Men cannot develop in isolation. What poor creatures men would be if they were solitary units. They would be as the beasts that perish. It is through the heritage of nationality that the soul is enriched. What poor stunted lives would ours be if we had not behind us the great and noble deeds which built up our Empire, if the words of the high souls of many generations did not come thrilling to our hearts, if Shakespeare and Wordsworth, Scott and Burns did not pour their treasures into our laps. The soul grows into the image of God through the riches of nationality. And whosoever warreth against nationality warreth against the soul. And the men who warreth against the soul must be resisted to the death.
We dare not appeal to Jesus Christ to cloak our shrinking from sacrifice. No doubt His gentleness has been the wonder of history; but His strength also summons us to be strong. For Jesus Christ was not a quietist. His religion is not a mere hospital for wounded souls. His place is among the strong of the earth. He faced the evil of this earth unflinching in His resistance. "Woe unto you Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites" is His denunciation of the oppressor; "Go tell that fox" is His message to the tyrant. When we think of Him making the whips, and falling, with holy anger in His eyes, on those who desecrated the courts of the temple, overturning the tables of the money changers, we know that the ideal of non-resistance is not His.
No doubt He laid it down as the law for the individual that he should turn the other cheek; but He did not lay it down as a law that a man should turn another's cheek to the smiter. What the individual can do, the nation may not do. It no doubt is the duty of the Ruler to turn his own individual cheek to the insulter; it is not his duty to turn the cheeks of the millions over whom he rules to those who would smite them, committing their children to shame and their homes to devastation.
No doubt Jesus Christ enjoined the law of forgiveness, but it was not unconditional. "If he repent, forgive him," is His law, and until the wrongdoer repents and ceases from his evil, it would be immoral to forgive him. Duty demands that every means be used to bring the evildoer to repentance; for only so is there a chance of his soul being saved. It is manifest that Christianity is not a religion of non-resistance to evil, but the religion of Him who Himself resisted evil, and who resisted it even to the death.
Patriotism, therefore, demands that we resist even to the shedding of blood. When a hostile army would destroy a nation, as in Belgium, it warreth against the soul, and it is as Christian to kill as it would be to shoot a tiger which leapeth out of the jungle to devour a man. And that Irish soldier whose face in the hospital in Paris was irradiated with joy when he was told that the enemy was put to flight and Paris saved, and who died with that gladness in his face, died in the spirit of Jesus Christ.
To say that the Founder of Christianity would not strike a blow for home and kindred and truth is to forget that He struck a blow in Jerusalem and wielded the thongs on the shoulders of those who polluted His Father's house. It is His will that we should strike a blow in defence of the house of our soul—the sanctuary of nationality.
Patriotism must be vibrant with the spirit of religion if it is to be a power rousing the nation to heroism and self-sacrifice. There never was a nation so patriotic as the Jew. No city ever gripped a nation's heart-strings as Jerusalem gripped the heart of the Jew. No suffering, no defeat, no exile however far, could quench the fire of patriotism in the heart. "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I remember thee not, if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy"—such was the cry of the Jew by the rivers of Babylon, yearning after Sion.
How was it that Jerusalem thus pulled at its children's heart-strings until they hurried back to rebuild? It was because Jerusalem was the seat of the worship of God. It was not the material stones or the hills round about that thus compelled the heart. It was the light of eternity shining over them. It was because of the "house of the Lord our God" that the Jew counted no good worth his striving except the good of Jerusalem. It is only when God standeth at the heart of a nation that the heart cleaveth with all its fibres to its native land, for then the whole of the man—not only the cravings of the body and the heart and the mind, but also the deeper cravings of the soul—wind themselves round the thought of the nation.