Principles of western civilisation

246 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

wherein lay all the distinctive potentiality in the future of the new form of belief.

In the resulting struggle around this ideal, almost the entire intellectual and political activities of our Western world become for the time being involved. The influence of the conflict has lasted down even to the present day, and is still with us under many forms. To perceive the bearing of the struggle on the process of our social evolution is the first step towards understanding the principles of modern history. Let us see now if we can place the nature of the issue involved clearly before us.

In one of his essays Sir Frederick Pollock brings clearly into view a fundamental fact of social development, the significance of which is apparent on reflection ; but the perception of which is calculated to come upon the mind, in the first instance, with something of the nature of a shock. It is that in human history theological persecution, in the strict sense, is of entirely recent origin.’ Or to put the statement in the more emphatic words used by Mr. Ritchie in a chapter of his Matural Rights, persecution — viewing it as an historical fact, and apart from any discussion as to whether it is involved or not in the true interpretation of the tenets of the religion now associated with our civilisation—“‘ persecution in the sense of repression for the purposes of maintaining true doctrine is the outcome of Christianity.”

However startling this statement may appear at first to the ordinary mind, there can be no doubt that, as the expression of a fact of history, it is to all

1 Cf. Essays in Jurisprudence and Ethics, pp. 145-175. 2 Natural Rights, by D. S. Ritchie, c. viii.