The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain: Nineteenth Century EuropeCramb, J. A. (John Adam)
History
The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain: Nineteenth Century Europe
Cramb, J. A. (John Adam)
Great Britain -- Colonies -- Administration -- History -- 19th century; Imperialism; War
Consider then, first of all, in relation to the consciousness which is
the attribute of the life of the State, the consciousness which is the
soul of man. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as we have seen,
the saintly ideal which had hitherto controlled man's life dies to the
higher thought of Europe. The saint gives place to the crusader and
scholastic, and the imagination of the time acknowledges the spell of
oriental paganism and oriental culture.
Certain of the most remarkable minds of that epoch, men like
Berengarius of Tours, for instance, or St. Victor, and Amalrich, are
profoundly troubled by a problem of the following nature. How shall
the justice of God be reconciled with the destiny He assigns to the
souls of men? They are sent forth from their rest in the Divine to
dwell in habitations of mortal flesh, incurring reprobation and exile
everlasting, or after a season returning, according as they are
appointed to a life dark to the sacrifice on Calvary, or to a life by
that Blood redeemed. By what law or criterion of right does God send
forth those souls, emanations of His divinity, to a doom of misery or
bliss, according as they are attached to a body north of the
Mediterranean, or southward of that sea, within the sway of the falsest
of false prophets, Mohammed? This trouble in the heart of the eleventh
century arose from the insight which compassion gives; the European
imagination, at rest with regard to its own safety, is for the first
time perplexed by the fate of men of an alien race and faith, whose
heroism it has nevertheless learnt to revere, as in after-times it was
perplexed in pondering the fate of Greece and Rome, whose art and
thought it vainly strove to imitate. Underlying this trouble in their
hearts is the assumption to which Plato and certain of his sect have
leanings, that within the Divine there is as it were a treasury of
souls from which individual essences are sped hither, to dwell within
each mortal body immediately on its birth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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