yalties that lift human life
out of selfish isolation. These loyalties only become anti-Christian
when they become exclusive. The early loyalty of primitive man to his
family or clan was deemed to involve a normal condition of antagonism to
neighbouring families or clans. Turn a page of history, and tribal
loyalty has become civic loyalty. But civic loyalty, as in the cities of
Greece or Italy or Flanders, involves intermittent hostility with
neighbouring cities. Then civic loyalty passes into national loyalty,
and again patriotism expresses itself in distrust and antipathy to other
nations. And this will also be so till we see that all these local
loyalties rest on the foundation of a deeper loyalty to the Divine
ideal of universal fellowship that found its supreme expression in the
Incarnation and its justification in the truth that God so loved the
world.

To the Christian man national life can never be an end in itself but
always a means to an end beyond itself. A nation exists to serve the
cause of humanity; by what it gives, not by what it gets, will its worth
be estimated at the judgment-bar of God.

"Whoso loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me" must
have seemed a hard saying to those to whom it was first spoken; and
"whoso loveth city or fatherland more than me is not worthy of me" may
seem a hard saying to us to-day; yet nothing less than this is involved
in our pledge of loyalty to Christ. Christian patriotism never found
more passionate expression than in St Paul's wish that he might be
anathema for the sake of his nation; yet passionately as he loved his
own people, he loved with a deeper passion the Catholic Church within
which there was neither Jew nor Greek, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor
free. It is because the idea of the Catholic Church has become to the
majority of Christian people a matter of intellectual assent rather than
of passionate conviction that the Church seems impotent in international
affairs.

The last four centuries of European history have had as their special
characteristic the development of nations. It may be that after this war
we shall pass into a new era. The special feature of the period now
closing has been the insecurity of national life. Menaced with constant
danger, every nation has tended to develop an exaggerated
self-consciousness that was liable to become inflamed and
over-sensitive. If adequate security can be provided, by a League of
Nations, or in