Part 3

This failure to give adequate recognition to nationality arises from too exclusive emphasis on the principle which is, quite rightly, the root idea of Catholicism--the idea of transcendence. Here in the last resort is the fundamental distinction between naturalism and religion; naturalism may take a form which stimulates the religious emotions and supports a high ethical ideal; but it confines itself to the limits of secular experience. For naturalism the history of man and of the universe is the starting-point and the goal; this as fact is the datum, this as understood is the solution. The Will of God, on this view, is to be discovered from the empirical course and tendency of history. But religion begins with God; it breaks in upon what we ordinarily call "experience" from outside; in its monotheistic form it regards the world as created by God for His own pleasure, and lasting only during that pleasure; in its pantheistic form it regards the world as a phase or a moment of His Being which is by no means limited to that phase or moment. Its philosophy does not elaborately conceive what God must be like in order to be the solution of our perplexities, but, starting with the assurance of His Being and Nature, shows how this is in fact the answer to all our needs.

It is one peculiarity and glory of Christianity that it unites both of those. Its faith is fixed upon One who "for us men and for our salvation _came down from heaven_," and who is yet the eternal Word through which all things were made, the indwelling principle of all existence. Transcendence and immanence are here perfectly combined. But because the former is the distinctively religious element, without which the latter would have been in danger of relapsing into naturalism, the deliberate emphasis was all laid on transcendence. We can see, as we look back, that when once the Incarnation has actually taken place upon the plane of history, it makes no jot of difference in logic, provided only that the Life of the Incarnate is taken as the starting-point and centre of thought, whether terms of transcendence or of immanence are used. The life of Christ is at once the irruption of the Divine into the world--(for the previous history of the world certainly does not explain it)--and is also the manifestation of the indwelling power which had all along sustained the world. In other words, the God who redeems is the same God who creates and sustains. But it is still true that the note of transcendence, of something given to man by God as distinct from something emerging out of man in his search of God, is the specifically religious note.

And the Church, as the divine creation and instrument, shares and must express this character. It must be so constituted as to keep alive this faith. That is the meaning of hierarchies and sacraments. Whether any given order is the most adequate that can be designed, is of course a perfectly legitimate question. But every order that aspires to be catholic aims, at least, at expressing the truth that religion is a gift of God, and not a discovery of man. And certainly it is only the gift of God that can be truly catholic or universal. Man's discoveries are indefinitely various; the European finds one thing, the Arab another, the Hindu yet another, and none finds satisfaction in the other's discovery, though in all of them God is operative. Only in His own gift of Himself is it reasonable to expect that all men will find what they need; only in a Church which is the vehicle of this gift, and is known to be this, and not a mutual benefit society organised by its own members for their several and collective advantage--only in a Church expressive of Divine transcendence can all nations find a home.

Yet just because of a too one-sided emphasis on this truth, the Catholic Church in the West has, as a rule, not tried to be a home for nations at all. "Christianity separated religion from patriotism for every nation which became, and which remained, Christian."[#] Patriotism is particular; religion ought to be universal. The nation is a natural growth; the Church is a divine creation. And so the primitive Church was organised in complete independence of national life, except in so far as its diocesan divisions followed national or provincial boundaries. No doubt the conditions of its existence made this almost necessary, for the organised secular life of the Roman Empire refused to tolerate it. But it was its own principle, true indeed but not the whole truth, which led to this line of development. The same principle is apparent in the Middle Ages, when there was no external pressure. The Church, as it was conceived in the sublime ideal of Hildebrand, was to belong to no nation, because supreme over them all, binding them together in the obedience and love of Christ, and imposing upon them His holy will.

[#] "War and Religion" in _The Times Literary Supplement_, Dec. 31, 1914.

The inevitable result of this was that the instinct of nationality was never christened at all. It remained a brute instinct, without either the sanction or the restraint of religion. But it could not be crushed, and so the Church let it alone; with the result that, though murder was regarded as a sin, a war of dynastic or national ambition was not by people generally considered sinful. No doubt theologians condemned such war in general terms; St. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, seems to regard as fully justified only such wars as are undertaken to protect others from oppression, and some of the greatest Popes made heroic efforts to govern national policy according to righteousness. But in the general judgment of the Church, international action was not subjected to Christian standards of judgment at all. This way of regarding the Church sometimes leads people to speak of "alternative" loyalties so that they ask, "Ought I to be loyal to my Church or to my nation?" And while faith and reason will combine to answer "To my Church," an imperious instinct will lead most men in actual fact to answer "To my nation." The attempt to exalt the Church to an unconditional supremacy has the actual result of making men ignore it when its guidance is most needed.

