religious movement and the most refined despotism ever known, it
has led to the superiority of politics over divinity in the life
of nations, and terminates in the equal claim of every man to be
unhindered by man in the fulfilment of duty to God #34--a doctrine
laden with storm and havoc, which is the secret essence of the
Rights of Man, and the indestructible soul of Revolution.

When we consider what the adverse forces were, their sustained
resistance, their frequent recovery, the critical moments when
the struggle seemed for ever desperate, in 1685, in 1772, in
1808, it is no hyperbole to say that the progress of the world
towards self-government would have been arrested but for the
strength afforded by the religious motive in the seventeenth
century. And this constancy of progress, of progress in the
direction of organised and assured freedom, is the characteristic
fact of Modern History, and its tribute to the theory of
Providence #35. Many persons, I am well assured, would detect that
this is a very old story, and a trivial commonplace, and would
challenge proof that the world is making progress in aught but
intellect, that it is gaining in freedom, or that increase in
freedom is either a progress or a gain. Ranke, who was my own
master, rejected the view that I have stated #36; Comte, the master
of better men, believed that we drag a lengthening chain under
the gathered weight of the dead hand #37; and many of our recent
classics--Carlyle, Newman, Froude--were persuaded that there is
no progress justifying the ways of God to man, and that the mere
consolidation of liberty is like the motion of creatures whose
advance is in the direction of their tails. They deem that
anxious precaution against bad government is an obstruction to
good, and degrades morality and mind by placing the capable at