XXI
I make use of the present tense, but am I speaking truly of present England? Such powerful agencies of change have been at work during the last thirty years; and it is difficult, nay impossible, to ascertain in what degree they have affected the national character, thus far. One notes the obvious: decline of conventional religion, free discussion of the old moral standards; therewith, a growth of materialism which favours every anarchic tendency. Is it to be feared that self-righteousness may be degenerating into the darker vice of true hypocrisy? For the English to lose belief in themselves--not merely in their potential goodness, but in their pre-eminence as examples and agents of good--would mean as hopeless a national corruption as any recorded in history. To doubt their genuine worship, in the past, of a very high (though not, of course, the highest) ethical ideal, is impossible for any one born and bred in England; no less impossible to deny that those who are rightly deemed "best" among us, the men and women of gentle or humble birth who are not infected by the evils of the new spirit, still lead, in a very true sense, "honest, sober, and godly" lives. Such folk, one knows, were never in a majority, but of old they had a power which made them veritable representatives of the English ETHOS. If they thought highly of themselves, why, the fact justified them; if they spoke, at times, as Pharisees, it was a fault of temper which carried with it no grave condemnation. Hypocrisy was, of all forms of baseness, that which they most abhorred. So is it still with their descendants. Whether these continue to speak among us with authority, no man can certainly say. If their power is lost, and those who talk of English hypocrisy no longer use the word amiss, we shall soon know it.