Page:History of Freedom.djvu/335

 NATIONALITY

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it confers on those who live together, but because it connects society either by a political or a national bond, gives to every people an interest in its neighbours, either because they are under the same government or because they are of the same race, and thus promotes the interests of humanity, of civilisation, and of religion. Christianity rejoices at the mixture of races, as pagan- ism identifies itself with their differences, because truth is universal, and errors various and particular. In the ancient world idolatry and nationality \vent together, and the same term is applied in Scripture to both. It was the mission of the Church to overcome national differences. The period of her undisputed supremacy was that in which all Western Europe obeyed the same laws, all literature was contained in one language, and the political unity of Christendom was personified in a single potentate, while its intellectual unity was represented in one university. As the ancient Romans concluded their conquests by carrying away the gods of the conquered people, Charlemagne overcame the national resistance of the Saxons only by the forcible destruction of their pagan rites. Out of the mediæval period, and the combined action of the German race and the Church, came forth a new system of nations and a new conception of nationality. Nature was overcome in the nation as well as in the individual. In pagan and uncultivated times, nations were distinguished from each other by the widest diversity, not only in religion, but in customs, language, and character. Under the ne\v law they had many things in COmlTIOn ; the old barriers which separated them \vere removed, and the new principle of self-government, \vhich Christianity imposed, enabled them to live together under the same authority, \vithout necessarily losing their cherished habits, their customs, or their laws. The new idea of freedom made room for different races in one State. A nation was no longer what it had been to the ancient v:orld,- the progeny of a common ancestor, or the aboriginal product of a particular region,-a result of merely physical and material causes,-but a moral and political being;