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...."