with the growth of a political theory which replaced the conception of
purpose by that of mechanism. During a great part of history men had
{10} found the significance of their social order in its relation to
the universal purposes of religion. It stood as one rung in a ladder
which stretched from hell to Paradise, and the classes who composed it
were the hands, the feet, the head of a corporate body which was itself
a microcosm imperfectly reflecting a larger universe. When the
Reformation made the Church a department of the secular government, it
undermined the already enfeebled spiritual forces which had erected
that sublime, but too much elaborated, synthesis. But its influence
remained for nearly a century after the roots which fed it had been
severed. It was the atmosphere into which men were born, and from
which, however practical, or even Machiavellian, they could not easily
disengage their spirits. Nor was it inconvenient for the new
statecraft to see the weight of a traditional religious sanction added
to its own concern in the subordination of all classes and interests to
the common end, of which it conceived itself, and during the greater
part of the sixteenth century was commonly conceived, to be the
guardian. The lines of the social structure were no longer supposed to
reproduce in miniature the plan of a universal order. But common
habits, common traditions and beliefs, common pressure from above gave
them a unity of direction, which restrained the forces of individual
variation and lateral expansion; and the center towards which they
converged, formerly a Church possessing some of the characteristics of
a State, was now a State that had clothed itself with many of the
attributes of a Church.

The difference between the England of Shakespeare, {11} still visited
by the ghosts of the Middle Ages, and the England which merged in 1700
from the fierce polemics of the last two generations, was a difference
of social and political theory even more than of constitutional and
political arrangements. Not only the facts, but the minds which
appraised them, were profoundly modified. The essence of the change
was the disappearance of the idea that social institutions and economic
activities were related to common ends, which gave them their
significance and which served as their criterion. In the eighteenth
century both the State and the Church had abdicated that part of the
sphere which had consisted in t