Principles of western civilisation

vir LHE GREAT ANTINOMY: FIRST STAGE 281

material, therefore, are in the power of the church; the one, indeed, to be wielded for the church, the other by the church; the one by the hand of the priest, the other by the hand of kings and knights, but at the will and sufferance of the priest. One sword, moreover, ought to be under the other, and the temporal authority to be subjected to the spiritual. . . . For, the truth bearing witness, the spiritual power has to establish the earthly power, and to judge it if it be not good.’”*

There could be no doubt as to the nature of the position here reached, or of the meaning of it as applied to the secular affairs of the world. Our civilisation has reached the climax of the problem towards which the tendencies of thirteen centuries of history had developed. in the name of the highest power in Christendom, the principle is in effect enunciated that a rule of religion must be, in the last resort, a rule of law. We have entered on the stage when the transgressor of a religious ordinance is about to be punished by civil penalties on a scale of which there is no previous example ; and with a thoroughness and completeness that even the ancient civilisations fell far short of. But, as has been said, with this significant difference: The rule of religion from which a rule of law in the present now proceeds, while it is enforced by the State, is no longer bounded by any interest of the State. The religious ordinance, the transgression of which is about to be punished on a universal scale by civil penalties in the present, is no longer related to any object of the State. The object of the punishment claims to issue superior to every

1 V. supra.