Principles of western civilisation

298 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

members of the ‘“‘ Oratory of Divine Love ;’*—the question to which the attention of men was again directed was the character of the profound antithesis opened in the human mind by the concept of the insufficiency of human nature. Beneath all the outward events of the time it is, we see, the assertion of the conviction of the absolute impossibility of bridging that antithesis in any terms of the sufficiency of human nature itself which has begun once more to move towards its outward expression in Western history.

Looking therefore beneath the surface of the vast, tumultuous, and gloomy world in which the movement known in history as the Reformation was in progress, the first matter which attracts attention is the nature of the problem upon which the Western mind had begun to concentrate itself. At the very heart of the organised ecclesiastical dominion, which for nearly a thousand years had, throughout Western Europe, represented the greatest absolutism within which the human spirit had ever been confined, there had been opened a vast controversy. The underlying problem presented itself under a number of phases. On either side of it all the principal powers and forces represented in our civilisation—all the jealousies and ambitions of the rising nationalities of Europe, all the resurgent activities of the Western mind now represented in the Renaissance—were soon to become involved. But of the nature of the lifecentre, around which all the accessory elements of conflict were in the last resort to centre, there can be no doubt from the beginning.

1 Cf, Ranke’s Hiéstory of the Popes, ii. § 1.