[13] Newman, Apologia (1864), pp. 91, 92.

Harnack, in the same way, when describing the causes of the expansion of Christianity, lays stress on the use of the word ‘church’ and the ’possibilities of personification which it offered.’[14] This use may have owed its origin to a deliberate intellectual effort of abstraction applied by some Christian philosopher to the common qualities of all Christian congregations, though it more likely resulted from a half conscious process of adaptation in the employment of a current term.  But when it was established the word owed its tremendous power over most men to the emotions automatically stimulated by the personification, and not to those which would follow on a full analysis of the meaning.  Religious history affords innumerable such instances.  The ’truth embodied in a tale’ has more emotional power than the unembodied truth, and the visual realisation of the central figure of the tale more power than the tale itself.  The sound-image of a sacred name at which ’every knee shall bow,’ or even of one which may be formed in the mind but may not be uttered by the lips, has more power at the moment of intensest feeling than the realisation of its meaning.  Things of the senses—­the sacred food which one can taste, the Virgin of Kevlaar whom one can see and touch, are apt to be more real than their heavenly anti-types.

[14] Harnack, Expansion of Christianity (Tr.), vol. ii. p. 11.

If we turn to politics for instances of the same fact, we again discover how much harder it is there than in religion, or morals, or education, to resist the habit of giving intellectual explanations of emotional experiences.  For most men the central political entity is their country.  When a man dies for his country, what does he die for?  The reader in his chair thinks of the size and climate, the history and population, of some region in the atlas, and explains the action of the patriot by his relation to all these things.  But what seems to happen in the crisis of battle is not the logical building up or analysing of the idea of one’s country, but that automatic selection by the mind of some thing of sense accompanied by an equally automatic emotion of affection which I have already described.  Throughout his life the conscript has lived in a stream of sensations, the printed pages of the geography book, the sight of streets and fields and faces, the sound of voices or of birds or rivers, all of which go to make up the infinity of facts from which he might abstract an idea of his country.  What comes to him in the final charge?  Perhaps the row of pollard elms behind his birth-place.  More likely some personification of his country, some expedient of custom or imagination for enabling an entity which one can love to stand out from the unrealised welter of experience.  If he is an Italian it may be the name, the musical syllables, of Italia.  If he is a Frenchman, it may be the marble figure of France with her broken sword, as he saw it in the market-square of his native town, or the maddening pulse of the ‘Marseillaise.’  Romans have died for a bronze eagle on a wreathed staff, Englishmen for a flag, Scotchmen for the sound of the pipes.