Principles of western civilisation

VII THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE 2209

ends no longer included within the horizon of merely political consciousness ; an antithesis in which the sense of human responsibility now involves a principle, the meaning of which is no longer contained within the ideal of the State. It is pro remedio animae meae, or pro peccatis minuendis, and not in relation to any end for which the State exists, that we continually find the testator of the Middle Ages manumitting his slaves on death. It is not because of any relation of men to any interest in the existing social order, but because Redemptor noster totius conditor naturae humanam carnem voluerit assumere, that we find Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century urging the restoration of slaves to liberty.

In the inner life of the movement which begins to set in throughout Europe against slavery we are continually in sight of the same principle. Stripped of all the phraseology with which a religious movement has surrounded them, and reduced to the terms of a clear scientific principle, there can be no doubt as to the essential relation of the concepts influencing men’s minds to that shifting of the controlling centre in the evolutionary process which we have endeavoured to define as characteristic of the development proceeding in our civilisation. They are all reducible, we see, to the terms of the same fact. We are in the presence of a principle operating in the human mind involving a sense of relationship to ends no longer comprised within the limits of the State, and involving a sense of responsibility to a cause which transcends all the bounds of political consciousness.

These are all, it must be once more emphasised,