ABSTRACT
The seventeenth century has been rightly termed the age of genius, for, even after three hundred years, the implications of its discoveries are not yet exhausted. It is in England that this is most clearly to be seen and there is no mistaking the meaning of the result. The victory is for utilitarianism in morals, for toleration in religion, for constitutional government in the sphere of politics. It is evident in the change of the preacher's emphasis from the scholastic embroidery of Donne and Andrewes to the simple moral exhortation of Tillotson and Wake. It is not too much to say that, by the end of the seventeenth century, it has come to possess one standard for the owners of property and another for those who live by wages. It remained for the eighteenth century to discover how to give a new social order its letters of credit.
