Principles of western civilisation

x LHE GREAT ANTINOMY: SECOND STAGE 325

an establishment existed threw it off, some by a sudden effort, like Virginia, some by a slow process, like Connecticut and Massachusetts. No new State has ever set it up.”’ In the first article of those in addition to, and in amendment of, the Constitution of the United States, proposed by Congress to the Legislatures of the States 25th September 1789, and ratified 1789-91, it is at last enacted that: ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”* Slowly, but with ever-increasing insistence, the stern logic of inherent principles expressed itself in the events of history, and brought home to men’s minds the fact they were yet for long to refuse to admit in principle, namely, that the grounds upon which there had hitherto rested that greatest of all despotisms of the present — that which must of necessity express itself through the alliance of civil authority with a form of religious belief conceived as concerned with the greatest of all human interests—had been once and for ever struck away from it in our civilisation.

We, therefore, see at last in true perspective—and as constituting but the details of a single developmental process in history—all the events in the movement, prolonged over seven centuries, which began with the struggle between Pope Gregory VII. and the Emperor in the eleventh century, and which reached its issue at last in the definite terms registered in the Constitution of the United States of America. In the article in the American Con-

* Pref. to L. W. Bacon’s History of American Christianity, by James Bryce ; see also The American Commonwealth, vol. i. ch. xxxvii., and vol. ii. ch. cvi.

* Cf. Macdonald’s Select Documents illustrative of the History of the United States, No. 5. The amendment went into effect on 3rd Nov. 1791.