Maggie's Farm

Via a Washington Reb post on mature vs immature liberty, quoted from History of American Congregationalism:

March, 1603: A great literature had been evoked; an efflorescence of genius made a single reign as nearly immortal as the temporal can be timeless.   Milton, a little later, would see England as an eagle flying proudly into the sun, a puissant people superbly self-confident.  But the nation was not inwardly at peace.  It had still to carry an unfinished religious and ecclesiastical reformation to some accepted issue within the framework of the English love of liberty, respect for authority, concern for established order, reverence for precedent, and militant tenacity of individual convictions and opinions.  In a spacious way, the action and interaction of these essentially English qualities had made English history since Magna Charta and determined its splendid and stormy course, politically, socially, and religiously.