Principles of western civilisation

ix THE GREAT ANTINOMY: SECOND STAGE 311

Reformation. It is a period in which, as has been stated, we see the mind of the time still, to all appearance, entirely unconscious of the nature of the principle which had been released into the world; still moving within the circle of the ideas hitherto ascendant in history ; and yet, withal, being carried irresistibly forward towards a goal altogether different from any which had been imagined in the past. By nearly all historians these centuries are included in the modern period of history. Yet, Strange as it may seem to many minds, in any scientific division of the periods of our civilisation they belong, strictly speaking, to the pre-Reformation epoch of history. In almost every country in which the new form of doctrine attained to ascendency the first result was the same. Its adherents immediately attempted to associate it with the State, and to enforce through the organisation of civil government the new interpretation of truth.

Looking first to Germany, the spectacle which is presented to view is of the deepest interest. In almost every part of that country in which the movement of the Reformation triumphed the same result followed. We see the party representing that movement conceiving itself now in turn as the representative of absolute truth; and, therefore, setting out almost from the beginning with its face, to all appearance, directed towards exactly the same goal that the organised Church had reached in Europe through that long development of the centuries already described. In the numerous Church communities’ early formed in North Germany on

1 Moeller, Hist. of Chr. Church, vol. iii. divs. i. and iv.