Principles of western civilisation

316 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

duration; in which success from time to time appeared to favour now one party and now another. It became in time sucha struggle of each for mastery as has been paralleled nowhere else in the world. Out of it, at the end of a prolonged period of profound political and religious convulsion, there began to emerge slowly into the sight of men the principle of a new epoch of human evolution; that master-principle the ascendency of which, in a scientific division of Western time, will in future be seen to constitute the real cause which divides the Middle Ages from the modern world.

For nearly two centuries beneath the shifting scenes of this struggle in England, only one idea continued to occupy the minds of all the combatants, namely, the deadliness of the liberty of religious error, and the necessity, therefore, for enlisting the arm of civil authority against it. For 140 years, from the passing of the Act of Uniformity in 1549 to the Toleration Act of 1689, the statute-book of England presents one of the most extraordinary records in the history of our civilisation, in the long list of measures with which it armed the civil authority from time to time with repressive powers against what the ruling party for the time being considered to be false doctrine. When the combatants in the struggle in progress in England crossed the Atlantic and sought a refuge for their ideas in the New England settlements, the principle which held men’s minds still carried them forward to the same result. Massachusetts early became the centre of colonies on the other side of the Atlantic, where the refugees endeavoured to carry out their ideas of theocratic States which rested, in the last resort, on exactly the