e to
the gratitude and admiration of Old England, to which
it would be difficult to point out worthy rivals.

____

ENGLAND'S FORGOTTEN WORTHIES

The Reformation, the Antipodes, the American Continent,
the Planetary system, and the Infinite deep of
the Heavens have now become common and familiar
facts to us. Globes and orreries are the playthings of
our school-days; we inhale the spirit of Protestantism
with our earliest breath of consciousness; it is all but
impossible to throw back our imagination into the time
when, as new grand discoveries, they stirred every mind
which they touched with awe and wonder at the revelation
which God had sent down among mankind. Vast
spiritual and material continents lay for the first time
displayed, opening fields of thought and fields of
enterprise of which none could conjecture the limit. Old
routine was broken up. Men were thrown back on
their own strength and their own power, unshackled
to accomplish whatever they might dare. And although
we do not speak of these discoveries as the cause of
that enormous force of heart and intellect which
accompanied them (for they were as much the effect
as the cause, and one reacted on the other), yet at
any rate they afforded scope and room for the play
of powers which, without such scope, let them have
been as transcendent as they would, must have passed
away unproductive and blighted.

An earnest faith in the supernatural, an intensely
real conviction of the divine and devilish forces by
which the universe was guided and misguided, was
the inheritance of the Elizabethan age from Catholic
Christianity. The fiercest and most lawless men did
then really and truly believe in the actual personal
presence of God or the devil in every accident, or scene,
or action. They brought to the contemplation of the
new heaven and the new earth an imagination saturated
with the spiritual convictions of the old era, which
were not lost, but only infinitely expanded. The
planets whose vastness they now learnt to recognize
were, therefore, only the more powerful for evil or for
good; the tides were the breathing of Demogorgon;
and the idolatrous American tribes were real worshippers
of the real devil, and were assisted with the
full power of his evil army.

It is a form of thought which, however in a vague
and general way we may continue to use its phraseology,
has become, in its detailed application to life, utterly
strange to us. We congratulate