This is exactly the position of the average modern thinker.

It will be said that this is avowedly a preposterous example.

But it is literally the fact of recent history.

The great and grave changes in our political civilization all belonged to the early nineteenth century, not to the later.

They belonged to the black and white epoch when men believed fixedly in Toryism, in Protestantism, in Calvinism, in Reform, and not unfrequently in Revolution.