as one Christian Society--an
attempt to realise the City of God of St Augustine's great treatise--and
the question at issue was whether the Pope or the Emperor was to be
regarded as the supreme head of this great society.

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
charac