“HIS Kingdom is always a Kingdom of variety, a Kingdom in which there is no dead uniformity or unbroken equality in external gifts, no endless repetition of the same types and forms of characters, as when a brickmaker makes millions on millions of bricks or tiles all of the same size and shape. That lifeless, blank uniformity is the characteristic of the works of man, not of God. As He has made the visible world so multifarious in its variety that, in this one little globe on which we live, there are many thousands of types and species of life and organization, or climate, or configuration, or production, blended together to make up the whole of our petty universe, so He has made mankind, as St. Paul says, of one stock, and yet He has divided them into great natural portions, more like than unlike one to another, and yet separate in their places of abode, their forms of social life, their polities, their nationalities.”

“And it is one of the most precious results of this distribution of various gifts and products on the part of God, that the various regions of the earth, so to say, need one another, and contribute to the well-being one of another, and this serves to create fresh ties of brotherhood, and fresh occasions of mutual assistance among men of different climates. So too, in the moral and intellectual order, the several nations and empires have their providential purposes and offices. Egypt, and India, and Greece, and Rome, and Italy, and France, and Spain, and England, and Germany, to speak of no others, have each contributed in their turn to the education, the development, the civilization, the welfare of the race. So too in the Catholic Church, we may well say, the various races and nations and classes of mind and genius have their office, and much glory to God and good to man result from their original diversities, so that the great wonder of the Day of Pentecost, ever lasting on in the Church, might be possible, and that she might have the glory of bringing them all into subjection to her unity,blended in one harmonious world-wide community and empire, of which the Gospel of Jesus Christ was to be the law and the bond of peace!”

—– The Return of the King: Discourses on the Latter Days, Coleridge, Henry James, 1894

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