The organic society of the middle ages gives place to an individual who builds the State out of his own desires.

Liberty becomes their realization; and the object of the State is to enable men in the fullest sense to secure the satisfaction of their private wants.

How far is that conception from the Anglican outlook of the seventeenth century, a sermon of Laud's makes clear.

"If any man," he said,[19] "be so addicted to his private interest that he neglects the common State, he is void of the sense of piety, and wishes peace and happiness for himself in vain.

For, whoever he be, he must live in the body of the commonwealth and in the body of the Church." So Platonic an outlook was utterly alien from the temper of puritanism.