began to argue on religion and politics from a deductive point of view, and to treat them as real matters of principle. This habit of mind was, perhaps, inoculated in them by the Scottish deductiveness of James I. and Charles I., who excelled in the art of raising questions of principle at the very moments when they would have been best advised to imitate their Tudor predecessors in appealing to expediency.
The Elizabethan method[1] of compelling all to unite in some form of ritual without disputing on matters of belief might have achieved all the unanimity which, as Bacon reminds us, it promoted among the heathen, and as Renan remarks, among the Jews. The more sceptical Englishmen of that hard-headed age were ready enough to acquiesce in it. There was a decided tendency towards a sceptical tolerance. Hooker, in his admission that all religions contained an element of truth, and that no religion, even that of the Druids or the Romans, could consist exclusively of untruths,[2] as well as in the scope he gives to reason in religion, goes much further than Pecock in the last century had ventured to go; and besides, Hooker was unmolested. Bacon in his
