Principles of western civilisation

VII THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE 221

fore, under one form or another, the attempt either to weaken again or to close entirely the profound antithesis opened in the mind as the controlling meaning of human action begins to pass out of the present, and to become related to ends no longer comprised within the limits of merely political consciousness. In the great Gnostic controversy, for instance, of the second century, as in later controversies of a similar kind in which the spirit of the ancient philosophy under the forms of Neo-Platonism struggled with Christianity, we may distinguish this plainly. In that controversy we have clearly in view the continually expressed tendency to lose sight again of the essential nature of the ideas from which this antithesis sprung. And, in the result, we have equally clearly in view the fact of the religious consciousness finally and definitely refusing to confuse, or lessen, or attenuate in any way either the nature or the dimensions of the antithesis, by insisting upon keeping clearly in view the central concept upon which it rested; namely, the insufficiency of the individual and the resulting necessity of what is described as his redemption from evil. In the Arian heresy we have in view a similar spectacle. We see the same profound instinct of the religious consciousness resolutely opposing a tendency which made in the same direction. We see it persistently resisting any weakening whatever of that main concept associated with the work of the Founder of Christianity upon which the antithesis rested ; and again, in the result, we see it once more retaining undiminished the uncompromising definition of the cosmic nature of the concept by which alone