their abstractions. Our modes of testing ability will exclude all the youth whose ways of thought lie outside our conventions of learning. In such ways the universities, with their scheme of orthodoxies, will stifle the progress of the race, unless by some fortunate stirring of humanity they are in time remodelled or swept away. These are our dangers, as yet only to be seen on the distant horizon, clouds small as the hand of a man.
Those of us who have lived for seventy years, more or less, have seen first the culmination of an epoch, and then its disruption and decay. What is happening when an epoch approaches its culmination? What is happening as it passes towards its decay? Historical writing is cursed with simple characterizations of great events. Historians should study zoology. Naturalists tell us that in the background of our animal natures we harbour the traces of the earlier stages of our animal race. Theologians tell us that we ate nerved to effort by the distant vision of ideals, claiming realization. Both sets are right. A daughter of John Addington Symonds, in a novel entitled A Child of the Alps, remarks: “Spring is not a season, it is a battleground between summer and winter.”
In like manner every active epoch harbours within itself the ideals and the ways of its immediate predecessors. An epoch is a complex fact; and in many of its departments these inherited modes of thought and custom survive, unshaken and dominant. But on the whole the modes of the past are recessive, sinking into an unexpressed background. They are still there, giving a tonality to all that happens, and capable of flaring into a transient outburst when aroused by some touch of genius. Nor is it true that these vanishing ways of thought only appeal to the more backward natures. On the contrary, we find men of capacious intellect and cautious natures endeavouring, in this way and in that way, to adapt the wealth of inheritance to the oncoming fashions of thought. That is how I characterized some of the outstanding Archbishops of Canterbury, from Warham to Tait. Such men disagree in many ways. For example, Tillotson and Tait stand in sharp antagonism to Laud. But they all agree in that they were endeavouring to adapt some generalization of the old ecclesiastical-feudal organization of mankind to the purposes of the dominant rationalistic-individualistic epoch.
We were apt to conceive the Puritans who in the first half of the seventeenth century founded the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as the direct antagonists of these men. But, as we now know, this is a complete mistake. These Puritans were endeavouring to carry over a remodelled ecclesiastical organization as a dominant institution in the new individualistic epoch. In many ways these Puritans are to be classed with Laud, as striving to preserve more of the old world than either Tillotson or Tait.
The true antithesis to all these men is Roger Williams. Curiously enough, this man, who more completely than any other expressed the new individualistic tendencies, seems to stand as an isolated rebel, outside his own times, and yet not fitting into the world of either of the centuries subsequent to
