The War and Unity Part 9

(3) the desire to live down prejudice and establish confidence,

(4) the preparation of a people's mind by education before introducing a new religion,

--any one of these is treachery to the All-Father and to the family of man, and a vital _praeparatio evangelica_ is being made. Let me ill.u.s.trate.

It happened in a great marquee in France. On a summer evening in 1916 the place was crowded with Indians. There was a group playing Indian card games, there was a crowd round a gramophone with Indian records, at the writing tables with great torment of spirit men were writing to their homes. At the counter foods they loved were being provided.

Against one of the poles of the marquee stood a stately Indian of some rank. He had been seen there often before. He rarely spoke but seemed intensely interested. On this particular night the time arrived for the closing of the tent. The little groups gradually disappeared and the tent curtains were being replaced when the leader of the work found himself addressed by the Indian:

Why do you serve us in this way? You are not here by Government orders. You come when you like and you go when you like. There is only one religion on earth that would lead its servants to serve in this way, Christianity. I have been watching you men, and I have come to the conclusion that Christianity will fit the East as it can never fit the West. When the war is over I want you to send one of your men to my village. We are all Hindus, but my people will do what I tell them.

One of the ghastly tragedies of the war is that two great nations nominally Christian are at each other's throats. In the world's eyes Christian civilisation has broken down. We know better, but our explanations will not carry far enough to correct the impression. Our defence must be an offensive.

It is certainly within the truth to say that we have not yet seen what Christianity can do for a community or a nation where, as I put it before, "it is given a chance." May it not be that in the Providence of G.o.d the first great revelation of what Christianity can do for a nation will be seen in one of the lands that have come under the Flag, and among a people living under less complex conditions than ourselves? If that is a possibility we ought to see that wherever the Flag flies, there comes, with the unfurling of the Flag, the Gospel of Christ.

This is directly in the interest of unity, and many problems that have so far remained insoluble to our statesmen might discover the solution in Christian leadership.

I shall be pardoned I know for suggesting that the highest purposes of unity may be served by the extension and development throughout the Empire of such international organisations as the Student Christian Movement, the Y.M.C.A., the Y.W.C.A., and, used at its highest values, the Boy Scout Movement. There are others, but these are typical. They are established movements built up on definite principles capable of universal application, and yet each of them able to develop its organisation on lines that recognise national psychology and character.

Each of them may become and aims at becoming indigenous everywhere, giving freedom of method and action and free play to the moral and intellectual activities of the people concerned, while they have certain essential elements that are universally characteristic of them. In addition, they give large numbers of Christian people an opportunity of expressing their unity in service of the right kind.

What was said about the Cathedrals is equally true of our two ancient Universities. Mr Fisher's Education Bill may well mean more for Imperial unity than almost any other single factor. It will mean an ever increasing number of men to whom "Cambridge" and "Oxford" will be magic words. If our view of culture is broad enough we shall see to it that these two Universities become increasingly places where the children of the Empire who are fit to graduate in them shall not lack the opportunity of doing so. Because these ancient foundations link with the past, because of all they may mean to the present and to the future, the way to them should be made broad enough to admit the living stream of Greater Britain's children, who by dint of gifts and industry have proved their fitness to meet their peers in these delectable cities, where the very air breathes the romance of British culture. Their right of entry ought not to be won by the benefactions of private citizens, though all who love knowledge are grateful enough for these, but should be theirs by their citizenship in the Empire and their own tested fitness.

Nothing again is more hopeful in the present situation than the manifest desire, widely felt and expressed, that the old cla.s.s-antagonisms should never be revived. Surely this is _the_ strategic moment in which we may make the War once more contribute to a better state of things. Our politicians are awake to the need and are inventing every kind of machinery for bringing Capital and Labour together in Council Chambers as co-partners in the Commerce of the Empire. But there are sinister forces also at work, and this machinery can only run if it is controlled by men of resolute good will.

