XXI.

I make use of the present tense, but am I speaking truly of present England?  Such powerful agencies of change have been at work during the last thirty years; and it is difficult, nay impossible, to ascertain in what degree they have affected the national character, thus far.  One notes the obvious:  decline of conventional religion, free discussion of the old moral standards; therewith, a growth of materialism which favours every anarchic tendency.  Is it to be feared that self-righteousness may be degenerating into the darker vice of true hypocrisy?  For the English to lose belief in themselves—­not merely in their potential goodness, but in their pre-eminence as examples and agents of good—­would mean as hopeless a national corruption as any recorded in history.  To doubt their genuine worship, in the past, of a very high (though not, of course, the highest) ethical ideal, is impossible for any one born and bred in England; no less impossible to deny that those who are rightly deemed “best” among us, the men and women of gentle or humble birth who are not infected by the evils of the new spirit, still lead, in a very true sense, “honest, sober, and godly” lives.  Such folk, one knows, were never in a majority, but of old they had a power which made them veritable representatives of the English ethos.  If they thought highly of themselves, why, the fact justified them; if they spoke, at times, as Pharisees, it was a fault of temper which carried with it no grave condemnation.  Hypocrisy was, of all forms of baseness, that which they most abhorred.  So is it still with their descendants.  Whether these continue to speak among us with authority, no man can certainly say.  If their power is lost, and those who talk of English hypocrisy no longer use the word amiss, we shall soon know it.

XXII.

It is time that we gave a second thought to Puritanism.  In the heyday of release from forms which had lost their meaning, it was natural to look back on that period of our history with eyes that saw in it nothing but fanatical excess; we approved the picturesque phrase which showed the English mind going into prison and having the key turned upon it.  Now, when the peril of emancipation becomes as manifest as was the hardship of restraint, we shall do well to remember all the good that lay in that stern Puritan discipline, how it renewed the spiritual vitality of our race, and made for the civic freedom which is our highest national privilege.  An age of intellectual glory is wont to be paid for in the general decline of that which follows.  Imagine England under Stuart rule, with no faith but the Protestantism of the Tudor.  Imagine (not to think of worse) English literature represented by Cowley, and the name of Milton unknown.  The Puritan came as the physician; he brought his tonic at the moment when lassitude and supineness