grace which the irresponsible folly of the King was entailing upon the beloved land; and thereby it is redeemed from being mere idolatry. Contrast between Shake speare's age and ours. The most startling comment that can be made upon the Elizabethan period in England is that it received Shakespeare without surprise. To us, after three hundred years of familiarity, he still comes as a perpetual revelation and rebuke, turning our complacent dreams of progress into misgivings lest we be backward-moving and degenerate. Already before the end of the seventeenth century, Dryden, looking back not only to Shakespeare, but to all the men eminent in letters and in active life who flourished before the Civil War and the days of Crom- Dryden's well, exclaimed, Theirs was the giant race before the Flood! And so indeed it still seems to us, whether we look solely to the work of Shakespeare, or whether we regard the entire galaxy of stars of the first magnitude whose orbits centred in the throne of the Tudors. These dwellers in a little world uttered thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls, in a speech too majestic for our harassed and utilitarian times. The scope, the dignity, the plasticity of their tongue wrought masterpieces too perfect for our imitation. More and Spenser, Raleigh and Hooker and Bacon, each in his own way stirs us with the suggestion of a mightier breed than that which lives around us. The Book of Common Prayer is a specimen of the hurried work which Cranmer and his fellows could rush together to meet an exigency. The heavenly music of its diction, the large humanity of its outlook, and the tender and catholic piety of its Epistle to Congreve," 1694. The lan guage of the XVI century. The illusion spirit have been life and peace to millions. The English Bible, a greater work than any single mind could have brought forth, stands for the collective labour of a century. It is in large part the work of obscure men, none of whom in his own time was looked upon as a supreme literary artist. Yet to-day, when for the sake of accuracy we revise it, we cannot change a syllable without marring the felicity of its phrases. The notion that we have progressed, in any true of progress. spiritual sense, beyond these men, and the age in which they were at home, is an illusion, from which, for the sake of our souls, we must speedily awaken. We have indeed gained a knowledge of facts unknown to them; but in the vast abysses of space and time we have not found the splendours which inspired them. Their little world was a home to them,- perhaps because it had many exits; our vaster one, having none, has become a prison for us. We have multiplied machinery and enslaved ourselves to it. We have extended democracy and abridged freedom. We have lost the old sense of the unexplored possibilities of life; we cannot respond, as did the men of the time which we rightly call the New Birth, to the challenge of the future and the unknown. The soul of the wide world ceases to be prophetic, and dreams no more on things to come. We are materialists: which means that we think of ourselves as products and effects of that world which to them was the instrument and opportunity of the spirit of man. We must regain belief in the reality and freedom of the spirit. To renew our sense of the scope of the soul, of human freedom, and of the unexhausted possibilities of the spirit, we need to turn back from our universe of repetitions and inevitabilities, our worldwide empires and colossal republics, to the little world and the tiny nations of the past. We must unlearn the childish error which mistakes bigness for greatness, numbers for quality, and money for wealth. Spiritual grandeur has commonly dwelt with material littleness. The insignificant Palestine and Greece; the little England, with a population less than that of London to-day, and no colonial empire; the tiny Italian republics, unsecured even by the "scraps of paper" of their more potent neighbours,- from these have come forth the imperishable glories of the race of man. We need not infer, indeed, that the huge nations of the modern world cannot do things even nobler than were done by the little ones of the past; my unswerving faith is that they can and will. But certain it is that these achievements will not be realized unless the power of vision and creation can be renewed in us. In the Elizabethan time, most men, from our lordly and emancipated point of view, were ignorant and superstitious. We are wise and sceptical. We have exchanged poetry for science- we have bartered the heavenly promise of the rainbow for a knowledge of its chemistry. By the patient labour of three centuries we have gained infinitely, and it behooves us to be grateful for the potent wizardry wherewith science has armed us. But, alas! we have lost one secret that was known to the superstitious people of the older world: the secret that Man is a spirit, and that the world of the senses, vast and impressive as it may be, is no more than the shadow of the soul, and its means of communication with other souls and with the universal spirit. Without that secret we cannot live. Until we have learned once more to recognize what a piece of work is a man, and how all things bow before him;-un |