Principles of western civilisation

ix THE GREAT ANTINOMY: SECOND STAGE 303

which the ideal of the Church had come to be organised.*

Slowly, therefore, but with clear and consistent purpose, we see the organised Church, through all the long series of events which led up to and which followed the Council of Trent, moving towards the application of that principle which had been inherent from the beginning in the ideal in which a rule of religion was destined to become again a rule of law supported in the last resort by civil authority. The Church, in short, braced itself, in the supreme crisis now approaching in Western civilisation, to the application of force—of force universal and irresistible, applied now through all those secular instruments of the State which, as a first principle of its position, it regarded as existing throughout Christendom in organised subordination to its own purposes and ends.

With the history of the Church during the latter half of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century, that long-drawn-out phase of human development represented in the first period of our era passes towards its culmination. Throughout the whole of Western Europe—in the affairs of the empire, in the history of Italy, of Germany, of Spain, and of France, and in the development in progress in England, in Scotland, and in the Scandinavian countries—the battle which was waged round that ideal which had hitherto controlled the mind of the world, slowly broadened out into a single, clearly defined issue. That issue implied

* Compare the position of the emperor up to 1541, e.g. Ranke’s History of the Popes, b. ii. § 2, and Moeller’s Héstory of the Christian Church, vol. iii. d. i. ch. vi.