thereby, by the aid of art, adding even to England’s rare natural beauty), it was never at all likely that the bulk of the English people would, all on a sudden, cast off their cherished beliefs and hallowed affections respecting the deepest central questions of human life.[14]
Moreover, it may be taken as a general rule, to be remembered and applied by princes and statesmen, all the world over and for all time, that Man is a creature “full of religious instincts:” — “too superstitious,” should it be thought more accurate and desirable so to describe this undoubted habit and bent of the human mind.
Thence it follows that it is the merest fatuous folly for princes and statesmen if and when they have got themselves entangled in a false position, from some external cause or causes having little or no relation to the Invisible and the Eternal, to bid their subjects and denizens, “right about turn,” at a moment’s notice: however “bright and blissful” such mental evolutions may be deemed to be by those who have unwisely taken it into their foolish head to issue the irrational command.[A]
[A] That able and strong-minded Englishman, Dr. Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, said (in 1901) in the House of Lords, during the debates on that pathetically ridiculous document, the Sovereign’s Declaration against Popery, when speaking on Lord Salisbury’s proposed amended form, that England was resolved “to stand no interference with her religion from the outside.” It is a good thing that the heathen Kings Ethelbert and Edwin were less abnormally patriotic 1300 years ago. For the idea of “independence” has to be held subject to the “golden mean” of “nothing too much.” A fetish must not be made of that idea, especially by a people conscious of lofty imperial destiny. And “unity” must there be between ideas that are controlling fundamentals — in other words, between ideas intellectual, moral, and spiritual.
Now, in the days of Queen Elizabeth[A] those whom religious loyalty prompted to worship supremely “the God of their fathers” after a manner that those eager for change counted “idolatry,” were marked by different mental characteristics. This was so throughout England; but especially was it so in those five northern counties which comprised what was then by Catholics proudly styled “the faithful North.”
[A] The mother of Queen Elizabeth, Anne Boleyn, died reconciled to the Church of Rome. Her daughter, the Princess Elizabeth, was brought up in the tenets of that Church; but, like one type of the children of the Renaissance, Elizabeth was unconsciously “a Tribal Deist.” Margaret Roper, the daughter of Sir Thomas More, was equally “cultured,” but she accepted the Catholic tradition in its letter and in its spirit. I may here state that I have a great intellectual admiration for Queen Elizabeth, whose virtues were her own, while her faults, to a large extent, were her monstrous father’s and her Privy Counsellors’, who told her not what she ought to do but what she could do, which no really faithful adviser of a Sovereign ever does.
Some of these English “leile and feile,” that is loyal and faithful, servants of Rome were, on the subjective side, retained in their allegiance to the Visible Head of Christendom by bonds formed by mere natural piety and conservative feeling — dutiful affections of Nature which are the promise and the pledge of much that is best in the Teutonic race.
Others were mainly ruled by an overmastering sense of that lofty humility which foes call pride, but friends dignity.
Whilst a third class were persuaded, by intense intellectual, moral, and spiritual conviction that — “in and by the power of divine grace” — come what might,
nothing should separate them from those hereditary beliefs which were dearer to them far than not merely earthly goods, lands, and personal liberty, but even than their very life.