_Ellesmere_. No, that is not fair. The Tudors were a coarse, fierce race; but it will not do to lay the faults of their times upon them only. Look at Elizabeth’s ministers. They had about as much notion of religious tolerance as they had of Professor Wheatstone’s telegraph. It was not a growth of that age. _Milverton_. I do not know. You have Cardinal Pole and the Earl of Essex, both tolerant men in the midst of bigots. _Ellesmere_. Well, as you said, Milverton, we shall never push off, if we once get aground on this subject. _Dunsford_. I am in fault: so I will take upon myself to bring you quite away from the Reformation. I have been thinking of that comparison in the essay of the present with the past. Such comparisons seem to me very useful, as they best enable us to understand our own times. And, then, when we have ascertained the state and tendency of our own age, we ought to strive to enrich it with those qualities which are complementary to its own. Now with all this toleration, which delights you so much, dear Milverton, is it not an age rather deficient in caring about great matters? _Milverton_. If you mean great speculative matters, I might agree with you; but if you mean what I should call the greatest matters, such as charity, humanity, and the like, I should venture to differ with you, Dunsford. _Dunsford_. I do not like to see the world indifferent to great speculative matters. I then fear shallowness and earthiness. _Milverton_. It is very difficult to say what the world is thinking of now. It is certainly wrong to suppose that this is a shallow age because it is not driven by one impulse. As civilisation advances, it becomes more difficult to estimate what is going on, and we set it all down as confusion. Now there is not one “great antique heart,” whose beatings we can count, but many impulses, many circles of thought in which men are moving many objects. Men are not all in the same state of progress, so cannot be moved in masses as of old. At one time chivalry urged all men, then the Church, and the phenomena were few, simple, and broad, or at least they seem so in history. _Ellesmere_. Very true; still I agree somewhat with Dunsford, that men are not agitated as they used to be by the great speculative questions. I account for it in this way, that the material world has opened out before us, and we cannot but look at that, and must play with it and work at it. I would say, too, that philosophy had been found out, and there is something in that. Still, I think if it were not for the interest now attaching to material things, great intellectual questions, not exactly of the old kind, would arise and agitate the world.