)
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.
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