The Restoration of 1660 was such a revolution. Complete and
instantaneous inversion of the position of the two parties in the
nation, it occasioned much individual hardship. But this was only the
fortune of war, the necessary consequence of party ascendancy. The
Restoration was much more than a triumph of the party of the royalists
over that of the roundheads; it was the deathblow to national
aspiration, to all those aims which raise man above himself. It
destroyed and trampled under foot his ideal. The Restoration was a
moral catastrophe. It was not that there wanted good men among the
churchmen, men as pious and virtuous as the Puritans whom they
displaced. But the royalists came back as the party of reaction,
reaction of the spirit of the world against asceticism, of
self-indulgence against duty, of materialism against idealism. For a
time virtue was a public laughing-stock, and the word "saint," the
highest expression in the language for moral perfection, connoted
everything that was ridiculous. I do not speak of the gallantries of
Whitehall, which figure so prominently in the histories of the reign.
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