Principles of western civilisation

274 WESTERN CIVILISATION cHar.

which it seems inevitable that a rule of religion and a rule of law should become again one and identical ; nay, more, a world in which, to use Maine’s phrase, the transgressor of a religious ordinance will again be punished by civil penalties. But with this momentous difference: A rule of religion now no longer, as in the ancient world, relates to the interests of the existing political State. It is considered to rise superior to, and supreme over, every temporal purpose whatever for which the State exists. No such tremendous potentiality of absolutism ever lurked in the ancient world beneath any of the tyrannies through which the present expressed itself.

The further and greater steps which proceed from the position here defined follow each other henceforward in rapid succession. With the triumph in universal politics of the conception that spiritual interests are superior to the temporal welfare of the world, the authority representing the former gradually rises supreme over every power and purpose of the temporal State, and the dream of the monks of Cluny passes towards its realisation: ‘‘ The possibility of assuming the control of the whole Christian world, political as well as ecclesiastical, which had dawned upon the consciousness of the Roman Church,”! is at last visibly embodied in the ideal towards which the world is moving.

The steps by which we watch the growing claims being asserted in the final stage are to be followed throughout the public life of nearly all the States of Europe. In Spain, Hungary, England, France, Ireland, Scandinavia, and even Russia, the influence

1 Adam’s Civilisation during the Middle Ages, c. x.