Principles of western civilisation

304 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

the attempt to enforce the authority of the Church with all the powers of the secular State, and all the organised machinery of that secular world of which the Church had obtained control. From the election in 1519 of the Emperor Charles V., who regarded himself as called to the imperial office by divine appointment as champion and protector of the Church in the crisis upon which it had entered, to the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1649,—that is to say, for a period of 130 years,—only one prime issue underlay the political life of Western Europe. In that period of almost incessant war a multitude of class, of personal, and of national ambitions sought to obtain ends of their own amid the clash of arms and the continuous stress of diplomacy. But there can never be at any time a doubt as to the real nature of the world-embracing struggle which was in progress beneath the surface of events. In the international conflict of the counter-Reformation, in the States in which the Revolution had gained a firm footing, the Church organised, inspired, and directed to the full extent of its powers the secular forces of the world against the rebellion in its corporate aspect. In the conflict with the individual States it placed its rebels outside the pale of legality. It excommunicated the rulers; it absolved the subjects from allegiance to government. Within the borders of the States themselves it carried the same warfare to its utmost limits against the individual ; looking always, in the open processes of its hostility as in the secret courts of the Inquisition, to the secular arm of the civil law to execute its judgments against those whom it branded as heretics and rebels.