It may be thought that Puritanism ought to have been spoken of in the chapters on religion, but I am not sure that it ought to be classed as a special creed. It seems rather to be a reform of custom in the direction of severity and austerity which might be carried out under any creed that permitted rigorous moralists to obtain a great social power. The Wahhabees are the Puritans of Islam, with their particular prohibitions, their gravity of demeanour, their employment of pious forms in language, their severity of social espionage, and control by a vigilant public opinion. But although we may find Puritanism in the most unexpected places, it has never accomplished a work so extensive in its consequences, or likely to be so durable, as the transformation of British sentiment and custom. Only a dispassionate comparison with custom still alive on the continent, but extinct in England, can enable us to realise what that transformation is. A middle-class English family goes to Paris.[56] In due course of time a Sunday comes; or rather, not a Sunday, but a _Dimanche_. The English family has heard of a French Sunday before, but has hitherto been unable to realise it by mere force of imagination. On actually _seeing_ it, the impression received is that the French are all intentional Sabbath-breakers--that the amusements which go forward on that day are a clear evidence of French wickedness. Some good English or Scotch people are so shocked by what they see that they recognise in the defeat of 1870 a just punishment for the national sin of Sabbath-breaking. They do not realise that what they see is not the French Sunday in particular, but the continental Sunday in general; still less do they remember that it is also the English Sunday of pre-Puritanic times--those times now so remote in memory, and yet historically still so near, when the English had not yet become a peculiar people, but lived like the other nations of western Europe. The English of Shakespeare’s time went to the theatre on Sunday,[57] and after morning service in the churches they enjoyed many active games and recreations, including dancing, archery, and leaping.[58] Now, as there is nothing more visible than external differences of custom, and as people are separated even more by visible differences than by those which are invisible, and as on one day out of seven those differences are now strikingly apparent between the English and French peoples, it is evident that on the day when they differ most they cannot but feel infinitely more estranged from each other than their ancestors would have felt on the same day. [Sidenote: English Roman Catholics.] [Sidenote: The Catholic Sunday.] [Sidenote: Studies on Sunday.]