Religion still t/ie Key to History 233. opposition has already triumphed : in all, it will. The disestablish- ment of the Church in Ireland, in the face of the solemn provision to the contrary in the Act of Union, will some day be followed by the disestablishment of the Church of England, whose numbers have recently sunk to a minorit- of the English people. In France, the separation of the state from the churches, first in regard to educa- tion, and then at all points, has been the great political issue for a quarter of a century. The French Revolution could not accomplish it. Though in the Constitution of 1791 it was asserted that all the property of the church belonged to the nation, and the Concordat ten years later confirmed it, it was only in this present year that France ventured seriously to stand upon her title. A church to which the mass of any people belongs will exert a stronger influence on them than on their leaders in civil affairs. These leaders will be better fitted to exercise an independent judg- ment. They will be more moved by motives of personal ambition. Religion will not be to them the one thing to elevate their thoughts- beyond the narrow round of domestic life. But of those who direct affairs in any nation in which govern- ment formally avows and teaches in its schools the existence of a higher spiritual power few will escape the conviction that in this at least there is truth. A belief in God leads to a trust in God in great emergencies, and to an inspiring identification of God and country^ In war, this motive is as strong to-day as it was a thousand years ago. The Cambridge Modern History, after giving one volume to the Reformation, devotes another to what it styles the Wars of Religion. The Wars of Religion did not end in the seventeenth century, nor in the nineteenth. France is still sore from her losses by the last. The influences of an ecclesiastical establishment and of the sim- ple religious motive were curiously intertwined in what led to the fall of Napoleon III. The relations of Germany to the papacy had an important influence in bringing on first the war between Austria and Prussia in 1866 and then that between France and Prussia in 1870, both fomented from Rome, as events likely to prove a check to the Protestant interest in Europe.^ The proclamation of the German Empire at Versailles was the unexpected fruit — unexpected but not unnatural. The German fought for God and fatherland. The French were permeated by the godless philosophy of the first re- public. 'See Aiilobiografhy of .-hulrcti' D. White, 11. 350.
