Principles of western civilisation

ix LHE GREAT ANTINOMY: SECOND STAGE 321

which could prepare the way for the release into the world of the infinite potentiality which had been inherent in Western civilisation since the beginning of our era.

It has been said that in almost every country in which the new form of doctrine triumphed it had immediately attempted to associate itself with the State, and to enforce once more, through the organisation of civil government, its own interpretation of absolute truth. But it is not under this aspect alone that we have to watch the human mind in the evolutionary process in Western history being gradually driven step by step from one position to another; still ever looking back, still ever dreaming that it was moving within the circle of the ideals of the past; and yet, in reality, gradually but surely passing out under the control of an entirely new ruling principle in the development of the world.

The events which have been here passed in review constitute the development—every step in which may be said to have been inevitable from the beginning—leading to the slow dissociation of the religious consciousness from all ultimate alliance with the authority of the State. But on the other side of the process the separation of civil authority —claiming through the conception of divine right in the State—from its association with the religious consciousness has progressed equally, through all the events of history, with almost the same inexorable consistency of the law of gravitation.

At the beginning of the Reformation period in England we see the ruling sovereign? told by 1 Henry VIII.

Y