has declared its independence, and we see politics, economics, science and art organising themselves as autonomous kingdoms which owe no allegiance to any higher power.
And these tendencies were not confined to the secular side of life; they made themselves felt in religion also. Religion came to be regarded as one among a number of competing interests—a limited department of life, which had no jurisdiction over the rest. And as it lost its universal authority, it lost its universal vision ; it became sectionalised and rationalised with the rest of European life. The ancient unity of Christendom fell asunder into a mass of warring sects, which were so absorbed in their inter-necine feuds that they were hardly conscious of their loss of spiritual vision and social authority.
In Catholic Europe, it is true, the Church maintained its universal claims and its absolute metaphysical principles, but there also it was gradually extruded from the control of social and intellectual life, and forced to concentrate itself on the inner defences of the altar and the cloister.
By the nineteenth century the forces of secularism and ” anti-clericalism ” were everywhere triumphant, and the new Latin democracies seemed bent on the creation of a purely ” lay “
culture, which should eliminate the last traces of religious influence from the national life.
67 E 2