Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/122

 the circumstances 'a restitution of the best Government and the immortal nature of right,' and rejoiced 'that good patriots were endeavouring to restore the courses of the Church and State into their ancient channels,' his language was not that of political sycophancy, but represented the sober and mature conviction of the majority of the nation that what was above all things necessary was some kind of settled government, and that anything was preferable to the confusion which had reigned since the death of Cromwell, and the rapid alternations between the rule of second-rate soldiers, the agitation of religious fanatics, and the vacillations of a divided and incompetent Parliament. The maggots had eaten out the guts of the Commonwealth, as Henry Cromwell and Dr. Petty had foreseen. The noble lines in which Milton in after-years lamented the fall of the Republic, the injustice of man, and the inequality of fate, were the dirge of an ideal existing in his own mind, rather than of the reality of existing things. By 1660 the magnates of the Commonwealth were sleeping the sleep of death in Henry VII.'s chapel, from which their corpses were soon to be rudely torn. They had left no political successors, and the days were over when it could be said of the Puritan party, that giants were to be seen rising out of the earth.

The founders of great religions, even in the bygone eras of the world's history, have never themselves been the founders of great States. From the nature of the case it is almost impossible it should be otherwise, because they draw their ideas from a sphere excluding the compromises, the inequalities, and even the injustices, which, in secular affairs, have too often to be accepted as the conditions of the existence of government. Their task is that of destruction—often a necessary task. The same fatality has constantly pursued those who have transported religious ideas into subsequent and often widely different periods, and sought to make them the exclusive basis of political institutions and of civil society. This fatality had now destroyed the Commonwealth. It is true that amongst the party there were men who, either guided by the political instinct of their race, or