Alistair could make his poor neighbours happy, but they could not make him happy.
The poet searching for his Eden places it ever in some environment which he has not yet tried. Whole generations of priest-ridden Italians had placed the home of freedom in Puritan-ridden England; it was natural that Alistair should place it in Papal Rome.
Des Louvres, the Catiline of this conspiracy, had just that touch of the bohemian in his own character which enabled him to understand Stuart. He did not hope to rouse in him any active enthusiasm for the small territorial ambitions of the Catholic Pretenders, clerical or lay. But he saw that what Stuart wanted was a stick with which to beat society, and the Legitimist stick was as good as any other. Little by little he drew his proselyte on to the view that all the elements that made the Victorian Order hateful to him were personified in the reigning House itself. The Hanoverian dynasty was a Protestant dynasty—or, at least, it was required to pose as such in public. The Act of Settlement was the work of the Low Church party, supported by the Nonconformists; in other words, it was the Puritan settlement. All English history, all English literature, all English society, had rested hitherto on the basis that the Low Church party was in the right, and that its standards ought to govern Great Britain, and Ireland, and India, and ultimately the whole world.
Alistair himself had been brought up in an atmosphere where that assumption was not supposed to be even subject to discussion. The whole world, to his youthful mind, had been divided into two classes—those who were Low Churchmen, and those who ought to be, and knew it. He, Alistair, knew it, so did the others, from the General of the Jesuits to the stone-breaker suspected of being a Plymouth Brother, and from the condemned murderer to the author of the “Origin of Species.” The Sultan of Turkey knew it in his heart, and so did every follower of every other faith, except, possibly, the Grand Lama, protected by geographical barriers from the enterprise of the Low Church Missionary Society.
And now all these assumptions were breaking up and melting away so rapidly that the mere statement of them sounded more like satire than sober record. Histories of England were being written, and were being used in the schools, which failed to teach that the Revolution of 1688 was the most glorious event in the annals of the human race. It was no longer universally deemed an act of oppression on the part of James I. to permit the peasantry to dance on Sunday. Even the Reformation had ceased to be the subject of unmitigated eulogy. The rising generation were being allowed to perceive that some bigotry goes to the making of a martyr, as well as of a heretic-hunter. The failings of the leading Reformers were no longer veiled, and the virtues of their opponents were lovingly conceded.
Every revelation passes through three stages: first, it is a heresy; next, a commonplace; and last, a superstition. The mind of man revolves like his planet, and truths rise and set like the stars.
Protestantism had survived into the third stage. The great Protestant Churches still flourished, but they no longer professed the Protestant religion. The Church of England was suing for recognition by the Church of Rome. The Dissenting Churches, founded by men who were more willing to endure poverty and prison than to wear a surplice, or to use a ring in the marriage ceremony, were adopting liturgies and vestments. The evangelical organizations, the Missionary Societies, the Bible Societies, the Tract Societies, were still in full activity, but they had ceased to evangelize. Like the Churches, they lived on their inheritance; they were kept going by the dead hand. Frock-coated committees were called together by well-salaried secretaries to dispose of funds too large for the shrunken field of endeavour; but, wiser than the augurs of old Rome, the secretaries never smiled.
The machinery went on with well-oiled wheels, but the spirit was gone. The foundation stone of the building had been almost accidentally mined. The picks of excavators toiling at the dust-heaps beside the Tigris and Euphrates that once were Nineveh and Babylon, had turned up a handful of arrow-stamped bricks, and the Protestant Bible had become a mere human document. The whole of English society was engaged in a conspiracy to suppress the fact that the world was changing. The schools and universities went on teaching that it never changed; the pulpits proved that it could not; the newspapers were positive that it had not; yet underneath all this loud shouting of the cohorts of respectability could be heard a murmur like the whisper of Galileo before the Inquisition—But it does move.
It was the close of the Victorian Age. It was an age which had recorded its own praises on a myriad monuments, and chanted them in thunder on the days of jubilee. It was an age which had gazed round upon its mighty works, and boasted itself like Nebuchadnezzar. Nevertheless, in this age, so glorious in its own conceit, so fruitful in many respects, one rank weed had been suffered to grow up unchecked, till it poisoned the breathing-room of the human spirit.
The name of this weed was Cant.