Principles of western civilisation

ix THE GREAT ANTINOMY: SECOND STAGE 299

The dispute as to the position of the Church in our civilisation was related, we may perceive, in all its essential significance to one principal fact. This was the conviction slowly settling upon the minds of a party throughout our Western world, that in that development of doctrine which had organised the Church, as the representative of absolute truth, into a world-power coextensive with the State and resting ultimately on force—and by which, therefore, the religious position of the State, on the one hand, and of the individual, on the other, were made dependent on the observance of the Church’s authority and ordinances—the meaning of that profoundly significant antithesis opened in the human mind, by which the individual sense of responsibility was projected beyond the meaning of all systems of authority expressing themselves through the present, had tended, in some manner, to become obscured or obliterated.

It is accordingly, the evolutionist notes with interest, upon the concepts through which this antithesis is again tending to be expressed in its most extreme and uncompromising terms, that we see the mind of the party representing the movement known in history as the Reformation concentrating itself through the stress of the sixteenth century.! It is, for instance, the theological concepts of ‘the insufficiency of human nature,” of “ the absolute incapacity of the natural man for good,” of “reconciliation,” and of “justification by faith” as opposed to the prevailing doctrine of “justification by works,” that we continually encounter through all the fierce controversies of the period.

1 Cf. History of Modern Philosophy, vy Kuno Fischer, v.