The history of institutional Catholicism must be approached from a different side.  Troeltsch argues with much cogency that the Catholic Church must be regarded rather as the last creative achievement of classical antiquity than as the beginning of the Middle Ages.  Its growth belongs mainly to the political history of Europe; the strictly religious element in it is quite subordinate.  There is, as Modernist critics have seen, a real break between the Palestinian Gospel and the elaborate mystery-religion, with its graded hierarchy, its Roman organisation, its Hellenistic speculative theology, which achieved the conquest of the Empire in the fourth century.  The Church, as Loisy says, determined to survive and to conquer, and adapted itself to the demands of the time.  It has travelled far from the simple teaching of the earthly Christ; though we may, if we choose, hold that His spirit continued to direct the growing and changing institution which, as a matter of history, had its source in the Galilean ministry.  In truth, however, the extremely efficient organisation of the Roman Church began in self-defence and was continued for conquest.  It is one of the strongest of all human institutions, so that it was said before the war that it is one of the ‘three invincibles,’ the other two being the German Army and the Standard Oil Trust.

But our admiration for the subtle and tenacious power of this corporation must not blind us to its essentially political character.  Its policy has been always directed to self-preservation and aggrandisement; it is an imperium in imperio, which has only checked fanatical nationalism by the competing influence of a still more fanatical partisanship.  In the present war, the problem before the Pope’s councillors was whether the friendship of the Central Powers or that of the Entente was best worth cultivating; and the unshaken loyalty of Austria to the Church, together with a natural preference for German methods of governing as compared with democracy, turned the scale against us.  In Ireland, in Canada and in Spain the Catholic priests have been formidable enemies of our cause.  As for the other Churches, they have not the same power of arbitrating in national quarrels.  The Russian Church has never been independent of the secular government; and the Anglican and Lutheran Churches can hardly be expected to be impartial when the vital interests of England or Germany are at stake.  Lovers of peace have not much to hope for from organised religion.  National Christianity, as Mr. Bernard Shaw says, will only be possible when we have a nation of Christs.

The downfall of the medieval European system, though in truth it was a theory rather than a fact, has removed some of the restraints upon war.  The determining principle of the medieval political theory was the conception of a ‘lex Dei,’ which included the ‘lex Mosis,’ the ’lex Christi,’ and the ‘lex ecclesiae,’ but which also, as ‘lex naturae,’ comprised the law, science, and ethics of antiquity.  These laws were super-national, and no nation dared explicitly to repudiate them.  They formed the basis of a real system of international law, resting, like everything else in the Middle Ages, on supposed divine authority.