As we look back over this growth of modern monarchy, we cannot but be struck with the immense practical difficulty of creating a strong nationality without sacrificing self-government. Powerful, indeed, is the tendency toward over-centralization, toward stagnation, toward political death. Powerful is the tendency to revert to the Roman, if not to the Oriental method. As often as we reflect upon the general state of things at the end of the seventeenth century--the dreadful ignorance and misery which prevailed among most of the people of continental Europe, and apparently without hope of remedy--so often must we be impressed anew with the stupendous significance of the part played by self-governing England in overcoming dangers which have threatened the very existence of modern civilization. It is not too much to say that in the seventeenth century the entire political future of mankind was staked upon the questions that were at issue in England. To keep the sacred flame of liberty alive required such a rare and wonderful concurrence of conditions that, had our forefathers then succumbed in the strife, it is hard to imagine how or where the failure could have been repaired. Some of these conditions we have already considered; let us now observe one of the most important of all. Let us note the part played by that most tremendous of social forces, religious sentiment, in its relation to the political circumstances which we have passed in review. If we ask why it was that among modern nations absolute despotism was soonest and most completely established in Spain, we find it instructive to observe that the circumstances under which the Spanish monarchy grew up, during centuries of deadly struggle with the Mussulman, were such as to enlist the religious sentiment on the side of despotic methods in church and state. It becomes interesting, then, to observe by contrast how it was that in England the dominant religious sentiment came to be enlisted on the side of political freedom. [Illustration: Had it not been for the Puritans, political liberty would probably have disappeared from the world]