Page:Church and State under the Tudors.djvu/68

 REIGN OF HENRY VIII

is more difficult, glibly as it is often talked and written of, than successfully to place ourselves in the circumstances of men living in another period of history, or even in another climate or under another government. So vastly do the circumstances of our daily and hourly lives, the atmosphere of the society which we meet, the tone of the books and newspapers which we read, mould every thought which we think and modify every view which we take of the occurrences which surround us, that it is all but an impossibility to judge how those best known to us, or how even we ourselves, would think or speak or act in a set of circumstances widely different from those in which our actual experience has been cast.

The Tudor times are often and justly thought of as being those in which modern history took its rise, in which the great inventions and the great discoveries—the revival of learning, the printing-press, the discovery of America—tended of themselves to evolve great ideas and to develop great men; but when we are discussing the characters and achievements of those great men, we are apt sometimes to underrate the difference between their surroundings and our own—to forget, for instance, that they lived under a 'reign of terror,' as complete as that which has obtained that name in the history of modern France, and far more permanent. It is doubt-