ould not be maintained. They were followed by
a meanness and a descent of the mind into lower levels;
the loss of wings; no high speculation. Locke, to whom the meaning
of ideas was unknown, became the type of philosophy,
and his "understanding" the measure, in all nations,
of the English intellect. His countrymen forsook the lofty sides
of Parnassus, on which they had once walked with echoing steps,
and disused the studies once so beloved; the powers of thought
fell into neglect."

The highest powers of thought cannot be realized without the life
of the spirit. It is this, as I have already said, which has been
the glory of the greatest thinkers since the world began;
not their intellects, but the co-operating, unconscious power
IMMANENT in their intellects.

During the Restoration period, and later, spiritual life
was at its very lowest ebb. I mean, spiritual life
as exhibited in the poetic and dramatic literature of the time,
whose poisoned fountain-head was the dissolute court of Charles II.
All the slops of that court went into the drama,
all the `sentina reipublicae', the bilge water of the ship of state.
The dramatic writers of the time, to use the words of St. Paul
in his letter to the Ephesians, "walked in the vanity of their mind;
having the understanding darkened, being alienated from
the life of God through the ignorance that was in them
because of the blindness of their heart; who, being past feeling,
gave themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness
with greediness." The age, as Emerson says, had no live, distinct,
actuating convictions. It was in even worse than a negative condition.
As represented by its drama and poetry, it may almost be said
to have repudiated the moral sentiment. A spiritual disease
affected the upper classes, which continued down into the reign
of the Georges. There appears to have been but little belief
in the impulse which the heart imparts to the intellect,
or that the latter draws greatness from the inspiration of the former.
There was a time in the history of the Jews in which, it is recorded,
"there was no open vision". It can be said, emphatically,
that in the time of Charles II. there was no open vision.
And yet that besotted, that spiritually dark age, which was afflicted
with pneumatophobia, flattered itself that there had never been an age
so flooded with light. The great age of Elizabeth (which designation
I would apply to the period of fif