xpression of this new principle asserted itself in
the religious sphere. The individualism which was inherent in early
Christianity, but which was present as a speculative content merely,
had not been strong enough to counteract even the remains of corporate
tendencies on the material side of things, in the decadent Roman
Empire; and infinitely less so the vigorous group-organization and
sentiment of the northern nations, with their tribal society and
communistic traditions still mainly intact. And these were the
elements out of which mediaeval society arose. Naturally enough the new
religious tendencies in revolt against the mediaeval corporate
Christianity of the Catholic Church seized upon this individualistic
element in Christianity, declaring the chief end of religion to be a
personal salvation, for the attainment of which the individual himself
was sufficing, apart from Church organization and Church tradition.
This served as a valuable destructive weapon for the iconoclasts in
their attack on ecclesiastical privilege; consequently, in religion,
this doctrine of Individualism rapidly made headway. But in more
material matters the old corporative instinct was still too strong and
the conditions were as yet too imperfectly ripe for the speedy triumph
of Individualism.

The conflict of the two tendencies is curiously exhibited in the popular
movements of the Reformation-time. As enemies of the decaying and
obstructive forms of Feudalism and Church organization, the peasant and
handicraftsman were necessarily on the side of the new Individualism. So
far as negation and destruction were concerned, they were working
apparently for the new order of things--that new order of things which
_longo intervallo_ has finally landed us in the developed capitalistic
Individualism of the twentieth century. Yet when we come to consider
their constructive programmes we find the positive demands put forward
are based either on ideal conceptions derived from reminiscences of
primitive communism, or else that they distinctly postulate a return to
a state of things--the old mark-organisation--upon which the later
feudalism had in various ways encroached, and finally superseded. Hence
they were, in these respects, not merely not in the trend of
contemporary progress, but in actual opposition to it; and therefore, as
Lassalle has justly remarked, they were necessarily and in any case
doomed to failure in the long run.

This point should