No
one Church must claim a paramount position or demand submission as the
price of fellowship; and all excommunications of one Church by another
must be swept away.
Christ did not come to destroy the local loyalties that lift human life
out of selfish isolation. These loyalties only become anti-Christian
when they become exclusive. The early loyalty of primitive man to his
family or clan was deemed to involve a normal condition of antagonism to
neighbouring families or clans. Turn a page of history, and tribal
loyalty has become civic loyalty. But civic loyalty, as in the cities of
Greece or Italy or Flanders, involves intermittent hostility with
neighbouring cities. Then civic loyalty passes into national loyalty,
and again patriotism expresses itself in distrust and antipathy to other
nations. And this will also be so till we see that all these local
loyalties rest on the foundation of a deeper loyalty to the Divine
ideal of universal fellowship that found its supreme expression in the
Incarnation and its justification in the truth that God so loved the
world.
To the Christian man national life can never be an end in itself but
always a means to an end beyond itself.
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