In the Empire of Persia and the great days of the Sassanides, in Kurush, who destroys the Median Empire, and spreads wider the religion of the vanquished, the religion of Zerdusht, the symbolic worship of flame, loveliest of inanimate things--even there no sustained, no deliberate effort towards an ideal amongst the peoples beneath the Persian sway can be discovered. Islam starts with religious aspirations, the most lofty, the most beneficent, but the purity of her ideals dies with Ali. At Damascus and at Bagdad an autocratic system warped by contact with Rome infects the religious; the result is a theocracy in which the purposes of Mohammed, at least on their political side, are abandoned, lost at last in the gloomy and often ferocious despotism of the Ottoman Turks.
Consider in contrast with these empires the question--What is the distinction in this phase of human life of the Empire of Britain, of its history? Steadily growing from its first beginnings--shall I say, from that great battle of the Winwaed, where three Kings are in conflict and the slayer of two lies dead--steadily growing, on to the present hour, as in politics so in religion, the effort sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious, but persistent, continuous, towards an ever purer, higher, nobler conception of man's relations to the Divine. From this effort arises the Reformation, from this effort arises in the way of a thousand years the Empire based on the higher justice, the imaginative justice, the higher freedom, the imaginative freedom.
Thus even in the earliest periods of our history, during the struggle between Christianism and the religion of Thor and Woden, England shows far more violence, more earnestness, more fury on both sides, than is found anywhere else in Europe. Glance, for instance, at this struggle in Germany. Witikind[1] the Saxon arises as the champion of the old gods against Christianity. Charlemagne with his Frankish cavalry comes down amongst the Saxons. His march surpasses the march of Caesar, or of Constantine against Rome. Witikind does rise to the heights of heroism against Charlemagne twice; but in the end he surrenders, gives in, and dies a hanger-on at the court of his conqueror. Mercia, the kingdom of the mid-English, that too produces its champion of the old gods against the religion of Christ--Penda. There is no surrender here; two kings, I repeat, he slays, and grown old in war, he rouses himself like a hoary old lion of the forest to fight his last battle. An _intransigeant_, an irreconcilable, this King Penda, fighting his last battle against this new and hated thing, this Christianism! He lies dead there--he becomes no hanger-on. There you have the spirit of the race. It displays itself in a form not less impressive in the well-known incident in the very era of Penda, described by Bede.