Lectures on Modern history | Page 5

as in
so many things, the product of these centuries has favoured the new
elements; and the centre of gravity, moving from the Mediterranean
nations to the Oceanic, from the Latin to the Teuton, has also passed
from the Catholic to the Protestant #31.
Out of these controversies proceeded political as well as historical
science. It was in the Puritan phase, before the restoration of the Stuarts,
that theology, blending with politics, effected a fundamental change.
The essentially English reformation of the seventeenth century was less
a struggle between churches than between sects, often subdivided by
questions of discipline and self-regulation rather than by dogma. The

sectaries cherished no purpose or prospect of prevailing over the
nations; and they were concerned with the individual more than with
the congregation, with conventicles, not with State churches. Their
view was narrowed, but their sight was sharpened. It appeared to them
that governments and institutions are made to pass away, like things of
earth, whilst souls are immortal; that there is no more proportion
between liberty and power than between eternity and time; that,
therefore, the sphere of enforced command ought to be restricted within
fixed limits, and that which had been done by authority, and outward
discipline, and organised violence, should be attempted by division of
power, and committed to the intellect and the conscience of free men
#32. Thus was exchanged the dominion of will over will for the
dominion of reason over reason. The true apostles of toleration are not
those who sought protection for their own beliefs, or who had none to
protect; but men to whom, irrespective of their cause, it was a political,
a moral, and a theological dogma, a question of conscience involving
both religion and policy #33. Such a man was Socinus; and others arose
in the smaller sects--the Independent founder of the colony of Rhode
Island, and the Quaker patriarch of Pennsylvania. Much of the energy
and zeal which had laboured for authority of doctrine was employed for
liberty of prophesying. The air was filled with the enthusiasm of a new
cry; but the cause was still the same. It became a boast that religion was
the mother of freedom, that freedom was the lawful offspring of
religion; and this transmutation, this subversion of established forms of
political life by the development of religious thought, brings us to the
heart of my subject, to the significant and central feature of the historic
cycles before us. Beginning with the strongest religious movement and
the most refined despotism ever known, it has led to the superiority of
politics over divinity in the life of nations, and terminates in the equal
claim of every man to be unhindered by man in the fulfilment of duty
to God #34--a doctrine laden with storm and havoc, which is the secret
essence of the Rights of Man, and the indestructible soul of Revolution.
When we consider what the adverse forces were, their sustained
resistance, their frequent recovery, the critical moments when the
struggle seemed for ever desperate, in 1685, in 1772, in 1808, it is no
hyperbole to say that the progress of the world towards

self-government would have been arrested but for the strength afforded
by the religious motive in the seventeenth century. And this constancy
of progress, of progress in the direction of organised and assured
freedom, is the characteristic fact of Modern History, and its tribute to
the theory of Providence #35. Many persons, I am well assured, would
detect that this is a very old story, and a trivial commonplace, and
would challenge proof that the world is making progress in aught but
intellect, that it is gaining in freedom, or that increase in freedom is
either a progress or a gain. Ranke, who was my own master, rejected
the view that I have stated #36; Comte, the master of better men,
believed that we drag a lengthening chain under the gathered weight of
the dead hand #37; and many of our recent classics--Carlyle, Newman,
Froude--were persuaded that there is no progress justifying the ways of
God to man, and that the mere consolidation of liberty is like the
motion of creatures whose advance is in the direction of their tails.
They deem that anxious precaution against bad government is an
obstruction to good, and degrades morality and mind by placing the
capable at the mercy of the incapable, dethroning enlightened virtue for
the benefit of the average man. They hold that great and salutary things
are done for mankind by power concentrated, not by power balanced
and cancelled and dispersed, and that the whig theory, sprung from
decomposing sects, the theory that authority is legitimate only by virtue
of its checks, and that the sovereign is dependent on the subject, is
rebellion against the divine will manifested