This was the fictitious personage whose travels had led him to the distant island of Utopia, and who described to Sir Thomas the nature of its government.  Europe for fifteen centuries had been under the control of the clergy, and what had been the result?  Where was the progress?  How much had the barbarism of one century differed from that of the last?  But in Utopia there was no priesthood.  Men had a simple faith.  They “were persuaded that it is not in a man’s power to believe what he list,” and when they met in public worship it was to hold such services that all might freely join in them.  Religion in Utopia was left to the individual conscience.  War was considered an unmitigated evil, and never undertaken except in the extremest necessity.  The people of Utopia, therefore, not being exclusively occupied, on the one hand, with discussing their religion and enforcing it on others, or, on the other hand, with violating all its teachings, were able to think of other things.  How to make the best laws for the government of the commonwealth; how to deal with crime, with labor; how to promote the highest condition of general well-being, as regarded the public health, public education, the comfort and cleanliness of dwellings;—­these were the questions which the Utopians considered most important, and these were solved by the exercise of human reason.  These were questions, too, with which the English people found themselves confronted in the beginning of the sixteenth century, and before that century had passed away, the results even of a very imperfect solution regarding them were apparent in every department and in every class of life.

The great mind, the noble character of Sir Thomas More stand out the best production of his time.  The strong religious bias of the man made it inevitable that he should remain considerably under the influence of the old theological teachings, but in the intelligent man of the world, in the large-hearted philanthropist, in the honest patriot, appear the new and beneficent tendencies which were at work.  Like all men who have been in advance of their time, More was looked upon as a dreamer.  A dreamer he might naturally seem, who, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, looked for peace, for religious toleration, for justice to the lower classes.  But these dreams were destined to be realized long after More’s headless body had crumbled to dust, by that learning which he himself so seduously cultivated, and by the decay, too, of some of those ideas for which he died a martyr’s death.  The growth of the universities, the establishment of grammar schools, the impetus given to all useful occupations during the reign of Henry viii, were gradually aiding the advance of that new era in the history of England which developed so brilliantly under Elizabeth.  In her reign the old warlike spirit had decayed, theology had lost its obstructive power, and human reason began to bear its legitimate fruits—­prosperity and civilization.