Principles of western civilisation

230 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHapP.

but the first outward expressions of the alteration in the stand-point of the human mind which was in progress deep down beneath the surface of society, and of which the profounder evolutionary results were still incalculably remote in the future. At the point at which the new movement came into relations with the outward forms of the Roman empire, it is the same principle which furnishes the clue to the phenomena we are regarding. In its light we distinguish clearly the real nature of that vast, halfformed, subconscious instinct of the populations of the ancient world against the new belief in its earlier stages. Beneath all the confusing and conflicting phenomena of distrust and hostility resulting from the contact of the movement with the institutions of the Roman world, what we have in sight is, in reality, nothing less than the ultimate fact of the pagan world instinctively standing at bay before a cause, the operation of which was absolutely incompatible with the life-principle of every institution which was characteristic of it. The instinct which, in the Decian persecution of 249, and in the Diocletian persecution of 303, produced deliberate attempts, supported by the whole machinery of Roman government, to extirpate the new system of belief from the world,’ rightly recognised the essential nature of the movement it confronted. That world, which could behold with tolerance a thousand forms of religion existing under Roman rule,’ but in all of which it nevertheless saw the highest human interests and the highest human ideals still conceived as comprised within the limits of the

1 Lecky’s Zuropean Morals, vol. i. pp. 449-468. 2 Cf. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. i. ch. xvi.