Thus in England Puritanism began as the hardest of creeds, but has ended as the softest; soft-hearted and not unfrequently soft-headed.

Of old the Puritan in war was certainly the Puritan at his best; it was the Puritan in peace whom no Christian could be expected to stand.

Yet those Englishmen to-day who claim descent from the great militarists of 1649 express the utmost horror of militarism.

An inversion of an opposite kind has taken place in Germany.

Out of the country that was once valued as providing a perpetual supply of kings small enough to be stop-gaps, has come the modern menace of the one great king who would swallow the kingdoms of the earth.