h accompanied them (for they
were as much the effect as the cause, and one reacted on the other),
yet at any rate they afforded scope and room for the play of powers
which, without such scope, let them have been as transcendant as they
would, must have passed away unproductive and blighted.

An earnest faith in the supernatural, an intensely real conviction of
the divine and devilish forces by which the universe was guided and
misguided, was the inheritance of the Elizabethan age from Catholic
Christianity. The fiercest and most lawless men did then really and
truly believe in the actual personal presence of God or the devil in
every accident, or scene, or action. They brought to the contemplation
of the new heaven and the new earth an imagination saturated with the
spiritual convictions of the old era, which were not lost, but only
infinitely expanded. The planets, whose vastness they now learnt to
recognise, were, therefore, only the more powerful for evil or for good;
the tides were the breathing of Demogorgon; and the idolatrous American
tribes were real worshippers of the real devil, and were assisted with
the full power of his evil army.

It is a form of thought which, however in a vague and general way we may
continue to use its phraseology, has become, in its detailed application
to life, utterly strange to us. We congratulate ourselves on the
enlargement of our understanding when we read the decisions of grave law
courts in cases of supposed witchcraft; we smile complacently over
Raleigh's story of the island of the Amazons, and rejoice that we are
not such as he--entangled in the cobwebs of effete and foolish
superstition. Yet the true conclusion is less flattering to our vanity.
That Raleigh and Bacon could believe what they believed, and could be
what they were notwithstanding, is to us a proof that the injury which
such mistakes can inflict is unspeakably insignificant: and arising, as
they arose, from a never-failing sense of the real awfulness and mystery
of the world, and of the life of human souls upon it, they witness to
the presence in such minds of a spirit, the loss of which not the most
perfect acquaintance with every law by which the whole creation moves
can compensate. We wonder at the grandeur, the moral majesty of some of
Shakespeare's characters, so far beyond what the noblest among ourselves
can imitate, and at first thought we attribute it to the genius of the
poet, who has outstripped natu