Principles of western civilisation

ix LHE GREAT ANTINOMY: SECOND STAGE 329

a scale so vast that the horizon of its meaning has hitherto fallen beyond the view even of the minds which have most assisted in working out its principles.

But the main outline of that meaning, as it has begun at last to come within the field of intellectual vision, is very remarkable. Side by side with the process just referred to, in which, in the dissociation of the religious consciousness from all alliance with civil authority, we have the outward historical expression of the projection of the controlling centre of the evolutionary process beyond the bounds of political consciousness, it may be noticed that there are to be distinguished in modern thought two main streams of tendency. Each of these, involving a development incomplete in itself, and forming but an outward symptom of a deeper movement beneath, has slowly but inevitably progressed in our time towards the exhibition of its own insufficiency. In one of these developments we follow from the Reformation onward through modern times, first of all in English and later in German thought, a slowly descending line of search after the principle of authority in politics allied with the sanction of the system of religious belief associated with our civilisation. The ideal of this quest may be said to have reached its last attenuation in Western thought in the Hegelian conception of civil authority in the Christian State.?

In the other development we follow a long sustained, but also gradually faltering, quest of the

* Compare John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, chap. i. (to the year 1833), for a sense of the failure of this conception reached in a section of English religious thought in the first quarter of the nineteenth century.