Principles of western civilisation

262 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

Charlemagne simply as a self-evident truth that the State should be directed towards the realisation of the ideal of the spiritual welfare of the world. The highest representative of the power of the State being the emperor, the next step follows, apparently, with the same inherent inevitableness. We have in the Capitulary, accordingly, the spectacle of the emperor conceiving himself as standing, not simply as the head of the political organisation, and as the impersonification of military power and civil justice ; but as placed at the head of all morality and religion, to hold in his hands the interests of morality, of doctrine, and of the Church; even to the extent of charging himself, in the last resort, with the rule and ordering of the clergy.*

Now, as the evolutionist looks closely at the position here defined, the remarkable features which are inherent in it may be readily distinguished. It will be remembered that the inquiry which has been hitherto followed led us up to the conclusion that the essential characteristic of that epoch of evolution upon which the world entered when it passed out of the era of the ancient civilisations, in which a rule of law and a rule of religion had been one and identical,” consisted in the fact that there had been opened in the human mind an antithesis, the evolutionary significance of which sprang from the principle that it was not capable of being again bridged in any equilibrium within the horizon of the present, nor within any boundaries of political consciousness, however widely conceived. Yet what we now appear to have in sight in this Capitulary of Charlemagne is the spectacle of the world already moving,

1 Cf. Select Historical Documents, ii. ii. 2 Cf. Maine’s Ancient Law, p. 23.