Templars—as a great 'national' order; such a title would be at once recognised-as a misnomer. It would be answered that they were in no sense national. They were powerful orders of men, bound by their own rules, subject to their own officers, settled, indeed, in every nation of Europe, and so far—and so far only—bound by the instinct of self-preservation to keep on good terms with the law of the several countries within whose dominions they lived, and by whose protection they enjoyed their possessions, but acknowledging no nationality but that of Christendom as a whole, and deriving their power, their grandeur, and their influence mainly from the very fact that they did acknowledge none. And yet this is but comparing small things with great. If this be true—as surely it is true—of the great religious orders of the Church, much more is it true of the Church herself—the one great nationality, if I may so call it, which those great religious orders owned, the one great mistress and mother whom alone they acknowledged and obeyed.
