Vast spiritual and material continents lay for the first time displayed, opening fields of thought and fields of enterprise of which none could conjecture the limit.  Old routine was broken up.  Men were thrown back on their own strength and their own power, unshackled to accomplish whatever they might dare.  And although we do not speak of these discoveries as the cause of that enormous force of heart and intellect which accompanied them (for they were as much the effect as the cause, and one reacted on the other), yet at any rate they afforded scope and room for the play of powers which, without such scope, let them have been as transcendent as they would, must have passed away unproductive and blighted.

An earnest faith in the supernatural, an intensely real conviction of the divine and devilish forces by which the universe was guided and misguided, was the inheritance of the Elizabethan age from Catholic Christianity.  The fiercest and most lawless men did then really and truly believe in the actual personal presence of God or the devil in every accident, or scene, or action.  They brought to the contemplation of the new heaven and the new earth an imagination saturated with the spiritual convictions of the old era, which were not lost, but only infinitely expanded.  The planets whose vastness they now learnt to recognize were, therefore, only the more powerful for evil or for good; the tides were the breathing of Demogorgon; and the idolatrous American tribes were real worshippers of the real devil, and were assisted with the full power of his evil army.

It is a form of thought which, however in a vague and general way we may continue to use its phraseology, has become, in its detailed application to life, utterly strange to us.  We congratulate ourselves on the enlargement of our understanding when we read the decisions of grave law-courts in cases of supposed witchcraft; we smile complacently over Raleigh’s story of the island of the Amazons, and rejoice that we are not such as he—­entangled in the cobwebs of effete and foolish superstition.  The true conclusion is the opposite of the conclusion which we draw.  That Raleigh and Bacon could believe what they believed, and could be what they were notwithstanding, is to us a proof that the injury which such mistakes can inflict is unspeakably insignificant:  and arising, as they arose, from a never-failing sense of the real awfulness and mystery of the world, and of the life of human souls upon it, they witness to the presence in such minds of a spirit, the loss of which not the most perfect acquaintance with every law by which the whole creation moves can compensate.  We wonder at the grandeur, the moral majesty, of some of Shakespeare’s characters, so far beyond what the noblest among ourselves can imitate, and at first thought we attribute it to the genius of the poet who has outstripped nature in his creations; but we are misunderstanding the power and the meaning of