Whatever truth there may be in the statement that the Reformation was in part due to the growing sentiment of nationality, is evidence of the failure of the old Catholic Church in this matter. In England at any rate one main source of the popular Protestantism was the objection to anything like a foreign domination. No doubt the political ambitions of the Papacy were largely responsible for the feeling that the Catholic Church brought with it a foreign yoke. But the whole principle of the Church as non-national necessarily meant that the Church was regarded as "imposing" Christian standards rather than permeating national life with them. The Church tended to ignore the spiritual function of the State altogether, claiming all spiritual activity for itself alone; and thus it tended to make the State in actual fact unspiritual, and involved itself in the necessity of attempting what only the State can do. It thus not only tended to weaken the moral power of the State, but also forsook its own supernatural function to exercise those of the magistrate or judge, so that faith in the power of God was never put to a full test. The Reformation was not only a moral and spiritual reform of the Church, but the uprising of the nations, now growing fully conscious of their national life, against the cosmopolitan rule of Rome. But the Reformation did not fully realise its task. It expressed itself indeed in national Churches, but in actual doctrine tended to individualism; whereas Catholicism laid emphasis on religion as the gift of God, Protestantism, at least in its later development, laid stress on the individual's apprehension of the gift. But not only the individual--everything that is human, family, school, guild, trade union, nation, needs to apprehend and appropriate the gift of God. The nation, too, must be christened and submit to transforming grace.

The uprising of the national spirit has had the deplorable result of contributing to the break-up of Christendom, but it is not in itself deplorable at all. All civilisation has in fact progressed by the development of different nationalities, each with its own type. If we believe in a Divine Providence, if we believe that the life of Christ is not only the irruption of the Divine into human history but is also and therein the manifestation of the governing principle of all history, we shall confess that the nation as well as the Church is a divine Creation. The Church is here to witness to the ideal and to guide the world towards it, but the world is by divine appointment a world of nations, and it is such a world that is to become the Kingdom of God. Moreover, if it is by God's appointment that nations exist, their existence must itself be an instrument of that divine purpose which the Church also serves.

The whole course of Biblical revelation supports this view. It is quite true that if we were to read the New Testament for the first time, knowing nothing whatever about the Old, we should come to the conclusion that it almost entirely ignored nationality and everything which goes with it. But then the Church has always maintained that the New Testament grows by an organic life out of the Old, and presupposes it; and when we go back to that, there can be no doubt whatever about its view of nationality. The whole of the early books of the Old Testament are concerned with this, and almost nothing else. The task of Moses in the wilderness, of Joshua, of the Judges and the early Kings, is precisely to fashion Israel into a nation. So much is all attention concentrated upon this that we find a contentment with that contraction of the moral outlook which presents to many modern readers the chief stumbling block about the Old Testament. Almost everything that was serviceable to Israel is approved. Rahab is guilty of sheer treason to her own city of Jericho, but it is serviceable to Israel, and there is no word of condemnation. Jael is guilty of a very treacherous murder, but it was serviceable to Israel, so "Blessed shall she be above women in the tent."

Everything is concentrated upon this primary object of fashioning Israel into a nation and persuading individual Israelites to put the welfare of the whole before the interest and ambition of their own clique or faction; and when the time came for an advance to a wider view, it came precisely not by way of saying that national divisions do not matter and that national life itself is unimportant, but by insisting that nationality is equally precious in these other nations all around Israel as it is within Israel itself.

The turning point here as in so much else in the Old Testament is the Book of Amos, the first of the written prophecies. It is worth while to try to imagine the effect of those opening clauses. The prophet begins by securing a willing hearing from those to whom he writes: in other words he begins by abusing their neighbours.

"Thus saith the Lord: For three transgressions of Damascus, yea for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof...."

"Thus saith the Lord: For three transgressions of Gaza, yea for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof....

"Thus saith the Lord: For three transgressions of Tyre, yea for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof....

"Thus saith the Lord: For three transgressions of Edom, yea for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof....

"Thus saith the Lord: For three transgressions of the children of Ammon, yea for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof....

"Thus saith the Lord: For three transgressions of Moab, yea for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof...."

