Christian individualism embraces and includes thoroughgoing communalism.  True and full Christians are the most devoted patriots.  As the acorn sends forth far-reaching; roots into the soil for moisture and nourishment, and a mighty trunk and spreading branches upward for air and sunlight, so the seed of Christian life develops in two directions, individualism as the root and communalism as the beautiful tree.  They are not contradictory, but supplementary principles.  While his own final gain is a real aim of the individual, it is only a part of his aim; he also desires and labors for the gain of all; and even the individual gain, he well knows, can be secured only through the communal principle, through service to his fellow-men.  His own welfare, whether temporal or eternal, is inseparably bound up with that of his fellows.

The Christian religion finds the sanctions for any and every social order that history knows, in the fact that all physical and social laws and organisms are part of the divine plan.  Because any particular social order is the association of imperfect men and women, it must be more or less imperfect.  But the Christian, even while he is seeking to reform the social order and to bring it up to his ideal, must be loyal to it.  And for this loyalty to fellow-men and to God, the highest conceivable sanctions are held out, namely, an endless and infinite life of conscious, joyous fellowship with souls made perfect in the Kingdom of God, and with God himself.

A comprehensive study, therefore, of the real nature and the true function of religion in relation to man’s development, whether individual or communal, shows that Christianity fulfills the conditions.  A comparative study would show that, of all the existing religions, Christianity alone does this.  It alone combines in perfect proportion the individual and the communal elements, and the requisite sanctions.

An expansion of communal religion is taking place in modern times.  The community now arising is international in scope, interracial and universal in character.  Cultivated men and women the world around are beginning to talk of national rights and national duties.  Europe is thought to be justified in suppressing the slave trade and its accompanying horrors in Africa, and condemned for not preventing the Turk from carrying on his wholesale slaughter of innocent Armenians.  The Spaniard is despised and condemned for his prolonged inhumanities in Cuba and the Philippines, and the American is approved in warring for humanity and justified in interfering with Spain’s sovereignty.  The conscience of the world is beginning to discover that no nation, though sovereign, has an absolute right over its people.  Right is only measured by righteousness.  International righteousness, duty and rights, regardless of military power, are coming to the forefront of the thinking of advanced nations.