Principles of western civilisation

vii THE GREAT ANTINOMY: FIRST STAGE 265

In following this controversy through its first phase we must never lose sight of the main fact behind it, namely, that the conflict between the representatives of the civil and of the spiritual power in the Middle Ages is but preliminary. It decided who was to be the ultimate authority in directing the State towards a certain ideal. But the great and supreme problem for which the principal attention of the evolutionist must be reserved from the outset is the ideal itself—that to which the human mind advances through this conflict to reach the ultimate climax beyond, in which a rule of religion and a rule of law become again- practically one and coincident in our civilisation.

The long- drawn-out controversy between the spiritual power and the temporal power, in the persons of the Pope and the Emperor, begins in its acute phase soon after the accession of Pope Gregory VII. in 1073; and in the resulting movement it may be said to carry us down into the midst of the crisis known in history as the Reformation. In regarding this controversy it is necessary to keep always clearly before the mind, that throughout the entire history of the presentation of the claims put forward by both sides there runs the dominant influence of one principle which is implicitly accepted by each

principal attention, namely, the nature of the central position towards which the human mind is developing, what it soon distinguishes is that the claims formulated by successive Popes were, in the prevailing conditions of the world, inherent in the concept associated with our developing civilisation ; that these claims must at a certain stage of development have defined themselves and have been enunciated, on behalf of the spiritual authority, just as we find them here being enunciated. They are, indeed, to be distinguished long after, inherent in the concepts of Churches and parties which had never acknowledged, or which had ceased to acknowledge, the avthority of Rome.