children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the
New World have more than compensated her for what she has lost in the
Old. Her spiritual ascendancy extends over the vast countries which
lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which,
a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as
that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are
certainly not fewer than a hundred and fifty millions; and it will be
difficult to show that all the other Christian sects united amount to a
hundred and twenty millions. Nor do we see any sign which indicates
that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the
commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical
establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance
that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and
respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank
had crossed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished in
Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And
she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New
Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a
broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.
Here we have Macaulay in all his strength and all his limitations. The
passage contains in the main a solid truth--a truth which was very
little accepted in England in the year 1840--a truth of vast import and
very needful to assert. And this truth is clothed in such pomp of
illustration, and is hammered into the mind with such accumulated
blows; it is so clear, so hard, so coruscating with images, that it is
impossible to escape its effect. The paragraph is one never to be
forgotten, and not easy to be refuted or qualified. No intelligent
tiro in history can read that page without being set a-thinking,
without feeling that he has a formidable problem to solve. Tens of
thousands of young minds must have had that deeply-coloured picture of
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