t inside the
English mind. He did not know that some people go furthest and go
fastest when they look one way and row the other. It is the same with
every considerable nation. They work out their own political and
spiritual lives, through tempers, humours, and passions peculiar to
themselves; and the same disposition which produces the result is
required to interpret it afterwards. This is one reason why I should
feel diffident about what I have undertaken. Another is, that I do not
conceal from myself that the subject is an exceedingly delicate one. The
blazing passions of those stormy sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are
no longer, happily, at their old temperature. The story of those times
can now be told or listened to with something like impartiality. Yet, if
people no longer hate each other for such matters, the traditions of the
struggle survive in strong opinions and sentiments, which it is easy to
wound without intending it.

My own conviction with respect to all great social and religious
convulsions is the extremely commonplace one that much is to be said on
both sides. I believe that nowhere and at no time any such struggle can
take place on a large scale unless each party is contending for
something which has a great deal of truth in it. Where the right is
plain, honest, wise, and noble-minded men are all on one side; and only
rogues and fools are on the other. Where the wise and good are divided,
the truth is generally found to be divided also. But this is precisely
what cannot be admitted as long as the conflict continues. Men begin to
fight about things when reason and argument fail to convince them. They
make up in passion what is wanting in logic. Each side believes that all
the right is theirs--that their enemies have all the bad qualities which
their language contains names for; and even now, on the subject on which
I have to talk to-night, one has but to take up any magazine, review,
newspaper, or party organ of any kind which touches on it, to see that
opinion is still Whig or Tory, Cavalier or Roundhead, Protestant or
Catholic, as the case may be. The unfortunate person who is neither
wholly one nor wholly the other is in the position of Hamlet's 'baser
nature,' 'between the incensed points of mighty opposites.' He is the
Laodicean, neither cold nor hot, whom decent people consider bad
company. He pleases no one, and hurts the sensitiveness of all.

Here, then, are good reasons why I should ha