we estimate the greatness of a
king by another standard than roods of conquered earth, or roods of
parchment blackened with unregarded statutes, Richard I, crusader and
poet, must be reckoned amongst the greatest of his great line, and his
name to the Europe of the Middle Age was like the blast of a trumpet
announcing the England of the years to come.

Sec. 4. WORLD-HISTORIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ENGLISH REFORMATION

The crusader of the twelfth century follows the saint of an earlier
age, and in the thirteenth, England, made one in political and
constitutional ideals, attains a source of profounder religious unity.
The consciousness that not to Rome, but to Galilee itself she may turn
for the way, the truth, the light, has arisen. In the steady
development, in the ever-deepening power of this consciousness, lies
the unwritten history of the English Reformation. The race resolves no
more to trust to other witness, but with its own eyes to look upon the
truth.

Political history has its effect upon the growth of this conviction.
In the fourteenth century, for instance, the Papacy is at Avignon.
Edward I in the beginning of that century withstands Boniface VIII, the
last great pontiff in whom the temper and resolution of Hildebrand
appear, as William the Conqueror had withstood Gregory VII. The
statute of _praemunire_, a generation later, prepares the way for
Wyclif. The Papacy is now but an appanage of the Valois monarchs. How
shall England, conqueror of those monarchs at Crecy and on other
fields, reverence Rome, the dependent of a defeated antagonist?

The same bright energy of the soul, the same awe, rooted in the blood
of our race, which manifest themselves in the early and Middle Ages,
determine the character of the religious history of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. In the fifteenth century, suffering and the
presence of suffering, the law of tragedy of which we have spoken, add
their transforming power to spiritual life. As in political life the
sympathy with the wrongs of others grows into imaginative justice, so
sympathy with the faiths of others, which springs from the
consciousness of the first great illusion lost, and sorrow for a
vanished ideal, grows into tolerance for the creeds and religions of
others. For only a race deep-centred in its own faith, yet sensitive
to the faith that is in others, can understand the religion of others;
only such a race can found an empire characterize