CHRISTIANITY AND PATRIOTISM. 



231 



thropic effort within national confines. A man 

 who is interpenetrated with this view of life and 

 duty will spend his labors chiefly on his country- 

 men, not because he judges them the superiors 

 of all mankind in right of their being his own 

 connections, far less with the notion of giving 

 them an advantage over other nations, but be- 

 cause they are nearest to him, and have thus the 

 first claim on his attention. "When dogs are 

 licking the sores of Lazarus at a rich man's door, 

 there is a duty at hand to be attended to before 

 sending a subscription off to a Kirghiz tribe 

 which has had a murrain among its sheep. 



But there are two entirely diverse conceptions 

 of Christianity from that just mentioned, which, 

 when inculcated and acted on, very naturally 

 lead up to neglect of social duty, and that be- 

 cause they are both non-historical in spirit. One 

 is that which is chiefly, but not by any means 

 peculiarly, embodied in Calvinism — namely, that 

 Christianity is simply a contrivance for rescuing 

 an infinitesimal minority of human beings from 

 endless torture, and for lodging them in abodes 

 of unending bliss, quite apart from moral consid- 

 erations, balloting them, so to speak, into a most 

 exclusive club, and blackballing the whole re- 

 mainder of mankind. This kind of opinion has 

 not frequently, on the whole, led to its logical 

 conclusion of Antinomiun license, but it has al- 

 ways limited the area of real sympathy to the 

 hypothetical elect, and very usually tended to 

 the depreciation of such kinds of effort as imply 

 an educational character in the present life. For 

 example, though many very eminent scholars 

 and theologians have been found in the ranks 

 of its adherents, its current view has been that 

 earthly learning is altogether superfluous for 

 those who are destined to heavenly bliss in a life 

 entirely disconnected from the present one, and 

 having no relation of continuity with it whatever. 

 In heaven we shall know, the argument runs, all 

 that we want to know, and the wholly unlettered 

 saint will rank along with, if not above, the most 

 erudite ; and so of all other distinctions notice- 

 able here between man and man — wherefore the 

 true Christian will make no account of ihem, nor 

 busy himself in attaining them here, any more 

 than a sensible youth who knew that his life was 

 to be spent as an Indian official would devote 

 his attention to the study of Scottish agriculture 

 as a preparation for his new career. As to the 

 question of sympathy, its treatment is admirably 

 summed up in the three famous resolutions of the 

 Pilgrim Fathers, when they were preparing to 

 take the lands of the red-men from them by vio- 



lence : "Resolved — 1. That the earth is the 

 Lord's, and the fullness thereof. 2. That the 

 Lord hath given the earth to the saints. 3. That 

 we are the saints." This principle, though rare- 

 ly, if ever, expressed with such charming sim- 

 plicity and directness, has yet been very general- 

 ly acted on by those who accepted it, in the form 

 of rigid intolerance when they were the ruling 

 power, and of unscrupulous resistance to authori- 

 ty when subjects ; of which the crowning exam- 

 ples are the Huguenot wars already referred to, 

 and the invitation by the Hungarian Protestants, 

 Tekeli and his friends, of that Turkish invasion 

 which was crushed by the arms of King John So- 

 bieski and of Charles of Lorraine under the walls 

 of Vienna ; in each instance all social and politi- 

 cal considerations being postponed to those of 

 sectarian triumph and revenge. But whatever 

 objections may be taken on such grounds as these 

 to the practical working of such a system, the 

 argument we are considering can derive no sup- 

 port from it, for the threefold reason that the 

 system itself, however evil its method or ends 

 may have been at times, has by no means tended 

 to generate political inertness and incapacity; 

 that it never at best assumed larger dimensions 

 than those of a single section of Christianity, 

 whose claims, moreover, were uniformly repudi- 

 ated by the enormous majority of other Chris- 

 tians, inclusive of the whole East, of Latin Chris- 

 tendom, and of Luthcranism; and that its final 

 collapse in our own time shows that it is not 

 identical with Christianity, which is quite un- 

 affected, otherwise than beneficially, by its 

 fall. 



The Ultramontane form of Christianity, how- 

 ever, does lend more color to the objection, 

 though the vast system of which it is at pres- 

 ent the most powerful living exponent seems 

 at first sight, from its wide diffusion and long 

 continuance, free from those strait bonds of sec- 

 tarianism and of mere nationalism which prove 

 that the evil system just discussed is not, even 

 theoretically, coextensive with the universal fel- 

 lowship of Christians. 



The reason why Ultramontanism has failed in 

 all civil relations everywhere is that it has nar- 

 rowed, materialized, and coarsened the idea of a 

 kingdom of Christ, a brotherhood of ransomed 

 humanity, by identifying it with the papal mon- 

 archy, treated all along, at any rate from the 

 days of Nicolas I., as a temporal, much more 

 than a spiritual domain. The consolidation and 

 aggrandizement of this monarchy, rather than 

 the promotion of righteousness, has been the 



