wont;' not
'belief' but opinion, and opinion which is half insincere. Nothing else
can take its place. The day is too late for Protestantism, which has
developed into wider forms, and in the matter of satisfied and complete
religious conviction Protestants are hardly better off than Catholics.

Don G---- had been much in Spain; he was acquainted with many of the
descendants of the old aristocracy, who lingered there in faded
grandeur. He had studied the history of his own country. He compared the
Spain and England of the sixteenth century with the Spain and England of
the present; and, like most of us, he knew where the yoke galled his own
neck. But economical and political prosperity is no exhaustive measure
of human progress. The Rome of Trajan was immeasurably more splendid
than the Rome of the Scipios; yet the progress had been downwards
nevertheless. If the object of our existence on this planet is the
development of character, if the culminating point in any nation's
history be that at which it produces its noblest and bravest men, facts
do not tend to assure us that the triumphant march of the last hundred
years is accomplishing much in that direction. I found myself arguing
with Don G---- that if Charles V. and Philip II. were to come back to
this world, and to see whither the movement had brought us of which they
had worked so hard to suppress the beginning, they would still say that
they had done right in trying to strangle it. The Reformation called
itself a protest against lies, and the advocates of it imagined that
when the lies, or what they called such, were cleared away, the pure
metal of Christianity would remain unsullied. The great men who fought
against the movement, Charles V. in his cabinet and Erasmus in his
closet, had seen that it could not rest there; that it was the cradle of
a revolution in which the whole spiritual and political organisation of
Europe would be flung into the crucible. Under that organisation human
nature had ascended to altitudes of chivalry, of self-sacrifice, which
it had never before reached. The sixteenth century was the blossoming
time of the Old World, and no such men had appeared since as then came
to the front, either in Spain or Italy, or Germany or France or England.
The actual leaders of the Reformation had been bred in the system which
they destroyed. Puritanism and Calvinism produced men of powerful
character, but they were limited and incapable of continuance;