d feeling within every breast had been
utterly transformed. The work of the sixteenth century had wrecked that
tradition of religion, of knowledge, of political and social order,
which had been accepted without question by the Middle Ages. The sudden
freedom of the mind from these older bonds brought a consciousness of
power such as had never been felt before; and the restless energy, the
universal activity of the Renascence were but outer expressions of the
pride, the joy, the amazing self-confidence, with which man welcomed
this revelation of the energies which had lain slumbering within him.
But his pride and self-reliance were soon dashed by a feeling of dread.
With the deepening sense of human individuality came a deepening
conviction of the boundless capacities of the human soul. Not as a
theological dogma, but as a human fact, man knew himself to be an all
but infinite power, whether for good or for ill. The drama towered into
sublimity as it painted the strife of mighty forces within the breast of
Othello or Macbeth. Poets passed into metaphysicians as they strove to
unravel the workings of conscience within the soul. From that hour one
dominant influence told on human action: and all the various energies
that had been called into life by the age that was passing away were
seized, concentrated, and steadied to a definite aim by the spirit of
religion.

[Sidenote: The Bible.]

The whole temper of the nation felt the change. "Theology rules there,"
said Grotius of England only two years after Elizabeth's death; and when
Casaubon was invited by her successor to his court he found both king
and people indifferent to pure letters. "There is a great abundance of
theologians in England," he says; "all point their studies in that
direction." Even a country gentleman, like Colonel Hutchinson, felt the
theological impulse. "As soon as he had improved his natural
understanding with the acquisition of learning, the first studies he
exercised himself in were the principles of religion." It was natural
that literature should reflect the tendency of the time; and the dumpy
little quartos of controversy and piety which still crowd our older
libraries drove before them the classical translations and Italian
novelettes of the age of the Renascence. But their influence was small
beside that of the Bible. The popularity of the Bible had been growing
fast from the day when Bishop Bonner set up the first six copies in St.
Paul's. E