reasing
power. It was characterized also by the great Protestant outbreak
against the despotic pretensions of the Church, which once, in its
antagonism to the rival temporal power, had befriended the liberties of
the people, but now (especially since the death of Boniface VIII.)
sought to enthrall them with a tyranny far worse than that of
irresponsible king or emperor. As we have seen Aryan civilization in
Europe struggling for many centuries to prove itself superior to the
assaults of outer barbarism, so here we find a decisive struggle
beginning between the antagonist tendencies which had grown up in the
midst of this civilization. Having at length won the privilege of living
without risk of slaughter and pillage at the hands of Saracens or
Mongols, the question now arose whether the people of Europe should go
on and apply their intelligence freely to the problem of making life as
rich and fruitful as possible in varied material and spiritual
achievement, or should fall forever into the barren and monotonous way
of living and thinking which has always distinguished the half-civilized
populations of Asia. This--and nothing less than this, I think--was the
practical political question really at stake in the sixteenth century
between Protestantism and Catholicism. Holland and England entered the
lists in behalf of the one solution of this question, while Spain and
the Pope defended the other, and the issue was fought out on European
soil, as we have seen, with varying success. But the discovery of
America now came to open up an enormous region in which whatever seed of
civilization should be planted was sure to grow to such enormous
dimensions as by and by to exert a controlling influence upon all such
controversies. It was for Spain, France, and England to contend for the
possession of this vast region, and to prove by the result of the
struggle which kind of civilization was endowed with the higher and
sturdier political life. The race which here should gain the victory was
clearly destined hereafter to take the lead in the world, though the
rival powers could not in those days fully appreciate this fact. They
who founded colonies in America as trading-stations or military outposts
probably did not foresee that these colonies must by and by become
imperial states far greater in physical mass than the states which
planted them. It is not likely that they were philosophers enough to
foresee that this prodigious physical