m. The whole
moral effect which is produced nowadays by the religious newspaper, the
tract, the essay, the missionary report, the sermon, was then produced
by the Bible alone; and its effect in this way, however dispassionately
we examine it, was simply amazing. The whole nation became a church. The
problems of life and death, whose questionings found no answer in the
higher minds of Shakspere's day, pressed for an answer not only from
noble and scholar but from farmer and shopkeeper in the age that
followed him. The answer they found was almost of necessity a
Calvinistic answer. Unlike as the spirit of Calvinism seemed to the
spirit of the Renascence, both found a point of union in their
exaltation of the individual man. The mighty strife of good and evil
within the soul itself which had overawed the imagination of dramatist
and poet became the one spiritual conception in the mind of the Puritan.
The Calvinist looked on churches and communions as convenient groupings
of pious Christians; it might be as even indispensable parts of a
Christian order. But religion in its deepest and innermost sense had to
do not with churches but with the individual soul. It was each Christian
man who held in his power the issues of life and death. It was in each
Christian conscience that the strife was waged between Heaven and Hell.
Not as one of a body, but as a single soul, could each Christian claim
his part in the mystery of redemption. In the outer world of worship and
discipline the Calvinist might call himself one of many brethren, but at
every moment of his inner existence, in the hour of temptation and of
struggle, in his dark and troubled wrestling with sin, in the glory of
conversion, in the peace of acceptance with God, he stood utterly alone.
With such a conception of human life Puritanism offered the natural form
for English religion at a time when the feeling with which religion
could most easily ally itself was the sense of individuality. The
'prentice who sate awed in the pit of the theatre as the storm in the
mind of Lear outdid the storm among the elements passed easily into the
Calvinist who saw himself day by day the theatre of a yet mightier
struggle between the powers of light and the powers of darkness, and his
soul the prize of an eternal conflict between Heaven and Hell.

[Sidenote: Growth of Calvinism.]

It was thus by its own natural developement that the temper of
Englishmen became above all religious, and t