Principles of western civilisation

vil THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE 235

of the higher ideal,'—that the future of the world has passed. :

It is in the light of the bearing of these facts on a wider development to come that we have to view the sombre significance of what may be called the last act of the conversion of the military races of Northern Europe to the Christian religion. In that act we see Charlemagne, the barbarian chief of these races, becoming, in effect, in the year 800, protector of the Bishop of Rome. And in return we see the head of the new religion in Western Europe placing what men still held to be the crown of the Czsars—the outward symbol of that empire in which the military epoch of human evolution culminated—upon the head of the leader and representative of the peoples upon whom the destinies of a new world’ had devolved. Many Continental historians, and in England the late Professor Freeman, and, in particular, Mr. Bryce, have done much to enable us to realise the significance in history of this act. Buttothe mind of the evolutionist it must possess even a deeper meaning than any which the historian, occupied with the relations of the shadowy Holy Roman Empire—an ideal beyond which the evolutionist sees the world to have moved even at the moment of its inception—has been able to give it.

It is upon the antinomy, slowly developing beneath the surface of history, which the act

1 Lord Rosebery, address at Winchester, Aing Alfred Millenary Commemoration. ? It was a world, nevertheless, in which the history of Western civilisation was to become outwardly continuous, and in which no gain nor product of the civilisations of Greece or of Rome was to be eventually lost to us ; even though they were to be taken up, for the most part, as disintegrated organic products are taken up, by a new system of life subject to other laws of vitality.

° Cf. The Holy Roman Empire, by James Bryce, ch. iv.