EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST 



the keen disappointment, the queen began to 

 reason with herself, " she could not doubt that 

 her hopes had been at one time well founded ; 

 but for some fault, some error in herself, God 

 had delayed the fulfilment of His promise. 

 And what could that crime be ? The accursed 

 thing was still in the realm. She had been raised 

 up, like the judges in Israel, for the extermina- 

 tion of God's enemies ; and she had smitten 

 but a few here and there, when, like the evil 

 spirits, their name was legion." * As the prac- 

 tical result of these pious meditations, some 

 fifty Protestants one of my own ancestors 

 among them were forthwith burned at the 

 stake. Obviously, Mary's reasoning, like that 

 of the Spanish Archbishop, had no validity or 

 significance whatever, except as it appealed to 

 that terrible sense of corporate responsibility 

 which they had inherited as a tradition from pre- 

 historic times. 



Now, although the feeling of corporate re- 

 sponsibility for opinions was still so powerful as 

 recently as the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- 

 turies, although plentiful traces of it may still be 

 found at the present day, nevertheless the state 

 of things by which the feeling was logically jus- 

 tified has long since passed away. And it has 

 passed away, no doubt, never to return. It be- 

 gan to pass away so soon as men began to become 

 1 Froude, History of England, vi. 330. 

 232 



