Principles of western civilisation

vr ZHE GREAT ANTINOMY: FIRST STAGE 273

dominion had become firmly established. The spiritual power had come forth victorious from the long struggle. When its victory had been signalised by that scene enacted at the spot where three red slabs in the church of St. Mark’s point out the spot where another Emperor knelt before the Pope, the end of the first stage, towards the climax which we saw foreshadowed at the outset, had been reached. After a hundred years of conflict the Western world saw it established on seemingly unassailable foundations that if, indeed, the spiritual welfare of the world is of greater importance than all those temporal interests with which the State is concerned; then the power in whose hands the spiritual interests are placed is higher than any ruler in the name of the State; his will, as representing those interests, rises superior to every power and purpose for which the temporal State exists.

In these events we appear to see the human mind in the historical process deliberately advancing step by step to the very heart of the remarkable problem which was outlined at the outset. Inherent, to all appearance, in the actual concept by which alone it is possible that the future can be emancipated, by which alone the controlling principles of human action can be projected beyond the limits of political consciousness, there would appear to be involved a principle which must prevent that free play of forces within the present out of which alone the larger future can be born; a principle which must apparently again imprison all human energies in a tyranny greater than any from which they had emerged. We have reached the brink of a world in

T