"Whoso loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me" must have seemed a hard saying to those to whom it was first spoken; and "whoso loveth city or fatherland more than me is not worthy of me" may seem a hard saying to us to-day; yet nothing less than this is involved in our pledge of loyalty to Christ. Christian patriotism never found more passionate expression than in St Paul's wish that he might be anathema for the sake of his nation; yet passionately as he loved his own people, he loved with a deeper passion the Catholic Church within which there was neither Jew nor Greek, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free. It is because the idea of the Catholic Church has become to the majority of Christian people a matter of intellectual assent rather than of passionate conviction that the Church seems impotent in international affairs. The last four centuries of European history have had as their special characteristic the development of nations. It may be that after this war we shall pass into a new era. The special feature of the period now closing has been the insecurity of national life. Menaced with constant danger, every nation has tended to develop an exaggerated self-consciousness that was liable to become inflamed and over-sensitive. If adequate security can be provided, by a League of Nations, or in some other way, for the free development of the national life of every nation, the senseless over-emphasis of nationality from which the past has suffered will no longer hinder the growth of a true Internationalism. I believe that the real alternative lies not between Nationality and Internationalism but between an Internationalism founded, like that of the 18th century, on non-Christian culture and materialism, and an Internationalism founded on the consecration of all the local loyalties that bind a man to family, city and nation, lifting him through local spheres of service to the service of the whole human race for whom Christ died. The tree whose leaves are for the healing of the nations grows only in the City of God. The Christian forces in the world are impotent to guide the future, because they are entangled in the present. Yet it is in the Holy Catholic Church that the one hope for humanity lies. It may be that that hope will never be realised; that the Holy Catholic Church is destined to remain to the end an unachieved ideal. But it is by unachieved ideals that men and nations live; and what matters most for every Christian man is that he should keep the Catholic mind and heart that reach out through home and city and country to all mankind, and rejoice that every man has an equal place in the impartial love of God. CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY J. B. PEACE, M.A., AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS