"Down to the 20th century the English liberals were affected by the persistence of their alliance with Nonconformity. The churches in their turn, since they were not politically endangered, saw no necessity to lock themselves away in a political die-hard-ism. So the new and the old were allowed to mingle and frontiers were blurred, producing another piece of that English history which, like a weed, grows over the fences, chokes and smothers the boundaries—luxurious and wanton as life itself—to drive the geometers and the heavy logicians to despair. The whigs, and indeed the English in general, were saved from some of the excesses of that secular liberalism which came to prevail on the continent, and which, though never entirely absent here, has not yet been allowed to govern the character of our politics."