Principles of western civilisation

ix THE GREAT ANTINOMYV: SECOND STAGE 2097

Nothing can be more striking, therefore, to the evolutionist than the spectacle which is presented when, with these facts in mind, and with the nature of the problem towards which the human mind is advancing in Western history clearly before him, he turns now from the outward events of the Renaissance to the real centre around which the forces were gathering that were to set in motion that revolution the stress and conflict of which were to fill the centuries in the future. From whatever point the religious upheaval of the sixteenth century is approached it is the same fact which meets the observer. After an interval of more than a thousand years it is, he sees, round the terms of the same antithesis that fierce religious conflict has again begun to be waged. It is upon the conditions in which it is alleged that the meaning of this antithesis has become obscured or obliterated—in a development in which a rule of religion claiming to represent absolute truth is tending to become again a rule of law resting ultimately on force throughout the world—that the religious consciousness has once more become concentrated.

There can be no doubt of this fact as the mind follows closely the characteristic features of the religious revolution of the sixteenth century. Amid the scholastic gloom of the monasteries of North Germany ; among the homes of the Swiss Cantons; in the furtive meetings of the wandering artisans of the cities of the empire; among the Swabian peasants and the Netherlandian burghers ;* nay, even in the shadow of the Curia itself, among the

1 Cf. History of the Christian Church, vol. iii. 1517-1648, Wilhelm Moeller ; trs. J. H. Freese, 1st, 2nd, and 3d divisions.