“ We are all clear by now that the Christian Church cannot be made the servant of one nation; we must become equally clear that it cannot be regarded as standing apart from them, so that in becoming a Churchman a man is withdrawn in some degree from national loyalty. We must get rid of the idea of "alternative" loyalties. The Church is indeed the herald and the earnest of that Kingdom of God which includes all mankind; but unless all history is a mere aberration, that Kingdom will have nations for its provinces, and nations like individuals will realise their destiny by becoming members of it. ”

“ And most will agree that we enjoy a great play better when we have read it in advance, or when we have already seen it on the stage before; because then we do reach something that may serve perhaps as the nearest image that we can get for eternity—a grasp of the whole stretch of time, realised in its successiveness and in the meaning which that successiveness gives to it, and having the sense of the whole throughout and seeing each moment, as it comes, in the light not only of the past but of the future too. ”

“ And which of us has served mankind the better? Thy appeal was to the few strong souls. We have cared for the weak. Many who would be disorderly and miserable have been made orderly and happy. And now Thou art come to spoil our work and repeat Thy great mistake in the wilderness by giving to men again Thy fatal gift of freedom, through trust in the power of love. ”

“ To be tied and bound with the chain of our sins is just as much slavery as to be in the ownership of another man; and we can acquire the real liberty which is worth having, the liberty, that is, to shape our lives, to live according to our own purpose, following out our own ideal, only in so far as our natures have been welded by discipline into unity, so that we are no longer a chaos of impulses and instincts, any of which may be set in motion by the appropriate environment, but are self-governing persons controlling our own lives. ”

“ Holiness must come first, Holiness which means absolute conformity to the will of God. Whatever obstacles there may be to overcome, whatever seductions to avoid, the Church is to remain absolutely devoted to the Divine Will. Only so can it be catholic or universal. It might for a moment achieve an all-embracing unity by giving up everything that is offensive to men, and gathering all within it under the glow of a comfortable sentiment ”

“ Surely he would have expected that all nations would be linked together in the Holy Communion, the Fellowship of Saints. Roman, Spaniard, African, Syrian, those strange Germans, and the barbarous Britons who lived in the remotest corner of the earth, might have maintained their own varieties of culture, but each would find his joy and pride in offering his contribution to the life of the whole family of nations. Rooted in knowledge of the love of God, their life would grow luxuriantly and bear fruit in love of one another and service of the common cause. ”

“ So far it would seem that there must be in the most obvious sense of the words a certain curtailment of everybody's liberty in order that anybody may have liberty at all. If we are all to be free to indulge our passions of anger and hatred, should such arise within us, then it is quite clear that there will be very little freedom of action in the Society which rests on that principle. Everyone will go about in fear of everyone else. ”

“ The uprising of the national spirit has had the deplorable result of contributing to the break-up of Christendom, but it is not in itself deplorable at all. All civilisation has in fact progressed by the development of different nationalities, each with its own type. If we believe in a Divine Providence, if we believe that the life of Christ is not only the irruption of the Divine into human history but is also and therein the manifestation of the governing principle of all history, we shall confess that the nation as well as the Church is a divine Creation. ”

“ The Catholic Church, which is itself not yet a society of just men made perfect, while upholding the ideal of brotherhood and the love which kills hate by suffering at its hands, and while calling both men and nations to penitence and renewed aspiration in so far as they fail to reach that ideal, will none the less recognise the divinity of the nation in spite of all its failures. ”

“ It has been well said that the mediæval man looked upwards and downwards—to Hell and to Heaven; his view of the world is on a vertical plane; the modern man has a horizontal view, looking to the past and future—the past as it has existed, and the future as it shall exist, in the history of human society upon this earth. We need if possible to combine these two, but it is a very difficult achievement. With our point of view we inevitably read Apocalypse as if it were a literal history of the future written before the event; but this is not its primary significance. ”

“ Suppose that we decide that we will give to all men in Society that which is their due. How are we going to determine what is due? Is it to be determined by their economic value, for example by the amount they are contributing to the economic or general welfare of Society? Well then, there are a large number of people at both ends of what we call the social scale who ought to receive nothing at all, because they are contributing nothing economically, or, indeed, in any other way, to the public welfare. ”

“ European history derives its whole life from Palestine, Greece and Rome; and in each of those three peoples, some one excellence was developed to a peculiar degree. Rome perfected and has bequeathed to us the instincts for social order, as embodied in law. The history of the Roman people is of significance, precisely because one may there trace the growth and working out of this instinct for social or political life. There has never been anything to rival it in history. No modern nation has shown the same extraordinary political sense and sanity. ”

