What, then, is the whole social ideal which lies at the root of the modern State? Is it pure, or is it impure? Is it the true “Salt of the Earth” which, if equally applied, will benefit all nations and all peoples alike: those to whom, in President Wilson’s phrase, we wish to be just, and those to whom we do not wish to be just? Does any modern State really present within its own borders, and in its treatment of all classes and interests, an example which, if extended, would make the world safe for Internationalism--an end which I am inclined to think is more important than making it safe for Democracy? The phrase “Salt of the Earth,” which I have taken to illustrate the meaning and value of social purity, has come to us from that wonderful compendium of ethical teaching known to Christians as the “Sermon on the Mount”; that body of coherent, consistent, and constructive doctrine from which Christianity--so soon as it had allied itself with Cæsar and the things of Cæsar--made such haste to depart. And the whole process of that departure was (from the pure ethical standard of the Sermon on the Mount) a process of adulteration--of impurity--an adaptation of a spiritual ideal to a secular practice of mixed motives. But the process really began earlier. It began in the attempt to identify the God of the Sermon on the Mount with Jahveh, the tribal God of Hebrew history. And in that attempted identification (incompatible ethics having to be reconciled) ethics became confounded. The Rabbinical training of St. Paul, the Hebraistic tendencies of the early Christian Church (whose first device was to proselytize the Jews on the old nationalistic assumption that they were the Chosen People), all combined to give an impure vision of God to the followers of the new faith. The nationalism of Judaism corrupted the internationalism of the Day of Pentecost; and the primitive Mosaic code uttered from Sinai, and adapted to the mission of racial conquest there enjoined, stultified the teaching of Calvary. The two were incompatible; yet, somehow or another, the Christian Church had to evolve an ethic which embraced both. And it did so through allegiance to the State, and the setting-up of a compromise between things secular and things spiritual which has existed ever since. You can see for yourselves which of the two is to-day the more recognised and observed among nations which call themselves Christian. The old tenets of Judaism--based on the Mosaic law and summed up in the saying, “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth”--can be observed by any one to-day in practical entirety with the full approval of the State. A strict observance of the Sermon on the Mount, and a practical belief in the teaching of Calvary land a man in prison or may even render him liable to be shot.