the flames of universal persecution in the cause of the new absolutism rise on the horizon; when religious persecution, for the first time in the history of the world, is actually about to possess on a universal scale that ominous significance which Mr. Ritchie distinguishes in it as associated with the faith of Christianity. The institution of the Inquisition, founded as early as the beginning of the thirteenth century, and the decree of the Fourth Council of the Lateran of a few years later, enjoining all rulers "to exterminate from their dominions all those who are branded as heretics by the Church," 2 is soon to acquire in this relation a grim significance throughout the greater part of our Western world. We are close to the period when the Spanish peninsula, under the forms of the Inquisition, is to be invaded by a tyranny unknown in the world of the ancients; 4 when religious persecution is to prevail throughout Western Europe as it was never known in the world before; when Paul IV. is to institute the Index Expurgatorius; when the Emperor Charles V. and Philip II. of Spain are to become associated with that movement in which a sentence of death is to be formulated against all the inhabitants of the Netherlands as heretics, the spiritual authority leaving to the able and willing civil power the selection of the victims in

6

1Cf. Natural Rights, chap. viii.

2 Cf. Lecky's Rise of Rationalism in Europe, vol. ii. p. 30. 8 Cf. Ibid., vol. ii. chap. iv.

Ranke's History of the Popes, ii. § 6.

5 Ibid.

Lecky's Rise of Rationalism in Europe, vol. ii. p. 119; and Ranke's History of the Popes, ii. § 6.

7 Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic, chap. ii. part i. and chap. ii. part iii.

a condemnation in which, as Motley points out, all being sentenced alike to a common grave, it was possible for any, without warning, difficulty, or trial, to be carried to the scaffold or the stake. Nay, more, we have almost reached the period when, looking into the future, we see the spirit which rises to question this absolutism, itself caught in the influence of the same ideas, and differing neither in tendency nor in will to make its own absolutism as unquestioned as that which it challenged.

What, therefore, is the solution of the problem towards which the world is advancing? Is the Western mind destined to reach a synthesis of knowledge hidden as yet beneath the horizon? Is it destined to retrace its steps, and, baffled and disillusioned, to abandon that conviction to which we have seen it advance in the full light of history - the conviction that what it has come to call its spiritual welfare is more important than its temporal interests?

The principles of the evolutionary process which are working out the destiny of the peoples who are to inherit the future are principles which can never more be comprised within the content of political consciousness. The peoples to whom the future. belongs are they who already bear upon their shoulders the burden of the principles with which the interests of that future are identified. And yet, how is the future to be emancipated in the present? How is the race to rise to a sense of direct, personal, and compelling responsibility to a principle transcending every power and purpose included in the limits of its

1 Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic, chap. ii. part i. and chap. ii. part iii.

political consciousness; and still be so occupied with its present as to set free therein the play of its highest powers? How are we to witness the controlling principles of human consciousness projected out of the present; and yet see opened within the present a free conflict of forces such as has never been in the world before, out of which the greater future can alone be born, and towards which the whole process of evolution in society must ultimately ascend?

CHAPTER IX

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE GREAT ANTINOMY IN

WESTERN HISTORY: SECOND STAGE

In the study of the many-sided movement which, dating from the Renaissance in Europe, and which, taking its course through the religious and political upheaval known in history as the Reformation, carries us rapidly forward into the midst of the principles governing the development of the modern world, it is of the first importance that the attention of the observer should continue to be concentrated on the character of the central problem with which we have been concerned from the beginning. That problem in its briefest terms involves, as we saw, the realisation in Western history of conditions in which the principle of Projected Efficiency is to become more effectively operative than has ever been possible in the world before.

Standing at this point for a moment and looking back over the history of the progress which the race has made, it may be recalled that the conditions under which development has been possible in the social process have had one characteristic feature. While progress has been identified from the beginning with competition, the inherent tendency of all competition, in the era of the ascendency of the present, has, of necessity, been for the strongest competitive forces to become absolute, and so to suppress in time those

conditions of really free conflict out of which the most effective future could arise. This has been the key, as we saw, to that condition of the world which culminated in the ancient civilisations.

If we have been right so far, the significance of Western civilisation from the beginning of our era has been related to a single cause; namely, the potentiality of a principle inherent in it to project the controlling principles of its consciousness beyond the present; and so ultimately to operate in breaking up all the closed imperiums in government, in action, in thought, and in religion, through which the omnipotent present had hitherto been able to become absolute. The controlling principles of human responsibility being no longer confined within the present, the evolutionary significance of the social process in Western history consists, in short, in its tendency to produce the condition of such a free rivalry of forces as has never been in the world before; by rendering it impossible to shut up again the human will in any system of government, of action, or of thought, through which the tyranny of forces expressing themselves within the limits of political consciousness could once more become absolute. It is upon the conditions of the world-embracing struggle in which the future is thus to be emancipated, and in which the hitherto prevailing ascendency of the present in the world is destined to be ultimately broken, that the attention of the mind has now to be fixed.

No situation can be of more absorbing interest to the evolutionist than that which presents itself to him when, with the conditions of the remarkable