Principles of western civilisation

Vil THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE 227

forms, still to remain scarcely more than pagan in forms, and even in spirit, for ages to come, there have been unloosed forces destined never again to be bound ; forces destined to make impossible all the ideals of the State, and of government, and of society, under which men had hitherto lived. The monks of Cluny have already begun to see visions of a kingdom greater than the world, and withal a kingdom of the world.t They are dreams greater than the poor dreamers who have dreamed them; nursed in the spirit of a pagan world, seeing only through its images, and thinking only through its thoughts. But they are dreams of which no one who has caught the meaning of the controlling principle of the evolutionary drama unfolding itself in human society, will be likely in future to miss the significance. They are dreams in which we feel the very pulses of the cosmos; they are visions through which there runs the inner spirit of that antithesis which can never again be closed within any limits of the State or of political consciousness. Far down in the under strata of society we already begin to catch the meaning of that spirit which springs from the antithesis which has been opened within the State; that spirit which is destined to dissolve every principle upon which the State has hitherto rested; that spirit of responsibility to principles transcending the interests of the family, of blood relationship, of party, and of the State itself; which is to enfranchise not simply the slave and the serf, but the sullen, long-bound, silent

1 Cf. Letter of Gregory VII. to Bishop Hermann of Metz, March rsth, 1081, Henderson’s Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages, w. Gregory VII. was one of the three popes who in the eleventh and twelfth centuries went forth from Cluny.