Stoics and Saints - College of Stoic Philosophers

184 ST. THOMAS OF CANTERBURY.
out of which these conflicts spring. Leave us our tithes and
private benefactions, and we will give ourselves to spiritual
work. Let Heinrich renounce his right of Investiture, and
the Church will immediately restore all that it has received
from secular princes since the time of Charlemagne. The
proposal was received with a storm of indignation. German
bishops and Roman cardinals loaded the poor Pope with
execrations. It came to nothing ; in those days
it could
but come to nothing. The two spheres drawing
off from
each other, and each living its own life, would have rent
in pieces the very structure of society. And why
? Because
fundamentally, as wr e are learning now, the two spheres are
one. Unity is the aim and the longing of society. The
Church entered the secular sphere through its worldly organ
isation, and by that instrument wrought, not pure Christian
ideas, but its own debased image of them, into the heart of
worldly society. The end of it all is the consecration of
the secular not life, by having always an institution which we
call the Church working on it from without, but by the
dwelling of the Christian mind and spirit
within it.
We are far enough from this ideal, the one holy secular
life; but we are working
towards it. And we are able to
disengage the spirit from the secular sphere and leave it
free to devote itself to its own spiritual exercises and duties.
If we recognise Christ as the sole Lord of the conscience,
and leave a man s belief and conduct as a spiritual being
untrammelled by any considerations arising
out of his relations
to civil society, it is because the two kingdoms have become so
intimately one. not because we are content to recognise them
as separate. It is because secular life has become so spiritual,
so penetrated and leavened by Christian ideas, that we can
unyoke the individual conscience and leave it free for nobler
ministries than men dreamed of in Becket s days. The time
will come may God hasten it when all the world will be a