oral
laws of political action of which John Bright so memorably said
that "though they were not given amid the thunders of Sinai, they
are not less the commandments of God."

Now, the fearless utterance of this ethical creed does not tend
to popularity. Englishmen will bear a good deal of preaching, so
long as it is delivered from the pulpit; but when it is uttered
by the lips of laymen, and deals with public problems, it arouses
a curious irritation. That jovial old heathen, Palmerston, once
alluded to Bright as "the Honourable and Reverend Member"; Gladstone's
splendid appeals to faith and conscience were pronounced "d----d
copy-book-y"; and Lord Houghton, who knew the world as well as most
men, said, "Does it ever strike you that nothing shocks people so
much as any immediate and practical application of the character
and life of Christ?"

Lord Hugh Cecil need not mind the slings and arrows of outrageous
partisanship, so long as he shares them with Bright and Gladstone.
Just lately, his pronouncement that we ought to love the Germans,
as our fellow-citizens in the Kingdom of God on earth, has provoked
very acrid criticism from some who generally share his political
beliefs; and in a Tory paper I noticed the singularly inept gibe
that this doctrine was "medieval." For my own part I should scarcely
have thought that an undue tendency to love one's enemies was a
characteristic trait of the Middle Age, or that Englishmen and
Frenchmen, Guelphs and Ghibellines, were inclined to sink their
racial differences in the unity of Christian citizenship. Lord Hugh's
doctrine might be called by some modern and by others primitive; but
medieval it can only be called on the principle that, in invective,
a long word, is better than a short one.

Having thus repelled what I think a ridiculous criticism, I will
admit that Lord Hugh's doctrine raises some interesting, and even
disputable, points. In the first place, there is the theory of
the Universal Church as the Divine Kingdom on earth, and of the
citizenship in which all its members are united. I grant the theory;
but I ask myself if I am really bound by it to love all these my
fellow-citizens, whatever their conduct and character may be. Love
is an elastic word; and, if I am to love the Germans, I must love
them in some very different sense from that in which I love my country
and my race. It really is, in another form, the old controversy
between cosmopolitanism and patriotis