Principles of western civilisation

286 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

the Netherlands as heretics,’ the spiritual authority leaving to the able and willing civil power the selection of the victims in a condemnation in which, as Motley points out, all being sentenced alike to a common grave, it was possible for any, without warning, difficulty, or trial, to be carried to the scaffold or the stake.” Nay, more, we have almost reached the period when, looking into the future, we see the spirit which rises to question this absolutism, itself caught in the influence of the same ideas, and differing neither in tendency nor in will to make its own absolutism as unquestioned as that which it challenged.

What, therefore, is the solution of the problem towards which the world is advancing? Is the Western mind destined to reach a synthesis of knowledge hidden as yet beneath the horizon? Is it destined to retrace its steps, and, baffled and disillusioned, to abandon that conviction to which we have seen it advance in the full light of historythe conviction that what it has come to call its spiritual welfare is more important than its temporal interests ?

The principles of the evolutionary process which are working out the destiny of the peoples who are to inherit the future are principles which can never more be comprised within the content of political consciousness. The peoples to whom the future belongs are they who already bear upon their shoulders the burden of the principles with which the interests of that future are identified. And yet, how is the future to be emancipated in the present? How

1 Motley’s Aése of the Dutch Republic, ch. ii. part i. ; and ch. ii. part iii. 2 Ibid.