It would seem that he began and ended his career in the orthodox religion and a general acquiescence in the ideas and customs of his time, and he played an honourable and acceptable part in that time; but his permanent interest lies not in his general conformity but in his incidental scepticism, in the fact that underlying the observances and recognised rules and limitations that give the texture of his life were the profoundest doubts, and that, stirred and disturbed by Plato, he saw fit to write them down.  One may question if such scepticism is in itself unusual, whether any large proportion of great statesmen, great ecclesiastics and administrators have escaped phases of destructive self-criticism of destructive criticism of the principles upon which their general careers were framed.  But few have made so public an admission as Sir Thomas More.  A good Catholic undoubtedly he was, and yet we find him capable of conceiving a non-Christian community excelling all Christendom in wisdom and virtue; in practice his sense of conformity and orthodoxy was manifest enough, but in his “Utopia” he ventures to contemplate, and that not merely wistfully, but with some confidence, the possibility of an absolute religious toleration.

The “Utopia” is none the less interesting because it is one of the most inconsistent of books.  Never were the forms of Socialism and Communism animated by so entirely an Individualist soul.  The hands are the hands of Plato, the wide-thinking Greek, but the voice is the voice of a humane, public-spirited, but limited and very practical English gentleman who takes the inferiority of his inferiors for granted, dislikes friars and tramps and loafers and all undisciplined and unproductive people, and is ruler in his own household.  He abounds in sound practical ideas, for the migration of harvesters, for the universality of gardens and the artificial incubation of eggs, and he sweeps aside all Plato’s suggestion of the citizen woman as though it had never entered his mind.  He had indeed the Whig temperament, and it manifested itself down even to the practice of reading aloud in company, which still prevails among the more representative survivors of the Whig tradition.  He argues ably against private property, but no thought of any such radicalism as the admission of those poor peons of his, with head half-shaved and glaring uniform against escape, to participation in ownership appears in his proposals.  His communism is all for the convenience of his Syphogrants and Tranibores, those gentlemen of gravity and experience, lest one should swell up above the others.  So too is the essential Whiggery of the limitation of the Prince’s revenues.  It is the very spirit of eighteenth century Constitutionalism.  And his Whiggery bears Utilitarianism instead of the vanity of a flower.  Among his cities, all of a size, so that “he that knoweth one knoweth all,” the Benthamite would have revised his sceptical theology and admitted the possibility of heaven.