And then, without a change of phrase, without even the compliment of a heightened denunciation--

"Thus saith the Lord: For three transgressions of Judah, yea for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof....

"Thus saith the Lord: For three transgressions of Israel, yea for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof...."[#]

[#] Amos i, 3-ii, 6.

It would be impossible more emphatically to insist that all nations, Israel and the rest, stand on an equal footing before the Judgment Seat of God, and are to be regarded as real entities, and real moral agents; but that is not enough for the prophet.

"Are ye not as Children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel?--saith the Lord."

I have no more care for you than the Ethiopians--who then, as now, were black folk.

"Have not I brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt, _and_ the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Syrians from Kir?"[#]

[#] Amos ix, 7.

It is the God who had guided the history of Israel who has equally guided the history of the despised Philistine and the hated Syrian. And this line of thought reaches its culmination where we should expect to find it, in the works of the statesman-prophet Isaiah. His little country of Judah was likely to be destroyed by the hostilities of Assyria and Egypt, and in the middle of that peril, when these nations were at each other's throats, he looks forward and says:--

"In that day there shall be a highway out of Egypt to Assyria and the Assyrian shall come into Egypt, and the Egyptian to Assyria; and the Egyptians shall worship with the Assyrians."

There shall be free intercourse between them, and worship of the one God shall be the link between them.

"In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and with Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth, for that the Lord of hosts hath blessed them, saying, 'Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine inheritance?'"[#]

[#] Isaiah xix, 23-25.

Just picture the pallid frenzy of the orthodox Jew at the words--"Egypt my people."

The teaching of the Bible is plain enough; and as we come to the New Testament, with all this in our minds, knowing the emphasis that has already been laid upon nationality, we find that there, too, is the note of patriotism.

No man has ever loved his nation more than the Lord loved Israel, and in the bitterness of disappointment in the lament over Jerusalem we have the measure of His patriotic love for the holy places of His people.

St. Paul, the author of those great ejaculations--"That there can be neither Jew nor Gentile, Greek nor Scythian, bond nor free, but one man in Christ Jesus"[#]--is also the author of the most ardent expression of patriotism in all literature.

[#] Gal. iii, 28; Col. iii, 11.

"I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience bearing witness with me in the Holy Ghost, that I have great sorrow and unceasing pain in my heart. For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren's sake, my kinsmen according to the flesh; who are Israelites, whose is the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises; whose are the patriarchs, and of whom is Christ as concerning the flesh."[#]

[#] Rom. ix, 1-5.

One can almost hear him panting as he dictates the words.

The Bible, then, strongly insists upon the nation as existing by divine appointment, and it looks forward, not to the abolition of national distinctions, but to the inclusion of all nations in the family of nations. So it was well that nationality should insist upon itself within the sphere of religion in the movement that we call the Reformation. But it left us with a broken Christendom, and with what are called national Churches. The old Church endeavoured to tyrannise over the State; under the influence of the Reformation the State tended to tyrannise over the Church. Then comes a movement towards a free Church in a free State; but we shall only find satisfaction when we have a free State in a free Church.

The nation is a natural growth with a spiritual significance. It emerges as a product of various elementary needs of man; but having emerged it is found to possess a value far beyond the satisfaction of these needs. The Church is a spiritual creation working through a natural medium. Its informing principle is the Holy Spirit of God in Christ, but its members are men and women who are partly animal in nature as well as children of God. The nation as organised for action is the State; and the State, being "natural," appeals to men on that side of their nature which is lower but is not in itself bad. Justice is its highest aim and force its typical instrument, though force is progressively less employed as the moral sense of the community develops: mercy can find an entrance only on strict conditions. The Church, on the other hand, is primarily spiritual; holiness is its primary quality; mercy will be the chief characteristic of its judgments, but it may fall back on justice and even, in the last resort, on force.[#] Both State and Church are instruments of God for establishing His Kingdom; both have the same goal; but they have different functions in relation to that goal.

[#] See Appendix II.: _On Moral Authority_.

The State's action for the most part takes the form of restraint; the Church's mainly that of appeal. The State is concerned to maintain the highest standard of life that can be generally realised by its citizens; the Church is concerned with upholding an ideal to which not even the best will fully attain. When a man reaches a certain pitch of development, he scarcely realises the pressure of the State, though he is still unconsciously upheld by the moral judgment of society; but he can never outgrow the demand of the Church. On the other hand, if a man is below a certain standard, the appeal of the Church will not hold him and he needs the support of the State's coercion.

