A _national_ Theocracy has always been rejected in the West. The Roman Church, whose ideal is an international Theocracy under an imperial form, is in essence anti-national and cosmopolitan; and for this very reason it became repugnant to those Northern races whose genius makes for nationality and independence. Moreover, it is unable itself to flourish without the temporal appanage of a _State_; and it therefore tends to become an _imperium in imperio_. On Western soil religion is unable to thrive as a living force unless aided by the equipments of the _State_, which the instinct of the West evolved, and to which it is prone; while a non-organised, inorganic creed can no more make a _Church_, which is a society of believers, than a paper constitution can make a _state_, which is the community individualised. A _national_ Theocracy failed also in the East because the faculty for creating a _State_ was deficient. When once Theocracy, pure and simple, vanished from Palestine--“the fatherland of the Spirit”--Israel and Judah were confronted by their inherent inability to found a _State_. It was this, indeed, which gave rise to the Messianic hope, a hope which yielded to daily motherhood the consecration of divine destiny. For to lend an effective earthly sanction to the theocratic ideal, to reconcile without violence the government of a community under the Eternal and Invisible with the progress of a community under a visible chieftain, a perfect monarch, the founder of a golden age, was required--a theocrat king. The Jewish polity was a _Church_. All European churches, on the contrary, are polities. This is well recognised by Professor Ewald,[88] who proves that the _State_, as such, took no root and found no real place in Palestine. The tentatives towards a _State_ conflicted with the native theocratic ideals of race aspiration, and failed to survive them. And when at length the Incarnation displayed the “Perfect King,” whose “kingdom was not of this world,” but “within you,” and whose Kingship was “without observation,” it was the very anti-nationalism of His teaching at a period when Rome had tinged Palestine with Western politics that perplexed or offended a perverse caste of fanatics athirst for national unity, although national independence had crumbled away. When, once more, the Apostle to the Gentiles laid the Pauline foundations of an international Christian Church, the Jewish nationalism, despite the sublime prophecies of Isaiah, grew doubly embittered, and closed its ears to that theocratic message, which was, in fact, the fulfilment of its highest aspirations.