Some ‘clerks’ do better, and assert that by extolling national particularisms they are in complete harmony with the fundamental spirit of the Church, especially with the teaching of the great Doctors of the Middle Ages. (This is the thesis which opposes Catholicism to Christianity.) Need I recall the fact that the most national of these Doctors limited themselves to considering national particularisms as an inevitable condition of an earthly and inferior world, which must be respected like everything else which is the will of God? Or that they never exhorted men to intensify this feeling in their hearts, still less did they ever think of putting this intensification before them as an exercise in moral self-perfection? When the Church in past times did approve of something in patriotism, it was fraternity among fellow-citizens, like love of man for other men, but not his opposition to other men. She approved of patriotism as an extension of human love, and not as a limitation of it.[66] But the most remarkable thing in all this is that recently--precisely since the time when Benedict XV was reproached during the last war for not having denounced the arrogance of German nationalism--there has arisen a school in the bosom of the Church which tries to prove that by acting in this way the Holy Father had simply obeyed the teaching of his Divine Master, who is supposed to have preached explicitly the love of a man for his own nation. Could anything better symbolize the determination of the modern ‘clerks’ to place their credit and their activities at the service of lay passions than these Churchmen making Jesus an apostle of nationalism? These strange Christians express themselves thus: ‘Jesus does not look beyond the frontiers of his own country with the idea of bestowing his benefactions upon other nations. He declares to the Canaanitish woman, whose daughter he heals against his own wish, that “his mission is only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. xv, 24). He sent his first disciples among the Israelites. And notice how he insists that they shall not go elsewhere. “Go not on the paths of the Gentiles, and enter not the cities of the Samaritans, but go first to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” (Matt. x, 6.) Later on, it will be time enough to announce the good news to foreigners, but first of all we must bring it to our own people. This is what he means by the words, so full of patriotic meaning and love: “the house of Israel.” A group of human beings possessing the same blood, the same language, the same religion, the same tradition, form “a house”. These particularities are so many dividing walls.’[67] They also say: