and now
the liberty which was demanded had become what the instinct of the great
Emperor had told him from the first must be the final shape of it, a
revolution which would tolerate no inequalities of culture or position,
which insisted that no man was better than another, which was to exalt
the low and bring down the high till all mankind should stand upon a
common level--a level, not of baseness or badness, but a level of
good-humoured, smart, vulgar and vulgarising mediocrity, with melodrama
for tragedy, farce for comedy, sounding speech for statesmanlike wisdom;
and for a creed, when our fathers thought that we had been made a little
lower than the angels, the more modest knowledge that we were only a
little higher than the apes. This was the aspect in which the world of
the nineteenth century would appear to Sir Thomas More or the Duke of
Alva. From the Grand Captain to Senor Castelar, from Lord Burghley to
Mr. Gladstone, from Leonardo da Vinci or Velasquez to Gustave Dore, from
Cervantes and Shakespeare to 'Pickwick' and the 'Innocents at Home;'
from the faith which built the cathedrals to evolution and the survival
of the fittest; from the carving and architecture of the Middle Ages to
the workmanship of the modern contractor; the change in the spiritual
department of things had been the same along the whole line. Charles V.
after seeing all that has been achieved, the railways, the steam
engines, the telegraphs, the Yankee and his United States, which are the
embodiment of the highest aspirations of the modern era, after attending
a session of the British Association itself, and seeing the bishops
holding out their hands to science which had done such great things for
them, might fairly claim that it was a doubtful point whether the change
had been really for the better.

It may be answered, and answered truly, that the old thing was dead. The
Catholic faith, where it was left standing and where it still stands,
produces now nothing higher, nothing better than the Protestant. Human
systems grow as trees grow. The seed shoots up, the trunk forms, the
branches spread; leaves and flowers and fruit come out year after year
as if they were able to renew themselves for ever. But that which has a
beginning has an end, that which has life must die when the vital force
is exhausted. The faith of More, as well as the faith of Ken or Wilson,
were elevating and ennobling as long as they were sincerely believed,
but the time