For a while the three new forces worked together, carrying men’s thought and action forward; and then in the 18th century it would seem that there was, in England at any rate, a torpor due to their exhaustion; when revival came it was because Wesley and his friends revived the Hebrew element in our life, because Newman and Pusey with their friends revived the Latin element, and because F. D. Maurice and the Broad Church movement revived the Hellenistic, and this, with its passion for more adequate comprehension and expression, is the dominant force of our time. We watch these three influences still at work; but as they interact upon one another and within the persons of the new races, a new product is gradually being produced, and in those corporate personalities which we call nations, we see a character being born which is something that history has not known before.
The first requirement of personality is always freedom—freedom as we have already said in its two senses, that conduct is not dictated from without but is governed by the whole person, and not by isolated elements; and the corporate persons need freedom just as much as the individual; hence the need, the vital and absolute need, for political sovereignty in any State which is conscious of itself as a person, that is as having a single spiritual life.
But that life and freedom are exercised only in the citizens who are members of the State. We cannot surely assert that the corporate person is immortal, as the individual is; and therefore, to destroy a State is to inflict a more irreparable loss than to kill a man, which is one reason at least, perhaps the chief reason, why a man should die for the political freedom of his country, and even, if need be, kill for it; but, as freedom is the first requirement of personality, fellowship is its first duty, for it is true of corporate personalities quite as much as of individuals that they only find themselves and fulfil themselves in their inter-action upon one another, and the nations of the world do in fact need one another, and need one another’s full life.
In economics we found out long ago that in order to be wealthy, a country needs rich neighbours who may afford good markets. It is so in every other department. We need the gifts of the other peoples. We need that they shall be free and vigorous. Indeed the chief lesson which the world at this time needs to learn is just this—that all the nations of the world need one another, each needing also that the others should be free, in order that they may bring their contributions to the common life in which all share.
