not confined
even to Protestant countries; some great Romanists doubtfully followed
it until stopped by Rome. It was the spirit of the age, and should be a
permanent warning against mistaking the spirit of the age for the
immortal spirit of man. For there are now few Christians or
non-Christians who can look back at the Calvinism which nearly captured
Canterbury and even Rome by the genius and heroism of Pascal or Milton,
without crying out, like the lady in Mr. Bernard Shaw's play, "How
splendid! How glorious!... and oh what an escape!"

The next thing to note is that their conception of church-government was
in a true sense self-government; and yet, for a particular reason,
turned out to be a rather selfish self-government. It was equal and yet
it was exclusive. Internally the synod or conventicle tended to be a
small republic, but unfortunately to be a very small republic. In
relation to the street outside the conventicle was not a republic but an
aristocracy. It was the most awful of all aristocracies, that of the
elect; for it was not a right of birth but a right before birth, and
alone of all nobilities it was not laid level in the dust. Hence we
have, on the one hand, in the simpler Puritans a ring of real republican
virtue; a defiance of tyrants, an assertion of human dignity, but above
all an appeal to that first of all republican virtues--publicity. One of
the Regicides, on trial for his life, struck the note which all the
unnaturalness of his school cannot deprive of nobility: "This thing was
not done in a corner." But their most drastic idealism did nothing to
recover a ray of the light that at once lightened every man that came
into the world, the assumption of a brotherhood in all baptized people.
They were, indeed, very like that dreadful scaffold at which the
Regicide was not afraid to point. They were certainly public, they may
have been public-spirited, they were never popular; and it seems never
to have crossed their minds that there was any need to be popular.
England was never so little of a democracy as during the short time when
she was a republic.

The struggle with the Stuarts, which is the next passage in our history,
arose from an alliance, which some may think an accidental alliance,
between two things. The first was this intellectual fashion of Calvinism
which affected the cultured world as did our recent intellectual fashion
of Collectivism. The second was the older thing which had made t