ich formed the main strength of
the Tudor throne, had been sapped and weakened by the intellectual
activity of the Renascence, by its endless questionings, its historic
research, its philosophic scepticism. Writers and statesmen were alike
discussing the claims of government and the wisest and most lasting
forms of rule, travellers turned aside from the frescoes of Giorgione to
study the aristocratic polity of Venice, and Jesuits borrowed from the
schoolmen of the Middle Ages a doctrine of popular rights which still
forms the theory of modern democracy. On the other hand the nation was
learning to rely on itself, to believe in its own strength and vigour,
to crave for a share in the guidance of its own life. His conflict with
the two great spiritual and temporal powers of Christendom, his strife
at once with the Papacy and the House of Austria, had roused in every
Englishman a sense of supreme manhood, which told, however slowly, on
his attitude towards the Crown. The seaman whose tiny bark had dared the
storms of far-off seas, the young squire who crossed the Channel to
flesh his maiden sword at Ivry or Ostend, brought back with them to
English soil the daring temper, the sense of inexhaustible resources,
which had borne them on through storm and battle-field. The nation which
gave itself to the rule of the Stuarts was another nation from the
panic-struck people that gave itself in the crash of social and
religious order to the guidance of the Tudors. It was plain that a new
age of our history must open when the lofty patriotism, the dauntless
energy, the overpowering sense of effort and triumph, which rose into
their full grandeur through the war with Spain, turned from the strife
with Philip to seek a new sphere of activity at home.

[Sidenote: The spirit of religion.]

What had hindered this force from telling as yet fully on national
affairs was the breadth and largeness which characterized the temper of
the Renascence. Through the past half-century the aims of Englishmen had
been drawn far over the narrow bounds of England itself to every land
and every sea; while their mental activity spent itself as freely on
poetry and science as on religion and politics. But at the moment which
we have reached the whole of this energy was seized upon and
concentrated by a single force. For a hundred years past men had been
living in the midst of a spiritual revolution. Not only the world about
them but the world of thought an