speare or of Spenser: for them the poetry of the time was a large and true interpretation of life. And science and theology were then a genuine portion of literature.

Was there a check, an interruption, of the higher intellectual life of England? Yes-to a certain extent. The Renaissance influence in literature, separated from the serious temper of the Reformation, dwindled and suffered degradation; the spirit of liberty, entangled with politics, set itself to resolve urgent, practical problems, and lost some of its nobler ideality. Human freedom that indeed was still sought; but freedom came to mean deliverance from an unjust tax or from an inquisitorial bishop. The spirit of the Reformation separated from the Renaissance influence lost some of its more liberal temper in a narrow Scripturalism and in pettinesses of moral rigour. But the political and religious questions could not be put aside; they, too, supplied a stern discipline for the intellect; in their solution an effort was made on behalf of liberty of thought, narrowed in its meaning though liberty of thought might be by the exigencies of the time. The more enlightened Puritanism contained within it a portion of the spirit of the Renaissance. The mundane spirit of the Renaissance, in its lower form of commercial interests, by degrees allied itself with Puritanism. The higher tendencies of the Renaissance re-emerged in the great scientific movement of the second half of the seventeenth century. Through the strife of parties and the tangle of interests a real progress is discernible.

Poetical literature, in the years of growing trouble had in some degree, as has been said, lost touch with reality. The Cavalier poets produced their gallant songs of pleasure, of fancy, of delicate melody; but they do not, and they did not, sway the life of man. Two things, however, became more real and gravely earnest. One of these concerned the corporate life of the nation -the great contention between King and people. The other concerned primarily the inner life of the individual soul. In Elizabethan literature these two things had not fallen apart. Spenser's "Faërie Queene" deals essentially with the life of the soul and its combat with the various foes and tempters which beset that life; but it is also a poem concerning the honour and well-being of England. It is a moral or spiritual allegory; but at the same time it is an historical allegory. Gloriana is at once the glory of God and the Queen of England; St George is at once the knight of Holiness and the patron saint of England. Shakespeare can search the mysteries of the solitary soul in Hamlet, but he can also celebrate the glories of his country at Agincourt, and raise his chant of patriotic triumph. Such poetry became impossible in the days of James and of Charles. Men who were interested in public life were putting on their armour for an internecine struggle. Men who were concerned for the life of the soul, if they did not carry that concern into the public strife and become the zealots of a party, were tempted to retreat from the world of action, like the devout company at Little Gidding or certain of the Puritan fugitives to America, and they nourished the spirit of religion in secret or in little com

munities. The highest Elizabethan literature is at once mundane and, in the truest sense of the word, religious. At a later time the mundane literature became wholly mundane, often even frivolously or basely mundane; the religious literature, when it ceases from controversy, often ceases to regard the affairs of earth, which is but a City of Destruction or a Vanity Fair, and has its gaze intensely fixed upon another world, where the Saint will attain his Rest.

II

One of the first effects of the Protestant Reformation was a quickening of self-consciousness in matters of religion. External rites, ordinances, and ceremonies seemed for many devout men and women to lose much of their virtue. To some they became matters of indifference; to others they appeared hostile to the true life of the soul. The realm of sense was viewed as if it were separated by a deep gulf from the realm of the spirit. There have, indeed, always existed the two types of mind which we may call the Catholic and the Puritan, to one of which the visible and the invisible are only different aspects of one great reality, while to the other they stand apart as sundered or even as antagonistic powers. In a review of Newman's "Phases of Faith," written many years ago by the most venerable of recent thinkers, Dr Martineau endeavours to distinguish between these two conceptions of life and the world and of God's relation to it in a passage which it is worth while to quote at some length. According to the Catholic conception the two spheres of sense and spirit seem to melt into each other

under the mediation of a kind of divine chemistry; "hence," he goes on, "the invariable presence of some physical element in all that Catholicism looks upon as venerable. Its rites are a manipular invocation of God. Its miracles are examples of incarnate divineness in old clothes and winking pictures. Its ascetic discipline is founded on the notion of a gradual consumption of the grosser body by the encroaching fire of the spirit; till in the ecstatica the frame itself becomes ethereal and the light shines through. Nothing can be more offensive than all this to the Evangelical [or, as we may put it, the Puritan] conception, which plants the natural and the spiritual in irreconcilable contradiction, denies to them all approach or contact, and allows each to exist only by the extinction of the other. . This unmediated dualism follows the Evangelical into his theory as to the state of each individual soul before God. The Catholic does not deny all divine light to the natural conscience, or all power to the natural will of unconverted men: he maintains that these also are already under a law of obligation, may do what is well-pleasing before God, and by superior faithfulness qualify themselves to become subjects of grace; so that the Gospel shall come upon them as a divine supplement to the sad and feeble moral life of nature. To the Evangelical, on the contrary, the soul that is not saved is lost. . So, again, the contrast turns up in the opposite views taken of the divine economy in human affairs. The Evangelical detaches the elect in imagination from the remaining mass of men, sequesters them as a holy people, who must not mix themselves with the affairs of Belial, . The

Catholic, looking on the natural universe, whether material or human, not as an antagonist but as the receptacle of the spiritual, seeks to conquer the World for the Church, and instead of shunning political action, is ready to grasp it as his instrument."

The tendency to the one or the other of these religious conceptions, adds Mr Martineau, marks the distinction. between two great families of minds. How, we may inquire, does each conception adapt itself to literature and especially to the literature of imagination? We can at once perceive that what has been named the Catholic conception more readily finds that sensuous vehicle for its ideas which literature and art demand. It interprets the invisible by the visible; it does not suspect beauty or colour or the delight of life, but seeks to interpenetrate these with what is divine. The danger is that it may mistake what is arbitrary, artificial, or merely traditional for that which is natural, and so may construct a body of factitious symbolism instead of discovering the veritable play of what is spiritual in and through what is sensible. Such factitious symbolism debars or diverts the mind from the genuine sources of light; at best it serves as a receptacle for truth or passion transferred to it from the mind itself. In this large sense of the word "Catholic" we might name Wordsworth in some of his earlier poems a true Catholic, discovering, as he does, the ideal in the real, the divine in the natural, the invisible in the visible; and we might name Keble, in certain of his verses, a pseudo-Catholic, applying, as he sometimes does, a factitious or a traditional symbolism to sanctify what in reality is sacred in itself.