Des Louvres, the Catiline of this conspiracy, had just that touch of the bohemian in his own character which enabled him to understand Stuart. He did not hope to rouse in him any active enthusiasm for the small territorial ambitions of the Catholic Pretenders, clerical or lay. But he saw that what Stuart wanted was a stick with which to beat society, and the Legitimist stick was as good as any other. Little by little he drew his proselyte on to the view that all the elements that made the Victorian Order hateful to him were personified in the reigning House itself. The Hanoverian dynasty was a Protestant dynasty--or, at least, it was required to pose as such in public. The Act of Settlement was the work of the Low Church party, supported by the Nonconformists; in other words, it was the Puritan settlement. All English history, all English literature, all English society, had rested hitherto on the basis that the Low Church party was in the right, and that its standards ought to govern Great Britain, and Ireland, and India, and ultimately the whole world. Alistair himself had been brought up in an atmosphere where that assumption was not supposed to be even subject to discussion. The whole world, to his youthful mind, had been divided into two classes--those who were Low Churchmen, and those who ought to be, and knew it. He, Alistair, knew it, so did the others, from the General of the Jesuits to the stone-breaker suspected of being a Plymouth Brother, and from the condemned murderer to the author of the “Origin of Species.” The Sultan of Turkey knew it in his heart, and so did every follower of every other faith, except, possibly, the Grand Lama, protected by geographical barriers from the enterprise of the Low Church Missionary Society. And now all these assumptions were breaking up and melting away so rapidly that the mere statement of them sounded more like satire than sober record. Histories of England were being written, and were being used in the schools, which failed to teach that the Revolution of 1688 was the most glorious event in the annals of the human race. It was no longer universally deemed an act of oppression on the part of James I. to permit the peasantry to dance on Sunday. Even the Reformation had ceased to be the subject of unmitigated eulogy. The rising generation were being allowed to perceive that some bigotry goes to the making of a martyr, as well as of a heretic-hunter. The failings of the leading Reformers were no longer veiled, and the virtues of their opponents were lovingly conceded. Every revelation passes through three stages: first, it is a heresy; next, a commonplace; and last, a superstition. The mind of man revolves like his planet, and truths rise and set like the stars.