list," and when they met in public worship it was to hold such services
that all might freely join in them. Religion in Utopia was left to the
individual conscience. War was considered an unmitigated evil, and
never undertaken except in the extremest necessity. The people of
Utopia, therefore, not being exclusively occupied, on the one hand,
with discussing their religion and enforcing it on others, or, on the
other hand, with violating all its teachings, were able to think of
other things. How to make the best laws for the government of the
commonwealth; how to deal with crime, with labor; how to promote the
highest condition of general well-being, as regarded the public health,
public education, the comfort and cleanliness of dwellings;--these were
the questions which the Utopians considered most important, and these
were solved by the exercise of human reason. These were questions, too,
with which the English people found themselves confronted in the
beginning of the sixteenth century, and before that century had passed
away, the results even of a very imperfect solution regarding them were
apparent in every department and in every class of life.

The great mind, the noble character of Sir Thomas More stand out the
best production of his time. The strong religious bias of the man made
it inevitable that he should remain considerably under the influence of
the old theological teachings, but in the intelligent man of the world,
in the large-hearted philanthropist, in the honest patriot, appear the
new and beneficent tendencies which were at work. Like all men who have
been in advance of their time, More was looked upon as a dreamer. A
dreamer he might naturally seem, who, in the beginning of the sixteenth
century, looked for peace, for religious toleration, for justice to the
lower classes. But these dreams were destined to be realized long after
More's headless body had crumbled to dust, by that learning which he
himself so seduously cultivated, and by the decay, too, of some of