Principles of western civilisation

ix THE GREAT ANTINOMY: SECOND STAGE 305

The development which had taken place in our civilisation had, in short, reached its last logical outcome. The conditions of a past era of evolution, in which the controlling centre of religious consciousness was still in the present, and in which it was, therefore, considered that the transgression of a religious ordinance should be punished by civil penalties, had survived into the newera. But under the forms of our civilisation, and as the great antinomy represented therein had gradually defined itself, the old conditions had become instinct with a tyranny of which the human mind had never before dreamed. For the policy of the Church, it must be perceived, was dictated throughout with an absolute and unchanging belief that, as the spiritual welfare of the world was of greater importance than temporal interests, so the aims of the absolutism which it represented outweighed every other interest with which it was confronted. Its warfare was waged, therefore, the evolutionist sees, not in the spirit the controversialist often still speaks of it as having been waged, but, even under the darkest phases of the Inquisition, with a deep, concentrated, and steadfast determination, with an intense devotion, with a self-sacrificing and all-consuming zeal on the part of its chosen instruments, which is probably without any parallel on so great a scale in human history.

Even at this distance of time it is not possible for the nature of the part which has been played in that development by the military peoples of the world to altogether escape the attention of the observer. Over the peoples of Southern Europe the movement known as the Reformation passed,

x