The unity of Western Christendom found a crude, but real, expression in the Crusades, and it is significant that the decline of the crusading impulse coincides in time with the rise of national feeling in the two western states, England and France. What was to be the attitude of the Catholic Church towards this new national instinct? In the 14th and 15th centuries the question becomes increasingly urgent, and the Council of Constance may be regarded as the last sincere effort to find an answer. The answer suggested there, to which the English Church still adheres, was the recognition of a General Council of the Church as the supreme spiritual authority. Such a General Council might gather the glory and honour of the nations into the City of God, and might even, it was hoped, restore the broken unity between East and West. How the Council failed, how Constantinople was left to its fate, how a Papacy growing more and more Italian in its interests brought to a head the long-simmering revolt of the nations—all this you know. The Reformation was, in part, a struggle of the nations to give religious expression to their national life. The threefold bond that had held together the Church of the West—the bond of common language, law and ceremonial—was broken.
At the threshold of the new order stand the figures of Luther and 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.