Thus ended, apparently in simple catastrophe, the enterprise of projecting into sudden reality the impulse of spiritual freedom. Its only result, as it might seem, had been to {364} prevent the transition of the feudal into an absolute monarchy, and thus to prepare the way for the plutocracy under feudal forms which has governed England since the death of William III. This, however, is but a superficial view. Two palpable benefits the short triumph of puritanism did win for England. It saved it from the catholic reaction, and it created the ‘dissenting bodies.’ If it seems but a poor change from the fanatic sacerdotalism of Laud to the genteel and interested sacerdotalism of modern English churchmanship, yet the fifteen years of vigorous growth which Cromwell’s sword secured for the church of the sectaries, gave it a permanent force which no reaction could suppress, and which has since been the great spring of political life in England. The higher enthusiasm, however, which breathed in Cromwell and Vane, was not puritanic or English merely. It belonged to the universal spiritual force which as ecstasy, mysticism, quietism, philosophy, is in permanent collision with the carnal interests of the world, and which, if it conquers them for a moment, yet again sinks under them, that it may transmute them more thoroughly to its service. ‘Death,’ said Vane on the scaffold, ‘is a little word, but it is a great work to die.’ So his own enthusiasm died that it might rise again. It was sown in the weakness of feeling, that it might be raised in the intellectual comprehension which is power. ‘The people of England,’ he said again, ‘have been long asleep. I doubt they will be hungry when they awake.’ They have slept, we may say, another two hundred years. If they should yet wake and be hungry, they will find their food in the ideas which, with much blindness and weakness, he vainly offered them, cleared and ripened by a philosophy of which he did not dream. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Four Lectures on the English Revolution, by Thomas Hill Green