elieved in them most systematically, expounded his belief with
perfect calmness and confidence as he lay under sentence of death from a
revolutionary tribunal.

If this enthusiasm is madness, we might all well wish to be possessed.
The true line of criticism is different. At the Revolution, as before at
the Renascence, the leaders of the new movement could not see all their
debt to the past. Like the Renascence, they idealized certain features
in classical antiquity, but they had not yet gained the notion of
historical continuity; above all, they did not realize the value of the
religious development of the Middle Ages. It was left for the nineteenth
century and for us, its successors, to attempt the supreme task of
seeing things steadily and seeing them whole.

For in spite of the capital contributions of the Renascence to progress
and the idea of progress, especially by its scientific constructions, it
is undeniable that a bias was then given to the course of Western
civilization from which it has suffered ever since, and which it is now
our urgent duty to correct. Two aspects of this may be specified. The
old international unity which Rome had achieved, at least superficially,
in the Mediterranean world, and which the Catholic Church had extended
and deepened, was broken up in favour of a system of sovereign and
independent states controlling religion and influencing education on
lines calculated to strengthen the national forces and the national
forces alone. They even believed that, at any rate in trade and
commerce, the interests of these independent states were rather rival
than co-operative. The Revolution struck the note of human association
clearly enough, but we have not yet learnt to set all our other tunes in
accord with it. Another, and perhaps even more fundamental, weakness of
the Renascence tradition was the stress it laid on the material,
mechanical, external side of progress. On the one hand, the spiritual
side of life tended to be identified with that system of thought and
discipline which had been so rudely disrupted. On the other hand, the
new advance in science brought quickly after it a corresponding growth
of wealth and mechanical inventions and material comforts. The spirit of
man was for the time impeded and half suffocated by its own productions.

The present war seems to many of us the supreme struggle of our better
nature to gain the mastery over these obstructions, and freedom for its
pr