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.