The influence of Christianity was impotent to prevent war; though it was able to do something to restrain its worst excesses. Where the centrifugal force of nationality comes into opposition to the centripetal force of the Christian ideal, it is generally the former that wins. How is this impotence to be accounted for? Four reasons at least maybe noted. (1) The "inwardness" of Lutheranism, combined with the cynicism of the Machiavellian doctrine of the non-moral character of public policy led, especially in Germany, to an entire disregard of the principles of Christianity in the public policy of the State. Nations did not even profess to be guided by Christian principles in their dealings with each other. The noble declaration of Alexander I remained a piece of "sublime nonsense" to statesmen like Metternich and Castlereagh, and their successors. (2) The internal life of the nations was, and is, only partially Christianised. Nations cannot regulate their external policy on Christian principles unless those principles are accepted as authoritative in their internal affairs. (3) The influence of Christianity has been hindered, to a degree difficult to exaggerate, by the unhappy divisions that, especially in England and in the United States, have made it impossible for the Church to speak with a united voice. (4) The idea of the Sovereignty of the State and its supreme claim on the life of the individual, with which Dr Figgis has dealt with illuminating insight in his _Churches in the Modern State_, has prevented the idea of the Churches as local expressions of a universal society from exercising the corrective influence that it ought to exercise on the over-emphasis of State independence.