The Crimes of England | Page 8

dreamer. He made
that which is, perhaps, in the long run, the fullest and most shining
manifestation of failure; he made a name. Calvin made an active,
governing, persecuting thing, called the Kirk. There is something
expressive of him in the fact that he called even his work of abstract
theology "The Institutes."
In England, however, there were elements of chaos more akin to Luther
than to Calvin. And we may thus explain many things which appear
rather puzzling in our history, notably the victory of Cromwell not only
over the English Royalists but over the Scotch Covenanters. It was the
victory of that more happy-go-lucky sort of Protestantism, which had in
it much of aristocracy but much also of liberty, over that logical
ambition of the Kirk which would have made Protestantism, if possible,
as constructive as Catholicism had been. It might be called the victory
of Individualist Puritanism over Socialist Puritanism. It was what
Milton meant when he said that the new presbyter was an exaggeration
of the old priest; it was his office that acted, and acted very harshly. The
enemies of the Presbyterians were not without a meaning when they
called themselves Independents. To this day no one can understand
Scotland who does not realise that it retains much of its mediæval
sympathy with France, the French equality, the French pronunciation of
Latin, and, strange as it may sound, is in nothing so French as in its
Presbyterianism.
In this loose and negative sense only it may be said that the great
modern mistakes of England can be traced to Luther. It is true only in
this, that both in Germany and England a Protestantism softer and less
abstract than Calvinism was found useful to the compromises of
courtiers and aristocrats; for every abstract creed does something for
human equality. Lutheranism in Germany rapidly became what it is

to-day--a religion of court chaplains. The reformed church in England
became something better; it became a profession for the younger sons
of squires. But these parallel tendencies, in all their strength and
weakness, reached, as it were, symbolic culmination when the
mediæval monarchy was extinguished, and the English squires gave to
what was little more than a German squire the damaged and diminished
crown.
It must be remembered that the Germanics were at that time used as a
sort of breeding-ground for princes. There is a strange process in
history by which things that decay turn into the very opposite of
themselves. Thus in England Puritanism began as the hardest of creeds,
but has ended as the softest; soft-hearted and not unfrequently
soft-headed. Of old the Puritan in war was certainly the Puritan at his
best; it was the Puritan in peace whom no Christian could be expected
to stand. Yet those Englishmen to-day who claim descent from the
great militarists of 1649 express the utmost horror of militarism. An
inversion of an opposite kind has taken place in Germany. Out of the
country that was once valued as providing a perpetual supply of kings
small enough to be stop-gaps, has come the modern menace of the one
great king who would swallow the kingdoms of the earth. But the old
German kingdoms preserved, and were encouraged to preserve, the
good things that go with small interests and strict boundaries, music,
etiquette, a dreamy philosophy, and so on. They were small enough to
be universal. Their outlook could afford to be in some degree broad and
many-sided. They had the impartiality of impotence. All this has been
utterly reversed, and we find ourselves at war with a Germany whose
powers are the widest and whose outlook is the narrowest in the world.
It is true, of course, that the English squires put themselves over the
new German prince rather than under him. They put the crown on him
as an extinguisher. It was part of the plan that the new-comer, though
royal, should be almost rustic. Hanover must be one of England's
possessions and not England one of Hanover's. But the fact that the
court became a German court prepared the soil, so to speak; English
politics were already subconsciously committed to two centuries of the
belittlement of France and the gross exaggeration of Germany. The

period can be symbolically marked out by Carteret, proud of talking
German at the beginning of the period, and Lord Haldane, proud of
talking German at the end of it. Culture is already almost beginning to
be spelt with a k. But all such pacific and only slowly growing
Teutonism was brought to a crisis and a decision when the voice of Pitt
called us, like a trumpet, to the rescue of the Protestant Hero.
Among all the monarchs of that faithless age, the nearest to a man was
a woman. Maria Theresa of