Principles of western civilisation

228 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

tarian feeling, nor of any vague conception of the rights of the individual under some imaginary law of nature such as we find traces of in the Stoic philosophy, that furnishes the prime cause that effected the transformation in the attitude of the general mind which soon began to take place, and which was in time to abolish the institution of slavery throughout Western Europe. When we catch sight of the nature of the underlying principles to which the change is related, we perceive that the movement against slavery is but another of the early symptoms of the altered stand-point of the human mind, as the controlling consciousness in the evolutionary process rises to a sense of direct responsibility to principles transcending the meaning of all interests comprised within the limits of existing society.’

From an early period it may, accordingly, be noticed how incompatible with the spirit of the new movement the institution of slavery became. We continually encounter in the early literature of the movement the emphatic assertion that there were neither bond nor free from the stand-point of the new fellowship. The feeling on the subject is to be distinguished in innumerable utterances and acts of the early Church Councils against slavery. The stand-point therein, beneath the circumlocution of ecclesiastical expression, is ever consistent and unmistakable. We are always in the presence of the same antithesis, in which the controlling centre of human action is seen to have become related to

1 Tt makes no difference that the influence behind the transition operated, as it has continued to operate in the world, to a large extent indirectly ; and that it reached the minds of millions of men who were ignorant of its origin, only through its effect on the standards of public opinion.