And the transformations in man's conception of his relations to the divine are in turn fraught with consequence to the ideal of imperialism itself. Life is greatened. The ardour of the periods of history most memorable awakens again in man, the reverence of the Middle Age, the energy of the Renaissance. A higher mood than that of the England of Cromwell has arisen upon the England of to-day. Man's true peace is not in the finite, but in the infinite; yet in the finite there is a work to be done, with the high disregard of a race which looks, not to the judgment of men, but of angels, whose appeal is not to the opinion of the world, but of God. Here at the close of a century, side by side existing are two ideals, one political, the other religious, "a divine philosophy of the mind," in Algernon Sidney's phrase--how can the issue and event be other than auspicious to this empire and to this generation of men? As Puritanism seemed born for the ideal of Constitutional England, so this ideal of the Fourth Epoch seems born to be the faith of Imperial England. Behind Cromwell's armies was the faith of Calvin, the philosophy of the "Institutes"; behind the French Revolution the thought of Rousseau and Voltaire; but in this ideal, a thought, a speculative vision, deeper, wider in range than Calvin's or Rousseau's, is, with every hour that passes, adding a serener life, an energy more profound. § 5. THE "ACT" AND THE "THOUGHT" Carlyle's exaltation of the "deed" above the "word," of action above speech, does not exhaust its meaning in setting the man of deeds, the soldier or the politician, above the thinker or the artist. It is an affirmation of the glory of the sole Actor, the Dramatist of the World, the _Demiourgos_, whose actions are at once the deeds and the thoughts of men. "Im Anfang war die That." The "deed" is nearer the eternal fountain than the "word"; though, on the other hand, in this or that work of art there may converge more rays from the primal source than in this or that deed. In painting, that impressionism which loves the line for the line's sake, the tint for the tint's sake, owes its emotion, sincere or affected, to the same energy of the same divine thought as that from which the baser enthusiasm of the subject-painter flows. A consciousness of the same truth reveals itself in Wagner's lifelong struggle, splendidly heroic, to weld the art of arts into living, pulsing union with the "deed," the action and its setting, from which, in such a work as _Tristan_, or as _Parsifal_, that art's ecstasy or mystery derives.