The War has been a great bridge-builder linking up in the fellowship of discipline and sacrifice people between whom chasms yawned before. There are knowledge and understanding and sympathy to-day amongst us. Yet many of us are convinced that no purely political machinery can be made effective in achieving so great a task as the making permanent of this new and better condition. We need a new and abiding spirit of conciliation, a deeper determination than political action can produce, that things shall not relapse, that the forces of re-action shall not triumph. The one hope of carrying over into permanence this new understanding and appreciation lies in the nation becoming impregnated with those s.p.a.cious spiritual ideals that the Churches together represent. Nothing is impossible to faith, and faith in G.o.d and man will be kept astretch in the discipline that will be demanded of us all, in the breaking down of false barriers that have grown up through the years and the destruction of long-lived prejudices that will die hard.

The Empire itself is a unity. It is not easy for English people to realise all that is implied here. My great name-sake urged us in this country to "think Imperially." Another voice asks us "What do they know of England who only England know?" but it is hard for us to think except in terms of England. For example, I have referred to this country as the great treasure house of the Empire's history, and to the care and devotion shewn by our kinsmen from Overseas in their study of our country and its inst.i.tutions. All of us realise how right that is, but ought we not to reciprocate their devotion and regard, by much more intense interest and study of their life and the developments of their inst.i.tutions?

Our unity demands this wider culture, this reciprocity. The Motherland must not only teach, she must be prepared to learn. She may lead, but she must be prepared to follow. We have much to contribute, but in Religion, in political and social ideals, and in commerce there is much we need to receive.

If our land is the great treasure house, are not these other lands great laboratories where we might see, if we would only look, how some of our accepted ideas, and notions, and watchwords are tested in a larger arena?

Are we so sure of ourselves that we are prepared to hold on to our own experience as the final test of the truth and value of our theories? Or are we big enough in the light of Imperial experience to revise our judgment, to sift our theories, and to go forward carrying those which stand the test of the wider arena, and being prepared to surrender those which only seemed right and proper in the conventional setting of these small islands?

In conclusion, the Empire has come to power and unity on certain great principles. Our Imperial ideals have been evolved out of experience all over the world, and with all kinds of people, under the guidance of distinguished leaders of many-sided gifts. In an Empire so diverse in its const.i.tuent parts, including peoples at varied stages of development, it is impossible that those ideals should be everywhere expressed at their highest power. In many places our methods of government must be tentative, but everywhere they must be progressive, placing upon subject peoples the burden of government as rapidly as they are able to bear it, providing every inspiration that can call them upwards and onwards. Our tentative methods must never be allowed to become permanent. We may be tutors, we must never become tyrants. We may lead, direct, even control, but we may never be content until our people are free, self-governing, rejoicing in the liberty that enables them to choose whole-heartedly to remain in that Commonwealth of free peoples we call the Empire. Along this path lie permanence and closer unity. In our Imperial destiny it is the part of those who would be the greatest to become the servants of all.

Thank G.o.d for all who have laboured in this spirit to build our goodly heritage.

UNITY BETWEEN NATIONS

By the Rev. J. H. B. MASTERMAN, M.A.

In the previous lectures of this course you have been considering the problem of home reunion. My task to-day is to remind you of the fact that beyond the reunion of the Churches at home there lies the larger problem of the realisation of the Christian ideal of a universal brotherhood. How can this ideal be realised in a world divided into nations? I am going to treat the subject historically; firstly because I find myself incapable of treating it in any other way, and secondly because you can only build securely if you build on the foundation of the historic past. The State may ignore the lessons of the past, the Church can never do so.

How can we deal with the apparent antagonism between the centrifugal force of nationality and the centripetal force of the Catholic ideal?

There are two possible answers that we cannot accept. It is possible for religion to set itself against the development of national life, and claim that a world-religion must find expression in a world-state. That is the mediaeval answer.

Or it is possible for religion to become subordinate to nationality at the cost of losing the note of Catholicity, so that the consecration of national life may seem a n.o.bler task than the gathering of humanity into conscious fellowship in one great society. This is the modern answer.

With neither of these solutions can we be satisfied. The existence of nations as units of political self-consciousness within the larger life of humanity does, we believe, minister to the fulfilment of the purpose of G.o.d. Whatever may be the case hereafter, the establishment of a world-state, at the present stage in the evolution of human inst.i.tutions, would mean the impoverishment of the life of humanity. Yet a Church that is merely national or imperial has missed the true significance of its mission.

