Principles of western civilisation

320 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

preserve a position of detachment from all preconceived ideas, that we are confronted in history at this point with a deeper truth than is to be distinguished, at first sight, in any of the controversies of the time. It is not the aspect of these controversies as men were regarding them; but the development which the religious consciousness is itself slowly undergoing beneath the events of the time that calls for attention. It is the development in which we catch a first distant glimpse of the only condition under which it is possible to conceive the emancipation of the future being accomplished in the evolutionary process in history —the condition, that is to say, in which the human mind is destined to be compelled to rise to a conception of truth in which the principle of tolerance is to be held in the only way in which it can ever become permanently operative in the world, namely, as an ultimate conviction of the religious consciousness itself—which holds the scientific imagination.’ Viewed in this light, we see that it was, in reality, not so much in the movement usually known as the Reformation, as in the development in the two centuries immediately succeeding it, that a principle which had controlled an immense epoch of human history, and which had been projected into our era from arf earlier stage of the evolutionary process, reached its ultimate phase. And it was in this period that the operation of that principle culminated at last in the only conditions

1 Compare Caird’s Philosophy of Kant, pp. 365-372, with J. St. Loe Strachey’s statement to the effect that the essence of the characteristic truth to which the modern religious consciousness has advanced is ** that toleration is

per sé a religious act, and not a mere convention based on convenience—a course of action founded on the principle of reciprocity” (Essay : Cromwell).