Principles of western civilisation

ix LHE GREAT ANTINOMY: SECOND STAGE 319

No one familiar with the inner history of the period in question will doubt that in this matter Professor Gardiner is right ;* and that, in the statement of the aim expressed in the words here put into italics, he has correctly interpreted the inner purpose of Cromwell. It was, in short, in this purpose—the maintenance of an oligarchy founded on religious opinion as opposed to another oligarchy also, in the last resort, founded on religious opinion—that we have the real secret of the Cromwellian epoch in England, It was the same aim which underlay alike the struggle against the regal power and the execution of the king, the purge of Parliament, and the scheme for the government of England through the majorgenerals. The method varied from the absolutist standards of the past to what were the forms and at times almost the spirit, of the later principle of tolerance to which men were being compelled to rise. But it was still always, as yet, one clear idealthe ascendency in the State, and the alliance with civil authority, of a system of religious doctrines believed to be right—which held the mind even of the parliamentary leader in this fateful turning period of English history.

It is absolutely necessary, if we would obtain a clear view of the meaning of the world-process developing beneath our eyes, that the existence of this large group of facts should be kept well before the mind, and that its purport in the development of our civilisation should not be missed. It would seem, if the endeavour continues to be made to

* Compare closely in this connection the Document ‘‘ Declaration by the Lord-General and the Council on the dissolution of the Long Parliament” (Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, part v. No. 95)»