Lord Hugh Cecil need not mind the slings and arrows of outrageous partisanship, so long as he shares them with Bright and Gladstone. Just lately, his pronouncement that we ought to love the Germans, as our fellow-citizens in the Kingdom of God on earth, has provoked very acrid criticism from some who generally share his political beliefs; and in a Tory paper I noticed the singularly inept gibe that this doctrine was "medieval." For my own part I should scarcely have thought that an undue tendency to love one's enemies was a characteristic trait of the Middle Age, or that Englishmen and Frenchmen, Guelphs and Ghibellines, were inclined to sink their racial differences in the unity of Christian citizenship. Lord Hugh's doctrine might be called by some modern and by others primitive; but medieval it can only be called on the principle that, in invective, a long word, is better than a short one. Having thus repelled what I think a ridiculous criticism, I will admit that Lord Hugh's doctrine raises some interesting, and even disputable, points. In the first place, there is the theory of the Universal Church as the Divine Kingdom on earth, and of the citizenship in which all its members are united. I grant the theory; but I ask myself if I am really bound by it to love all these my fellow-citizens, whatever their conduct and character may be. Love is an elastic word; and, if I am to love the Germans, I must love them in some very different sense from that in which I love my country and my race. It really is, in another form, the old controversy between cosmopolitanism and patriotism. The "Enthusiasm of Humanity" is a noble sentiment; but the action of our fellow-members of the human family may be such as to render it, at least for the moment, impossible of realization. Under the pressure of injury from without, cosmopolitanism must contract itself into patriotism. We may wish devoutly that the whole human family were one in heart and mind--that all the citizens of the kingdom of God obeyed one law of right and wrong; but when some members of the family, some citizens of the kingdom, have "given themselves over to a reprobate mind," our love must be reserved for those who still own the claim of righteousness. If our own country stood as a solitary champion of right against a world in unrighteous arms, patriotism would be a synonym for religion, and cosmopolitanism for sin.