Principles of western civilisation

vir ZHE GREAT ANTINOMY: FIRST STAGE 285

cance of the principle at work in the world. Its very excesses, its very absolutism are hardly more than the measure of its potentiality.

Yet whither is the progress of the world tending? We have travelled to the brink of the period when the flames of universal persecution in the cause of the new absolutism rise on the horizon; when religious persecution, for the first time in the history of the world, is actually about to possess on a universal scale that ominous significance which Mr. Ritchie distinguishes in it as associated with the faith of Christianity." The institution of the Inquisition, founded as early as the beginnng of the thirteenth century, and the decree of the Fourth Council of the Lateran of a few years later, enjoining all rulers “to exterminate from their dominions all those who are branded as heretics by the Church,” ° is soon to acquire in this relation a grim significance throughout the greater part of our Western world. We are close to the period when the Spanish peninsula, under the forms of the Inquisition, is to be invaded by a tyranny unknown in the world of the ancients ;* when religious persecution is to prevail throughout Western Europe as it was never known in the world * before ; when Paul IV. is to institute the Index Expurgatorius ;° when the Emperor Charles V. and Philip II. of Spain are to become associated with that movement in which a sentence of death is to be formulated against a// the inhabitants of

1 Cf. Natural Rights, ch. viii.

* Cf. Lecky’s Kise of Rationalism in Europe, vol. ii. p. 30.

* Cf. bzd., vol. ii. ch. iv.

4 Ranke’s History of the Popes, ii. § 6. 5 [bid.

5 Lecky’s Rése of Rationalism in Europe, vol. ii. p. 119; and Ranke’s History of the Popes, ti. § 6.