Principles of western civilisation

ix THE GREAT ANTINOMY: SECOND STAGE 307

drama, in which the ascendency of the present was being challenged, continued to unfold itself in our civilisation. In the Latin countries of Italy and Spain the revolution was soon entirely suppressed by the unsparing use of force,—this end being the more rapidly attained as the movement in these countries had found little general support among the people, and was from the beginning almost limited to the more educated and inquiring classes. In France, after a brief and desperate period of opposition, punctuated by the Huguenot wars, the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and the events which were to lead up to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the same result followed. It was in Germany first, and in England afterwards, that the movement rocked and swayed in terrible convulsions round its life centre, and that the era of successful resistance, based on military force, passed gradually outwards towards a new world-era in development.

By the middle of the seventeenth century the issue of the struggle had been decided in Western Europe. Driven by an instinct, the reach and depth of which the Western mind even as yet but dimly understands, we see the human spirit, in the midst of the stress of a century and a half of worldshaking conflict, achieving the definition, in more uncompromising terms than it had ever before been stated, of the antinomy which had been opened in history. Centuries are yet to pass before the real meaning of the profoundly significant transition which has been accomplished is destined to fully permeate the religious consciousness of our civilisation. Whole periods of thought are destined yet