At the beginning of the Christian era, the greatest attempt ever made to gather all peoples into a universal society was actually in progress.

The Roman Empire was founded on the basis of a common administrative system, and a common law--the _jus gentium_. It needed a common religion. The effort to supply this pa.s.ses through three stages. The earliest of these is the stage of universal toleration which was made possible by polytheism. A second stage soon follows. The various religions of the Empire overflow one another's frontier-lines and a synthesis begins, leading to the Stoic idea of the universal truth expressed in many forms. But the popular mind was unable to rise to this high conception, and the third stage begins towards the end of the first century in the formal adoption of the worship of the Emperor as the religious expression of the unity of the Empire. It was the opposition of the Christian Church that did most to bring to naught this effort to give a religious foundation to the unity of the Empire, and the attempt of Constantine and Theodosius to make Christianity an Imperial religion came too late to save the Empire from disintegration.

For the unity of the Christian Church had been undermined. When Christianity shook itself free from the shackles of Jewish nationalism, it came under the influence of Greek thought. The theology and language of the early Church were Greek. Even in Rome the Church was for at least two centuries "a Greek colony." Hence the growth of Christianity was slow in those western parts of the Empire that had not come under the influence of Greek culture--Gaul, Britain, Spain, North Africa. Latin Christianity found its centre in North Africa, where Roman culture had imposed itself on the hard, cruel Carthaginian world. It is Carthage, not Athens, that gives to Tertullian his harsh intolerance and to St Augustine his stern determinism. So the way was prepared for what I regard as the supreme tragedy of history--the falling apart of Eastern and Western Christianity. Then, in the West, the unity of the Church is broken by the conversion of the Teutonic peoples to Arianism, so that the contest between the dying Empire in the West and the tribes pressing on its frontiers is embittered by religious antagonism. The sword of Clovis secured the victory of orthodoxy, but at what a cost!

When the storm subsides, there emerges the august conception of the Holy Roman Empire. For the n.o.blest expression of the ideal of a universal Christian Empire, read Dante's _De Monarchia_. The history of the Holy Roman Empire is too large a subject to enter upon. It is important to remember that the struggles between the Popes and the Emperors that fill so large a s.p.a.ce of mediaeval history were not struggles between Church and State. Western Europe was conceived of as one Christian Society--an attempt to realise the City of G.o.d 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 att.i.tude 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 G.o.d, 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 n.o.ble 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 a.s.sociated, 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 rea.s.sert 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 a.s.sociated with the consecration of all bishops of the Anglican Church. For by such a.s.sociation we should bring into clearer prominence the fact that the historic episcopate is more than a national inst.i.tution.

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 rea.s.sert, 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.

Christ did not come to destroy the local loyalties 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 pa.s.ses 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d.

"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 pa.s.sionate expression than in St Paul's wish that he might be anathema for the sake of his nation; yet pa.s.sionately as he loved his own people, he loved with a deeper pa.s.sion 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 a.s.sent rather than of pa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.s 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 some other way, for the free development of the national life of every nation, the senseless over-emphasis of nationality from which the past has suffered will no longer hinder the growth of a true Internationalism. I believe that the real alternative lies not between Nationality and Internationalism but between an Internationalism founded, like that of the 18th century, on non-Christian culture and materialism, and an Internationalism founded on the consecration of all the local loyalties that bind a man to family, city and nation, lifting him through local spheres of service to the service of the whole human race for whom Christ died. The tree whose leaves are for the healing of the nations grows only in the City of G.o.d. The Christian forces in the world are impotent to guide the future, because they are entangled in the present. Yet it is in the Holy Catholic Church that the one hope for humanity lies. It may be that that hope will never be realised; that the Holy Catholic Church is destined to remain to the end an unachieved ideal. But it is by unachieved ideals that men and nations live; and what matters most for every Christian man is that he should keep the Catholic mind and heart that reach out through home and city and country to all mankind, and rejoice that every man has an equal place in the impartial love of G.o.d.