity. If they
darkened the sun in heaven, they clothed it with the strong colours of
sunrise in garment or gloriole; if they had given men stones for bread,
the stones were carved with kindly faces and fascinating tales. If
justice counted on their shameful gibbets hundreds of the innocent dead,
they could still say that for them death was more hopeful than life for
the heathen. If the new daylight discovered their vile tortures, there
had lingered in the darkness some dim memory that they were tortures of
Purgatory and not, like those which Parisian and Prussian diabolists
showed shameless in the sunshine, of naked hell. They claimed a truth
not yet disentangled from human nature; for indeed earth is not even
earth without heaven, as a landscape is not a landscape without the sky.
And in, a universe without God there is not room enough for a man.

It may be held, therefore, that there must in any case have come a
conflict between the old world and the new; if only because the old are
often broad, while the young are always narrow. The Church had learnt,
not at the end but at the beginning of her centuries, that the funeral
of God is always a premature burial. If the bugles of Bonaparte raised
the living populace of the passing hour, she could blow that yet more
revolutionary trumpet that shall raise all the democracy of the dead.
But if we concede that collision was inevitable between the new Republic
on the one hand and Holy Russia and the Holy Roman Empire on the other,
there remain two great European forces which, in different attitudes and
from very different motives, determined the ultimate combination.
Neither of them had any tincture of Catholic mysticism. Neither of them
had any tincture of Jacobin idealism. Neither of them, therefore, had
any real moral reason for being in the war at all. The first was
England, and the second was Prussia.

It is very arguable that England must, in any case, have fought to keep
her influence on