Machiavelli, as champions of the supremacy of the State. True, Luther
thinks of the State as a Christian society, while Machiavelli is the
father of the modern German doctrine of the non-moral character of state
action. But the Augsburg compromise, _cujus regio_, _ejus religio_, was
a frank subordination of the Church to secular authority. The Tudor
sovereigns adopted the doctrine with alacrity, and imposed on the Church
of England a subjection to secular authority from which it has not yet
been able to disentangle itself.
While Lutheranism tended to treat religion as a department of the State,
Calvinism claimed for the Church an authority that threatened the very
existence of the State. Calvinism represents the second attempt to give
practical expression to St Augustine's _Civitas Dei_, as the Holy Roman
Empire was the first. It failed, in part, because it lost its catholic
character, and became (as, for example, in Scotland) intensely national.
The disintegration of the Catholic Church in the West was helped by two
influences. The first was the return to the standards and ideals of the
Old Testament. The appeal of the reformers to Holy Scripture involved
the elevation of the Old Testament to the same level of authority as the
New. The crude nationalism of Judaism obscured the Christian idea of a
universal brotherhood--St Paul's secret hidden from the foundation of
the world, to be revealed in the fulness of time in the Christian
gospel. Even now we hardly realise how largely our ideas of religion are
derived from the imperfect moral standards of the Old Testament. The
other influence was the identification of the Papacy with the Antichrist
of the Book of Revelation--the Protestant answer to the Roman
excommunication of heretics. The idea of a common Christianity deeper
than all national antagonisms hardly existed in the Europe of the later
half of the 16th century.
Nearly a century of wars of religion was followed by seventy years of
war in which the national idea played the leading part. The
internationalism of the 18th century was a reaction against both
religion and nationality. The Napoleonic struggle, and the Romantic
revival, with its appeal to the past, re-awakened the national instinct.
In France, Spain, Russia, Prussia, and Eastern Europe, national
self-consciousness was stirred into life. In Russia and Spain, and among
the Balkan peoples, this national awakening took a definitely religious
character. But it was Italy that produced the one thinker to whom the
real significance of nationality was revealed. Mazzini recognised, more
clearly than any other political teacher of the time, how Nationalism
founded on religion might lead to the brotherhood of nations in a world
"made safe for democracy." The last century has been an epoch of
exaggerated national self-consciousness. Against the aggressive
tendencies of the greater nations, the smaller nations strove to protect
themselves. Italy, Poland, Bohemia, Serbia, Greece, strove with varying
degrees of success to achieve national self-expression. Nation strove
with nation in a series of contests, of which the present war is the
culmination.
The influence of Christianity was impotent to prevent war; though it was
able to do something to restrain its worst excesses. Where the
centrifugal force of nationality comes into opposition to the
centripetal force of the Christian ideal, it is generally the former
that wins. How is this impotence to be accounted for? Four reasons at
least maybe noted. (1) The "inwardness" of Lutheranism, combined with
the cynicism of the Machiavellian doctrine of the non-moral character of
public policy led, especially in Germany, to an entire disregard of the
principles of Christianity in the public policy of the State. Nations
did not even profess to be guided by Christian principles in their
dealings with each other. The noble declaration of Alexander I remained
a piece of "sublime nonsense" to statesmen like Metternich and
Castlereagh, and their successors. (2) The internal life of the nations
was, and is, only partially Christianised. Nations cannot regulate their
external policy on Christian principles unless those principles are
accepted as authoritative in their internal affairs. (3) The influence
of Christianity has been hindered, to a degree difficult to exaggerate,
by the unhappy divisions that, especially in England and in the United
States, have made it impossible for the Church to speak with a united
voice. (4) The idea of the Sovereignty of the State and its supreme
claim on the life of the individual, with which Dr Figgis has dealt with
illuminating insight in his _Churches in the Modern State_, has
prevented the idea of the Churches as local expressions of a universal
society from exercising the corrective influence that it ought to
exercise on the over-emphasis of State independence.
The State is only one of the various forms in which national life
expresses itself. It is the nation organised for self-protection. And
wherever self-protection becomes the supreme need, the State, like
Aaron's rod, swallows all the rest. But in many directions, the world
has become, or is becoming, international. Science and philosophy, and,
to a lesser degree, theology and art, have become the common possession
of all civilised nations. The effort to make commerce the expression of
international fellowship, with which the name of Cobden is associated,
failed, largely as the result of the German policy of high tariffs, but
its defeat is only temporary, and the commercial interdependence of
nations will reassert its influence when the present phase of
international strife is over. The function of the Church is to express
the common life and interests of nations, as the State expresses the
distinctive character of each. So the Church holds to the four universal
things--the authority of Holy Scripture; the Creeds; the two Sacraments,
and the historic episcopate. We believe that the retention of the
historic Episcopate is essential to the maintenance of the Catholic
ideal of the Church. For the bishop is the link between the local and
the universal Church; the representative and guardian of the Catholic
ideal in the life of the local community; and the representative of the
local community in the counsels of the Catholic Church. I have often
wished that at least one bishop from some other Church than our own
could be associated with the consecration of all bishops of the Anglican
Church. For by such association we should bring into clearer prominence
the fact that the historic episcopate is more than a national
institution.
