on ecclesiasticism, attempted to penetrate far into its precincts.
This counter-attack by the State had proved a failure, in England at least, by the eighteenth century. For the English people declined, with their usual stubbornness, to be carried too far in either direction, and would no more consent to a strict political, than to a strict ecclesiastical, control, evicting the Stuarts on the one hand as they had repudiated Rome on the other.
With the eighteenth century, therefore, a novel situation arose. Church and State alike had gone under in turn. Each had definitely failed to assert its ascendency in a sphere not properly its own. The mediæval edifice which, mingling truth with beauty, had been the common shrine of sixty generations, was a dismantled wreck. Correspondingly, the State, now aloof from religion which it had tried in vain to dominate, had nowhere henceforth to apply for its higher inspiration, and there was nothing to make the dry bones live.
This was the cause why our State in the eighteenth, and through much of the nineteenth, century proved itself so unfitted to meet those needs of England now under review. For when, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, our materialistic and industrial expansion began, and active measures became then, if ever, necessary to solve the domestic issues opening up, we merely floated along. From whatever angle the states-
