As an Englishman, I can feel in my bones the sense of what English nationality implies; I feel intimately, for instance, the things that enable me to claim Shakespeare or Jane Austen or Dickens as typically English, without being able to put into words the things that make them so.
Laski expresses the deep, instinctive connection he feels to English nationality through its literary figures.
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The intolerance may be Catholic, when it insists that a unity of outlook is essential for the preservation of society; or it may be Protestant when, as with Calvin and the Socinians, it holds that the blasphemous nature of the belief…
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He is able, accordingly, to indulge in the twofold luxury not only of preserving his own authority, but also of assisting the persons attacked to enter, if they so choose, the way of truth.
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