“ As long as there are great numbers of citizens whose faculties are undeveloped it is impossible for society to be justly ordered. The democracies of the world have been curiously blind to this truth, as they have to the parallel truth that education is essential to true liberty.
As long as there is a vast difference between a man's actual worth to society and his potential worth, there will be two just claims concerning him, and no possibility of adjudicating between them. To treat a man who is in fact useless as though he were useful, is to injure the community by encouraging a parasite ”

“ II.—The value of the justice which the State is able to secure actually resides for the most part in the liberty which it makes possible. Justice, as the State interprets it, is of itself, as far as I can see, almost totally valueless. I can see no kind of advantage in merely allotting so much pain to so much evil. There is moral evil in a man and you put physical evil into him as well. ”

“ For the Hindu, for example, this world and all that is in it is mere illusion. He is spiritual enough but he is not material enough; and we find there that contempt for the things of the body which invariably issues in a contempt for moral conduct; for our moral conduct here, while we live upon this planet, is wrought out through our bodies. But the religion of Israel, and especially its completion in the Incarnation, wherein God Himself came in the flesh, gives at once a dignity to this world of ours, to our bodies, and to all the material side of life. ”

“ Deeper than all divisions of "Catholic" and "Protestant" is the division of the great human family—European, Indian, Chinese, and so forth. These great civilisations must each bring its own gift, consecrated by the Spirit of Christ, to the life of the whole Body before that Body reveals the measure of the fulness of the stature of Christ. A merely European Church cannot be fully Catholic, nor can it ever do, even for Europe, what the Catholic Church is called by God to do for the nations which become its provinces. ”

“ The great problem before the educational world in the next period is to draw the two types and tendencies in education closer together, to leave the whole strength of both unimpaired, but to unite them. It is not easy to do. It is a very big problem, easily stated, but very hard to solve in practice. I would suggest that one of the flaws of the modern tendency is that it leaves people very strongly aware of what is going on at the moment, but not always equally aware of what has been thought by the greatest men in the history of the world. ”

“ The Church must call men from temporal to eternal hopes. But in this way it will do more than is possible in any other way to purify the temporal life itself. For most temporal goods are such that the more one person has the less there is for others, so that absorption in them leads inevitably to strife and war. But the eternal goods—love, joy, peace, loyalty, beauty, knowledge—are such that the fuller fruition of them by one leads of itself to fuller fruition by others also, and absorption in them leads without fail to brotherhood and fellowship. ”

“ It is not for any selfish purpose, however harmless, that the power of God is given; selfishness in its most innocent form is set aside.
How shall He set about His work? Shall He fulfil that expectation which Isaiah's vision had fostered? He looks out on the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them, and He knows that they can be His, if He will fall down and worship the Prince of the power of this world. Shall He use worldly methods to convert the world to God? No; worldliness in its most attractive form is set aside. ”

“ It is a big risk that the Church must run; for if she does not save the world she will have ruined it, besides sacrificing herself. If there is no God nor Holy City of God, the Church will have just spoilt life for all her faithful members, and in some degree for every one else as well. But if her vision is true, then everything is worth while—rather the greatness of the sacrifice is an addition to the joy when the prize is so unimaginably great. ”

“ One of the clearest illustrations of the principle is before our eyes in our experience to-day. When the spirit of national patriotism makes its appeal, no one has to make any effort to understand its claim; our nation is a definite and concrete society in which we easily realise our membership to the full. We know that there is no escaping from it, and that, when it appeals for our service or our lives, we must either respond or refuse. But the Christian Church, as we know it, is powerless to bring home its appeal in the same way. ”

“ What we do then is to appeal, not to their conduct but to the principle of their conduct. So when Wilberforce started the campaign against slavery what he did was to appeal from the conduct of the Church to the principle of that conduct which it professed and admitted. In other spheres it admitted the sanctity of human personality; but it had never applied this principle to the particular problem of slavery.
In this way the appeal to authority is both just, safe, and progressive. It is only a fool who will throw away all that the experience of the ages has built up. ”

“ The Church, like its Master, will be chiefly concerned to seek and to save that which is lost, calling men everywhere to repent because the Kingdom of God is at hand. Worship is indeed the very breath of its life, but service of the world is the business of its life. It is the Body of Christ, that is to say, the instrument of His will, and His will is to save the world.
The spiritual life of men is not limited to this planet, and the fulfilment of the Church's task can never be here alone. ”

“ Only a Church which is perfectly loyal to the Will of God, can possibly be the home for all mankind.
But Holiness has always had two meanings—an outward and an inward, a ceremonial and a moral. We shall agree, I suppose, in saying that the outward and ceremonial is in itself of no consequence, and exists only in order to preserve and make possible the inward and spiritual conformity to God's Will; but for that purpose, as all human experience has always shown, it is quite indispensable. ”