of real progress; and insight into these deep-seated
needs is often dimmed by our too amiable and innocent belief in
automatic social advance waiting to take place on the slightest excuse.

To take but a single illustration of a radical change in men's
thinking, difficult to achieve and yet indispensable to a decent world,
consider the group of prejudices and passions which center about
nationalism and which impede the real progress of international
fraternity. What if all Christians took Jesus in earnest in his
attitude that only one object on earth is worthy of the absolute
devotion of a man--the will of God for all mankind--and that therefore
no nationality nor patriotism whatsoever should be the highest object
of man's loyalty? That ought to be an axiom to us, who stood with the
Allies against Germany. Certainly, we condemned Germany roundly enough
because so many of her teachers exalted the state as an object of
absolute loyalty. When in Japan one sees certain classes of people
regarding the Mikado as divine and rating loyalty to him as their
highest duty, it is easy to condemn that. When, however, a man says in
plain English: I am an American but I am a Christian first and I am an
American only in the sense in which I can be an American, being first
of all a Christian, and my loyalty to America does not begin to compare
with my superior loyalty to God's will for all mankind and, if ever
national action makes these two things conflict, I must choose God and
not America--to the ears of many that plain statement has a tang of
newness and danger. In the background of even Christian minds, Jesus
to the contrary notwithstanding, one finds the tacit assumption,
counted almost too sacred to be examined, that of course a man's first
loyalty is to his nation.

Indeed, we Protestants ought to feel a special responsibility for this
nationalism that so takes the place of God. In medieval and Catholic
Europe folk did not so think of nationalism. Folk in medieval Europe
were taught that their highest obligation was to God or, as they would
have phrased it, to the Church; that the Church could at any time
dispense them from any obligation to king or nation; that the Church
could even make the king, the symbol of the nation, stand three days in
the snow outside the Pope's door at Canossa. Every boy and girl in
medieval Europe was taught that his first duty was spiritual and that
no nationality nor patriotism could compa