Principles of western civilisation

248 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

of view even where the acts or opinions were condemned because they were held to be displeasing to the deity. For it was the tangible results of the withdrawal of the favour of the tutelar deity or deities on whose goodwill the existing temporal welfare was held to depend that was always feared. The principle underlying all such acts of persecution may indeed, after what has gone before, be readily perceived. They are all, we see, directly related to the fact already discussed at length, namely, that the controlling centre of the evolutionary process is still in the present. The conception which we have insisted on as characteristic of the second of the two great stages of human evolution—that conception in which the standpoint is that the interests included in what is called spiritual welfare transcend in importance those merely temporal in nature—was altogether absent.

Now, directly we conceive the human mind to have reached the standpoint at which the standard is set up that those interests, which become known at a later stage under the head of spiritual welfare, are actually more important than temporal interests, we are confronted with a position of altogether peculiar interest. To all appearance we have reached a kind of impass in human evolution. As the full nature of the position discloses itself on reflection, its essential features only seem to stand out with more uncompromising clearness. We seem, in the evolution of life, to have travelled to the brink of a problem to which there is no visible solution—a problem which must, beyond doubt, give rise to a class of phenomena entirely new and quite special to itself.