Last week, we stood at the threshold of Edmund Spenser’s Cantos of Mutability, where the great poet turns from the virtues he has spent a lifetime shaping — holiness, justice, courtesy — and asks a deeper, more unsettling question. What happens to virtue, to order, even to goodness itself, in a world where everything changes? This week, before we go any further, it helps to know exactly where we are — and where Spenser is taking us.