Principles of western civilisation

300 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

As the observer reads between the lines in the controversies of the time he readily grasps the nature of the situation with which the Western mind is gradually closing, as it rises at last to a full view of the dimensions of the problem we saw gradually unfolding itself in the last chapter. Looking back over the development which has taken place, it may be noticed with what inherent inevitableness the steps appear to have followed each other. From the concept that what is known as the spiritual welfare of the world is of more importance than its temporal interests there proceeded, as we saw, the ideal, apparently inherent in it, of the subordination of all the powers and purposes of the political State to the aims of the religious consciousness. In the effort to realise this ideal there arose, therefore, the long struggle between the head of the State and the head of the Church which resulted — apparently with the same _ inevitableness—in the definition of the latter as the ultimate authority in directing the powers and purposes of the State in subordination to spiritual ends. Of the same inherent necessity there followed the exaltation of the Church over all civil authority whatever. And now, in the final stage of the ideal—that in which, therefore, the State is conceived as dependent for its authority, and the individual for his religious position, upon the authority and the ordinances of the religious consciousness, as organised in a universal Church in which a rule of religion necessarily tends to become again a rule of civil law—the chain of sequences is complete. The human mind is to all appearance still involved in the ascendency of the present; still imprisoned