Principles of western civilisation

204 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

phase of human activity ; it must be, if he has been able to retain his position of detachment from all current theories and prepossessions, with a clear and definite impression growing in his mind. Sooner or later the conviction must take possession of him, that there must be underlying the phenomena he is regarding a meaning, in relation to the central problem of human evolution, which is altogether larger than any he is able to find expressed in the departments of knowledge which have dealt with these phenomena in the past.

As he follows the movement itself in the inner history of it presented in that most remarkable record of the human mind, the writings of the early Fathers of the Church; as he then turns outwards and notes the contact of the movement with the Roman, the Greek, and the Alexandrian tendencies in the philosophy of the ancient world, its contact with the mind of the northern military races, with the public opinion of the Roman world, and, last of all, with the political institutions of the Roman empire; and as he then turns once more and closely regards the movement itself, with the schisms, the conflicts, the developments which crowd around the low level from which it rises in history, and which almost serve to conceal from view the integrating process of life which is slowly rising through them all ;—one central idea will in all probability have taken possession of his mind. We are watching beneath it all, he must feel convinced, a development of the first importance in the evolution of life. Whatever the shape the movement may have taken for the time being, whatever the developments it may be destined to undergo in the future; of a