FROM The Return of the King: Discourses on the Latter Days, by Henry James Coleridge, 1894:

The Christian loves his country for the sake of God’s ordinance, and for the many benefits which he receives from its laws and its protection. He loves it for the sake of conscience, and therefore not more than his conscience. He knows that he must obey God rather than man. He knows that he will lose his soul if he makes his patriotism an excuse for hatred against his fellow-men, for violence, for revengefulness, and other bad passions. He knows that he is a citizen of a higher and nobler unity, the Kingdom of God in this world and in the next. He is a Christian first, and after that, and in harmony with the duties and the charity which that name implies, he is an Englishman or an Irishman or a Frenchman.

The Pagan knew none of these qualifications to his love for his country. His country or his city was to him a divinity, it was the highest unity and polity that he knew. Its interests overrode his conscience, its commands justified sin.

He read his own duty in that bad sense of which our Lord complains in the Sermon on the Mount — “Thou shalt love thy neighbour and hate thine enemy ” — and all outside his city walls were enemies to him. His country could do no wrong, commit no injustice — its gods were his, its religion his, it was a crime to set anything in the world higher than what its service required.

This is the explanation of the conduct of the Pagan persecutors of the Church in the early centuries, many of whom were virtuous men according to the heathen standard; the proconsuls and praetors who ordered the torture or the execution of the Christian martyrs, did so because they saw in them enemies of the divinity of the Empire. And when in this country of ours, three centuries ago, Elizabeth and her Ministers persuaded themselves that it was high treason to offer Mass or to remain firm in allegiance to the Holy See, it was on the same principle of the supremacy of the country over every other right, or law, or person, or institution to which allegiance might be due by the law of God or of man.

My brethren, it is hardly worth while to ask whether the nationalism of the days in which we live is a Pagan nationalism or a Christian nationalism.

[From Sermon VI, “The National Spirit.” Read more here.]

[Note: I have broken this text into more paragraphs to make it easier to read.]

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