The triumphant assertion of the spiritual significance of nationality in the latter part of the nineteenth century has made it further apparent that the forces working for religion, and especially for its Protestant forms, were stronger than the forces in opposition. The nation enters the arena of the controversy as a spiritual force, assuming as a first principle the existence of God and His supernatural government of the world. Never was this truth more impressively illustrated than in the experience of Lincoln, who, when he became President of the United States in the supreme crisis of its history, ceased to be indifferent to religion and passed into a devout belief in the mysterious control of the destiny of the nation by a sovereign, omnipotent hand. As the indifference to nationality was among the causes of religious doubt and of the weakness in the Churches in the middle of the century, so the triumphant assertion of nationality has contributed to turn the tide towards theistic belief and the Christian faith.
To give a full exposition of the inner relationship of the nation to religion and the Churches is not possible here, but some remarks may be offered which will tend to illustrate their organic connection.
(1) In any large historical survey the nation appears as guided by religious leaders. Religion is seen to have flourished in proportion as the nation is conscious of its strength and destiny. When the Roman Empire broke down the nationalities and merged them in a large composite unity, it broke down also religious faiths, and its own religion as well, till scepticism was the result and a consequent immorality. All attempts to build up religion on the basis of empire, as distinct from nationality, ended in failure.
(2) The Christian religion tended from the first to break up the empire and to restore nationality. Ultimately it became manifest that the cause which undermined the Roman Empire and accomplished its downfall was the Christian Church. In its Eastern half the empire was resolved into nationalities. In the West a Church, Latin Christendom, rose upon its ruins, but within this Latin Christendom the spirit of nationality began at once to work, forcing its way against the opposition of the Papacy, till, in the age of the Protestant Reformation, when nationality was felt as a conscious motive, it sundered Latin Christendom into fragments.
(3) The Old Testament in its form as a whole is simply the history of a nation from its birth through all its fortunes. Never did religion rise to a diviner and fuller expression than under the realization of the conviction that God was protecting the nation and determining its career. The Hebrew prophets were primarily statesmen, devoted to the nationality, as the incarnation of the divine will, in whose fortunes were revealed the divine purpose. Any nation which has not the similar conviction that it is the chosen people of God, and called to some important task, cannot maintain its independence and integrity, and has no future. This conviction to-day inspires the leading nations of the world.
(4) The nation mediates between humanitarianism and individualism. In serving its own ends and seeking to accomplish its mission, it works for the good of all, and also for the freedom of the individual man. The tendency of humanitarianism as a motive apart from the higher life of the state, or apart from its impersonation in Christ as its head and leader, is to weaken individualism and to defeat the very end it wishes to subserve, the achievement of the rights of man. Humanity as a whole lacks the visible, tangible embodiment of the nation. It has not yet the consciousness of itself nor of its unity. It cannot respond to the needs it awakens. It does not, as a whole, realize its relationship to God, nor is it placed in such a position as to make it feel the need of God. It is in danger of becoming an abstraction in so far as it exists without relationships. But the nation is close at hand, near, and felt as a moral personality or being, seeking ideal ends which are also within the bounds of possibility. Humanity as a whole undertakes no enterprises which make it tremble as it comes to unknown, trackless seas. But when the nation comes to great crises, where human wisdom is powerless to direct its course, it falls back instinctively and by necessity upon the belief in the guidance of God. Thus the nation as a whole appears in a higher form of personality than individual men can achieve, even the greatest men, and so prepares the way for the belief in the still higher, the invisible, infinite personality of God.
(5) The nation as a moral personality and depending upon God becomes the safeguard of morals. If there has been a decline in morality in the nineteenth century, as some maintain, shown in the general weakening of moral sanctions, or by the increase of divorce and indifference to the sacredness of family life, it must be attributed in some measure to the indifference to nationality from the time that political liberalism resting on an abstract humanitarianism, or in combination with a scientific naturalism, gained the ascendency. So far as this tendency has in any degree invaded the Christian Church it has been powerless to effect a change for the better. The great men whom humanity is directed to worship do not constitute a moral standard, nor can scientific postulates be made a basis for moral culture; for nature is at least unmoral, if not, as some assert, immoral, and it is only as acted upon by man that nature gives response to the increasing purpose of the world. Religious truths—the personality of God, His creation and government of the world, immortality, and the freedom of the will—these are shattered, we are told, “by the great eternal iron laws of the universe,” or “are in hopeless contradiction with the most solid truths of empirical science.” And so, it must be added, are the sanctions of ethics and moral law. It is when we turn to the state, to the moral personality of the nation, that we encounter other laws and living forces which restore what an empirical science or a transcendental humanitarianism has broken down. Here the supreme test is spiritual—the well-being of the nationality. The state must build upon the family as its corner-stone; it must enforce those moral laws which the history of nations, as well as human experience in its best estate, reveal to be the inmost expression of the normal life of man.
The beginning of a new century may seem like an artificial division of time, but the self-consciousness with which the nineteenth century closed, the efforts at introversive estimates of its place in history and of the work it had accomplished, indicate something more than a conventional barrier to be passed. Prophecies in regard to the new age may be futile, for God reserves to Himself the knowledge of the future. But it is much if we can to any extent read the meaning of the past and detect the sources of its strength and weakness. And for the rest, Christian faith and hope are inextinguishable, looking forward to the fulfilment of the Christian ideal—that higher unity where Christ appears as the embodiment of humanity and the voice of its yearning for a perfect brotherhood; where the nation also acknowledges Him as its overlord, so that, in the words of Christian prophecy, the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdom of our God and of His Christ. In that ideal conception, the dominium belongs to the state, and the ministerium to the Christian Church.
Alexander V. G. Allen.