in its defence. The defeat of the Armada was not the work of a mercenary levy, but of the spirit of the people in arms. From Gravelines onward England lost her insularity, and became a factor of deep importance in the affairs, not only of Europe, but of that wider world which was already dawning upon the horizon of her settlers and pioneers.
One part of the battle having been won, the war is carried to another sphere. England accepted a Reformation that, for logical completeness, can be paralleled nowhere else in Europe. Her spiritual conflict, bitter as it was, did not rage round the débris of the Church: it sought the essential principle of spiritual liberty and inner reformation. After a short destructive period the nation produced a man who, while vindicating that liberty of conscience which England has never since lost, at the same time refused to seek a barren liberty, but joined a moral reformation to patriotic ends, and welded the whole into one national ideal.
With Oliver Cromwell we come to the third of Montesquieu's characteristics—Industrial Ambition. With the practical insight of an experienced statesman he recognised the fact that England's future must be based upon a solid economic foundation. Puritanism at its best refused to allow the individual to live his moral life apart from the world of men. The medieval Church could not rise above a negation, and the formula, Deo placere non potest. It was a system of taboos and restrictions, and not of definite commands. True Puritanism urged that faith without works is dead, and that the glory of God was equally achieved in practical life as in the hermit's cell. The service of God in the world, and not out of it, in an active life of enterprise, and not in a passive mood of religious contemplation, became the standard of a new régime growing up under
