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In all revolutions there is some such background of intellectual ferment as I have sketched. But the creeds of the thinkers do not make impact directly upon the national mind. Popularly there is what Joseph Glanvill called a “climate of opinion,” which is created partly by forces from the intellectual laboratory, forces often strangely perverted, but largely by moods and notions of which the thinkers take little cognizance. To many royalists the people on the eve of the Civil War seemed to be surfeited with happiness, and the rebellion to be the crazy and perverse impulse of a nation which, in Izaak Walton’s phrase, was “sick of being well.” The truth is far otherwise. The early seventeenth century was full of maladies.

In the first place the minds of men were oppressed by a haunting insecurity. Most of the old certainties had vanished; religion was no longer an intelligible discipline directed by an infallible church, the English economy was changing fast, and government had lost the firm Tudor touch. The craving was for a new authority, a fresh assurance, some fixed point among the shifting sands, and the new sanction must be nothing short of the highest. So Omnipotence was claimed as the author of every creed brought to birth by confused mortals: there was a divine right of kings, and a divine right of presbytery; jus divinum in episcopal orders, in the old fabric of the laws, and in the new authority of parliament; presently there were to be whispers of heaven-bestowed rights in the common man. It was an age when everything, however crude, claimed a celestial warrant, and implicit belief in one or the other was held to be the first duty. Of Mr Incredulity in the Holy War Bunyan writes that “none was truer to Diabolus than he.”

Side by side with this passionate longing for faith went a profound sense of disillusion. There was morbidity in the air, for the mind turned back upon itself and got weary answers. The spring and summer of the world had passed and autumn was come.^[36] A great mass of the commonalty was unaffected, just as a great mass of the commonalty was wholly neutral in the war; but the mood was shared by most who in whatever degree felt the compulsion of thought. In some the consequence was a cynical obeisance to what seemed the winning side, often with comical results; in others of a stouter mettle a sceptical and mocking aloofness, like that of Selden, who visited the Westminster Assembly, he said, to enjoy the Persian pastime of seeing wild asses fight. But if disillusionment resulted in some cases in worldly wisdom and in others in a politic scepticism, its effect THE AWAKENED CONSCIENCE on many was to create a disbelief in all venerated things and a predisposition to violent novelties. The strong underground current of antinomianism in religion and politics was fed as much by a melancholy satiety with the old things as by a fierce partiality for the new.

But, deeper still, lay the private concern of men with their souls and the world beyond the grave. Everywhere there was an awakening of conscience and a quickened sense of sin. This mood had indeed been widespread ever since the dawn of Christianity, but under the old church with its discipline and sacraments men had been corporately assisted to make their peace with the Almighty. Now each was left to fight out the battle alone in his soul, and no help could be looked for from Mr Two-Tongues, the parson of the parish. There might be disputes about terrestrial sovereignty, but there could be none about the awful sovereignty of God. He demanded perfect purity and exact obedience, and every human deed and thought was impure and rebellious. Grace alone could give salvation, grace through the mediation of Christ,^[37] and the dogmas of theology suddenly became terribly alive, for on them hung the issues of life and death. There was an Enchanted Land, as in the Pilgrim’s Progress, where the soul could be drugged into apathy, and all distinctions blurred; but that way lay damnation, and the only hope was to fight out the battle. The conscience had become morbidly sensitive, and the brain crazily subtle, and many went through months and years of mental agony. Those who emerged triumphant knew themselves as the children of the promise; God and Christ, in Bunyan’s words, were continually before their face; their mood was one of absolute submission and passionate devotion; they marched steadfastly through the world, having passed beyond temporal fears. Such men might be apathetic about questions of civil right, having their gaze so constantly fixed upon the things beyond time; but once let these civil rights be linked in any way with moral and religious issues and they would uphold them to the death. As in the days of the Crusades, a power had been engendered which was outside politics but might well play havoc with policy, for its source lay in a sphere where ordinary political canons had no meaning.

No aerial viewpoint is high enough to bring into our vision the whole confused manifold of the epoch, and the most searching eye will scarcely find a pattern in its complexity. Creeds and moods shade into each other; the wheel repeatedly comes full-circle, and extremes rub shoulders with their opposites. But, as we gaze, it would seem that the intricacy sorts itself into two great masses of light and shade. There is the main body of Englishmen, pursuing their callings and pleasures, deep rooted in the soil, and perplexed only at odd moments by controversy. With them are the old ways of the land and the homely loyalties. Some have no religion, but “fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world”; some have the religion of the household gods; but some too, like Traherne and Vaughan and George Herbert, are Christians after the ageless pattern of the saints. Many are grossly sunk in matter, but many can kindle to unselfish causes, and all are realists, with a firm hold upon the things of sense and time. Opposite to such, eternally opposite, are those whose eyes are always turning inward to their souls, who believe that they themselves and their England are in the valley of decision and that momentous issues hang upon their lightest deeds. To them Herrick’s maypole is a “great stinking idol,” and Robin Goodfellow a satyr of the Pit. Such men are puritans, in the strict sense of a word which since their day has been grievously debased. They are indifferent Christians, for there is more in them of the Roman Stoic and the stern Israelite than of the meek gospel of Christ. Milton’s charge against Laud is strictly true of his own party—that they bedecked and deformed A SPIRITUAL ARISTOCRACY the conception of God with “palls and mitres, gold and gewgaws fetched from Aaron’s old wardrobe or the flamen’s vestry.”

Puritanism has long been degraded to mean the pedantries of comfortable folk who can afford to cosset their consciences, but let that not blind us to the magnificence of its beginnings. It was a faith for iron souls who, having made it their own, were ready to force the world to bow to it. It was self-centred, but the self was a majestic thing. It was a creed for the few—

Such as thou hast solemnly elected,

With gifts and graces eminently adorned,

To some great work, thy glory,

And people’s safety.

Could this spiritual aristocracy mould England to its pattern? Could it, perhaps abating its rigour, inspire the community with something of its high purpose? Could the phœnix, the “secular bird”—in the famous imagery of Samson Agonistes—ever mate with the “tame villatic fowl”? That, more than any niceties of political or ecclesiastical structure, was the riddle to which Oliver Cromwell sought an answer.