Page:War and Other Essays.djvu/179

Rh time instinctively tend toward realistic and naturalistic views of life for which a new world-philosophy is growing up. Here we have the explanation of the gulf which is constantly widening between the "modern spirit" and the traditional religion. Some cling to the traditional religion in one or another of its forms, which, after all, represent only the grades of departure from the mediæval form toward complete harmony with the modern mores. What the mores always represent is the struggle to live as well as possible under the conditions. Traditions, so far as they come out of other conditions and are accepted as independent authorities in the present conditions, are felt as hindrances. It is because our religious traditions now do not assume authority, but seek to persuade, that active war against them has ceased and that they are treated with more respect at present than in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Other-worldliness — that is, care about the life after death and anxiety to secure bliss there by proper action here — occupied a large share of the interest of mediæval men. Another element was feudalism, a form of society which arises under given conditions, as we see from the numerous cases of it in history. Mediæval society shows us a great population caught up in the drift of these two currents, one of world-philosophy and the other of societal environment, and working out all social customs and institutions into conformity with them. The force of this philosophy and the energy of the men are astounding. In the civil world there was disintegration, but in the moral world there was coherence and comprehensiveness in the choice of ideals and in the pursuit of them. In the thirteenth century there was a culmination in which the vigorous expansion of all the elements reached a