Neither State nor Church is itself the Kingdom of God, though the specific life of the Church is the very spirit and power of that Kingdom. Each plays its part in building the Kingdom, in which, when it comes, force will have disappeared, while justice and mercy will coalesce in the perfect love which will treat every individual according to his need.

The Church which, officially at least, ignored nationality has failed. The Church which allowed itself to become little more than the organ of national religion has failed. The hope of the future lies in a truly international Church, which shall fully respect the rights of nations and recognise the spiritual function of the State, thereby obtaining the right to direct the national States along the path which leads to the Kingdom of God. We are all clear by now that the Christian Church cannot be made the servant of one nation; we must become equally clear that it cannot be regarded as standing apart from them, so that in becoming a Churchman a man is withdrawn in some degree from national loyalty. We must get rid of the idea of "alternative" loyalties. The Church is indeed the herald and the earnest of that Kingdom of God which includes all mankind; but unless all history is a mere aberration, that Kingdom will have nations for its provinces, and nations like individuals will realise their destiny by becoming members of it.

We shall, then, conceive the relation of the nation to the Church on the analogy of that between the family and the nation. There is in principle no conflict of interest or loyalty here. The family is a part of the nation, owing allegiance to it; but the nation consists of families and can reach its welfare only through theirs. So the nation (in proportion as it is Christian) must learn to regard itself as a member of the family of nations in the Catholic Church. No doubt in this imperfect world there is often a conflict of supposed interests, and sometimes even of real interests. Moreover, there is often room for doubt as to where the true interest lies. But the family finds its own true welfare in the service of the nation, and the nation finds its own welfare in the service of the Kingdom of God.

The Catholic Church, which is itself not yet a society of just men made perfect, while upholding the ideal of brotherhood and the love which kills hate by suffering at its hands, and while calling both men and nations to penitence and renewed aspiration in so far as they fail to reach that ideal, will none the less recognise the divinity of the nation in spite of all its failures. It will not call upon men to come out from their nation or separate themselves from its action, unless it believes that then and there the nation itself is capable of something better, or unless the nation requires of them a repudiation of the very spirit of Christ, or an action intrinsically immoral. If it is doing the best that at the moment it is capable of doing, the Church will bid its citizens support it in that act, lest the nation be weakened in its defence of the right or its control handed over to those who have no care for the right.

The Church then must recognise the nation having a certain function in the divine providence with reference to man's spiritual life. It must not try to usurp the State's functions, for if it does it will perform them badly, and it will also--which is far more serious--be deserting the work for which it alone is competent; and the State must, in its turn, recognise the Church as the Society of Nations, of which it with all others is a member.

Nothing but such a spiritual society can secure fellowship among nations. Schemes of arbitration, conciliation, international police and the like, presuppose, if they are to be effective, an admitted community of interest between the nations. But this must be not only admitted but believed in sufficiently to prompt a nation which has no interest in a particular dispute to make sacrifices for the general good, by spending blood and treasure in upholding the authority of the international court or council. What will secure this, except the realisation of common membership in the Kingdom of God, and in the Christian Church, its herald and earnest?

And yet the Church we know is not only divided but at war within itself. This, the Creation of God in Christ, is not more free from strife and faction than the nations, which are natural growths. If grace fails, how can nature succeed? Why should we expect the nations of the world to be at peace, when the sections of the Church are at war?

Because the Church is so far from what we hope it may become, we can only sketch that future Church in outline. Its building will be the work of years, perhaps of centuries. And probably enough our attempt will fail as Hildebrand's failed; probably enough there will be scores of failures; but each time we must begin again in order that for Christ and His Spirit a Body may be prepared, through which His purpose may in the end of the ages find its accomplishment, and the nations of the earth bring their glory--each its own--into His Holy City.

There is the goal; dimly enough seen; but the method is perfectly plain. "Thomas saith unto Him, Lord, we know not whither Thou goest; how know we the way? Jesus saith unto him, I am the way." And when that way led to the Cross, beside the innocent Sufferer there were two others. One cried to Him, "Save Thyself and us"; the other recognised His royalty in that utmost humiliation and prayed, "Jesus, remember me when Thou comest in Thy Kingdom." He, and he alone in the four Gospels, is recorded to have addressed the Lord by His personal name. Penitence creates intimacy, whether it be offered to God or to man.