ter, 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