Excerpt from The Revolutions of 1688 and 1776

I. The collapse of Puritanism enabled the theatres to re Open. Actresses gave a new fascination to the stage; and even Shakespeare seemed likely to be eclipsed by Dryden. The century ended as it had begun, in a blaze of secular litera ture. The Roundheads had only put a dark period between two bright ones; and in the end the Reformation in England was conquered by the Renaissance. Science languished even worse than poetry in the shadow of theology. Bacon had no successor; and Englishmen were slow to notice the mighty books in which Descartes taught the dependence of life and motion on mechanical laws, as well as the necessity of observa tion and experience for making knowledge accurate. It was his method which Newton followed in the Principia; and this momentous demonstration of the universal power of gray itation throughout the solar system could not, in all probability, have been published, or perhaps even written, without the cc Operation established among friends of science in 1660. Then the members of what had hitherto been only a private club were able to form the Royal Society, hold public meetings, and publish reports of important experiments. One of the books which it sanctioned proved that comets return with a regularity which shows them to be signs of the omnipotence of law, and not of the divine wrath.

Not until the publication of Newton's Principia in 1687, however, was the fact clearly established that the world is not governed by arbitrary fiats, but according to fixed laws every where in force. These laws were acknowledged to be working for the general happiness of mankind; and thus faith in the universal fatherhood of God began to drive away the fancy that he wished his servants to slaughter whoever would not worship him precisely as they did. Thus Newton did much to increase the influence of the books published late in the century by Penn, Locke, Spinoza, and many other authors, to prove that religion is holy enough to have. A right to grow freely. The Principia was the death-warrant of persecution. Political freedom, also, was guaranteed by the advance of science. Early nations knew almost as little about kings who rule ao cording to the laws of the land, as about a God who rules according to the laws of the universe; but England was now beginning to see that the best of all governments, whether on earth or in heaven, is that which is most in harmony With im partial laws.

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