Principles of western civilisation

234 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

than a century, in short, Christianity was almost completely extinguished in southern and eastern countries ; and of the five Christian capitals of the world, Jerusalem, Carthage, Alexandria, Constantinople, and Rome, three—Jerusalem, Carthage, and Alexandria, all closely associated with its early history and development—were lost; the downfall of the fourth, Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman empire, being only deferred.

With these events the conditions of the antinomy in Western history may be said to be complete. It is to the peoples alone who represent in themselves, and in the highest development, the two opposing terms in that antinomy, to whom the future is henceforward to belong. It is amongst the peoples who represent the highest expression of force in the world, that there are to arise the conditions in which force itself, the governing principle of all the past development of the race, is to pass out under the control of a higher principle of human efficiency.' It is not upon the softer Eastern races, who may be said to have represented but one term of the antithesis,” that the work in the new era has devolved. It is to the barbarian out of the twilight of the stern north; to the man able to do all, able to dare all; to the man able, as has been finely said, to live his life as a man amongst men, while yet bearing ever hidden within his breast the little scroll

1 The essence of this position, as it has been defined in a previous chapter, consists in the fact that it is only the peoples amongst whom the qualities contributing to efficiency in the present have reached their highest development, that can hold the stage of the world during that epoch of human evolution in which it becomes the destiny of the present to pass under the control of the future.

2 Cf. **Race and Religion in India,” by A. M. Fairbairn, Contemporary Review, No. 404.