Principles of western civilisation

222 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

that antithesis could be bridged, and the individual thereby brought into a sense of the closest personal responsibility to principles infinite and universal in their reach. In the Pelagian controversy, at last, we have the same spectacle repeated in even clearer definition. Through a century of conflict, from the Council of Ephesus in 431 to the Third Council of Valence in 530, we have the attempts again and again repeated to close the antithesis. But we have still the spectacle of the religious consciousness set unchangingly against the doctrine of the normalcy of the individual, and, therefore, against the conception of virtue as conformity to his own nature in the conditions of the world around him. Once more we have the emphatic assertion of the antithesis in its most inflexible terms, in the doctrine of the entire insufficiency of the individual in respect of his own powers to rise to the standard required of him, or to fulfil, in virtue of his own nature, the conditions held to be necessary to his salvation.

The mind can have little insight into the nature of the central position involved in the drama of human evolution if it does not at this point perceive the cosmic reach of the principle into the action of which the life of our Western civilisation now begins to be slowly drawn. As we turn to follow the movement proceeding from the new system of belief in its first contact with the outward phenomena of the world, what it is of the first importance to notice is the change in the stand-point of the human mind which is in preparation beneath the face of history ; a change of which the more characteristic results are as yet immeasurably distant in