Page:Religion and the rise of capitalism.pdf/32

 In such an examination the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are obviously a critical period. Dr. Figgis5 has described the secularization of political theory as the most momentous of the intellectual changes which ushered in the modern world. It was not the less revolutionary because it was only gradually that its full consequences became apparent, so that seeds which were sown before the Reformation yielded their fruit in England only after the Civil War. The political aspects of the transformation are familiar. The theological mould which shaped political theory from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century is broken; politics becomes a science, ultimately a group of sciences, and theology at best one science among others. Reason takes the place of revelation, and the criterion of political institutions is expediency, not religious authority. Religion, ceasing to be the master-interest of mankind, dwindles into a department of life with boundaries which it is extravagant to overstep.

The ground which it vacates is occupied by a new institution, armed with a novel doctrine. If the Church of the Middle Ages was a kind of State, the State of the Tudors had some of the characteristics of a Church; and it was precisely the impossibility, for all but a handful of sectaries, of conceiving a society which treated religion as a thing privately vital but publicly indifferent, which in England made irreconcilable the quarrel between Puritanism and the monarchy. When the mass had been heated in the furnace of the Civil War, its component parts were ready to be disengaged from each other. By the end of the seventeenth century the secular State, separate from the Churches, which are subordinate to it, has emerged from the theory which had regarded both as dual aspects of a single society. The former pays a shadowy deference to religion; the latter do not meddle with the external fabric of the political and social system, which is the concern of the former. The age