So we reach the final question: What can the Churches do to promote the
unity of the nations?
An invitation was recently issued by the Archbishop of Upsala for a
conference of representatives of the Christian Churches, to reassert,
even in this day of disunion, the essential unity of the Body of Christ.
For various reasons, such a conference at the present juncture seems
impracticable, but the time may come when, side by side with a Congress
of the nations, a gathering of representatives of the Churches may be
called together to reinforce, by its witness, the idea of international
fellowship.
For a League of Churches might well prepare the way for a League of
Nations. Such a League of Churches would naturally find expression in a
permanent Advisory Council--a kind of ecclesiastical Hague tribunal.
Historical antagonisms seem to preclude the selection of Rome or
Constantinople as the place of meeting of this Council. Surely there is
no other place so suited for the purpose as Jerusalem. Here the
appointed representatives of all the Churches, living in constant
intercourse with one another, might draw together the severed parts of
the One Body, till the glory and honour of the nations find, even in the
earthly Jerusalem, their natural centre and home. Thus, and thus only,
can the spiritual foundation for a League of Nations be well and truly
laid.
Two things are involved in any such scheme for a League of Churches. No
one Church must claim a paramount position or demand submission as the
price of fellowship; and all excommunications of one Church by another
must be swept away.
Christ did not come to destroy the local loyalties that lift human life
out of selfish isolation. These loyalties only become anti-Christian
when they become exclusive. The early loyalty of primitive man to his
family or clan was deemed to involve a normal condition of antagonism to
neighbouring families or clans. Turn a page of history, and tribal
loyalty has become civic loyalty. But civic loyalty, as in the cities of
Greece or Italy or Flanders, involves intermittent hostility with
neighbouring cities. Then civic loyalty passes into national loyalty,
and again patriotism expresses itself in distrust and antipathy to other
nations. And this will also be so till we see that all these local
loyalties rest on the foundation of a deeper loyalty to the Divine
ideal of universal fellowship that found its supreme expression in the
Incarnation and its justification in the truth that God so loved the
world.
To the Christian man national life can never be an end in itself but
always a means to an end beyond itself. A nation exists to serve the
cause of humanity; by what it gives, not by what it gets, will its worth
be estimated at the judgment-bar of God.
"Whoso loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me" must
have seemed a hard saying to those to whom it was first spoken; and
"whoso loveth city or fatherland more than me is not worthy of me" may
seem a hard saying to us to-day; yet nothing less than this is involved
in our pledge of loyalty to Christ. Christian patriotism never found
more passionate expression than in St Paul's wish that he might be
anathema for the sake of his nation; yet passionately as he loved his
own people, he loved with a deeper passion the Catholic Church within
which there was neither Jew nor Greek, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor
free. It is because the idea of the Catholic Church has become to the
majority of Christian people a matter of intellectual assent rather than
of passionate conviction that the Church seems impotent in international
affairs.
The last four centuries of European history have had as their special
characteristic the development of nations. It may be that after this war
we shall pass into a new era. The special feature of the period now
closing has been the insecurity of national life. Menaced with constant
danger, every nation has tended to develop an exaggerated
self-consciousness that was liable to become inflamed and
over-sensitive. If adequate security can be provided, by a League of
Nations, or in some other way, for the free development of the national
life of every nation, the senseless over-emphasis of nationality from
which the past has suffered will no longer hinder the growth of a true
Internationalism. I believe that the real alternative lies not between
Nationality and Internationalism but between an Internationalism
founded, like that of the 18th century, on non-Christian culture and
materialism, and an Internationalism founded on the consecration of all
the local loyalties that bind a man to family, city and nation, lifting
him through local spheres of service to the service of the whole human
race for whom Christ died. The tree whose leaves are for the healing of
the nations grows only in the City of God. The Christian forces in the
world are impotent to guide the future, because they are entangled in
the present. Yet it is in the Holy Catholic Church that the one hope for
humanity lies. It may be that that hope will never be realised; that the
Holy Catholic Church is destined to remain to the end an unachieved
ideal. But it is by unachieved ideals that men and nations live; and
what matters most for every Christian man is that he should keep the
Catholic mind and heart that reach out through home and city and country
to all mankind, and rejoice that every man has an equal place in the
impartial love of God.
CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY
J. B. PEACE, M.A.,
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS