Principles of western civilisation

214 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

and existing nature, between the individual and the present, between the present and the untrammelled expression therein of the human will and of human desire, was still everywhere unmistakably represented. Now it is impossible to present anything more striking to the imagination, especially when we begin to distinguish the far-reaching evolutionary significance of the fact, than the contrast offered to all this in the antithesis which we see now opened in the human mind under the influence of the new religion. Almost the first thing to be noticed when we turn first of all to the history of the religious movement itself, is the profound change which has taken place in the stand-point of the individual. We are, as it were, in a new world. We move amongst men in whom the sense of an equilibrium between the individual and his surroundings, between the individual and his interests in the present, between the individual and his own nature, has been absolutely annihilated.

If attention is confined, first of all, to the inner life of the movement itself, we may perceive evidence of this on every hand. We are in a world in which it is no longer the dignity of the individual, or his virtue as the expression of his equipoise in a kind of imposing egoism, with which we are concerned. It is rather the profound abasement, the utter contempt of self which constitutes the characteristic prevailing note throughout the whole range of the phenomena we are regarding. The nature of the revolution is unmistakable. There is no fact in religious history more startling, says a modern writer, than the radical change