the English genius from the summits of Shakespeare."

"These heights could not be maintained. They were followed by
a meanness and a descent of the mind into lower levels;
the loss of wings; no high speculation. Locke, to whom the meaning
of ideas was unknown, became the type of philosophy,
and his "understanding" the measure, in all nations,
of the English intellect. His countrymen forsook the lofty sides
of Parnassus, on which they had once walked with echoing steps,
and disused the studies once so beloved; the powers of thought
fell into neglect."

The highest powers of thought cannot be realized without the life
of the spirit. It is this, as I have already said, which has been
the glory of the greatest thinkers since the world began;
not their intellects, but the co-operating, unconscious power
IMMANENT in their intellects.

During the Restoration period, and later, spiritual life
was at its very lowest ebb. I mean, spiritual life
as exhibited in the poetic and dramatic literature of the time,
whose poisoned fountain-head was the dissolute court of Charles II.
All the slops of that court went into the drama,
all the `sentina reipublicae', the bilge water of the ship of state.
The dramatic writers of the time, to use the words of St. Paul
in his letter to the Ephesians, "walked in the vanity of their mind;
having the understanding darkened, being alienated from
the life of God through the ignorance that was in them
because of the blindness of their heart; who, being past feeling,
gave themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness