shall cease to be mainly internal, and shall occupy themselves with
the wider interests that concern the relations of states to the world
at large. And it is just at this point that the opposing lines of
feeling divide. Those who hold that our political interests are
confined to matters within our own borders, and are unwilling to admit
that circumstances may compel us in the future to political action
without them, look with dislike and suspicion upon the growth of a
body whose very existence indicates that nations have international
duties as well as international rights, and that international
complications will arise from which we can no more escape than the
states which have preceded us in history, or those contemporary with
us. Others, on the contrary, regarding the conditions and signs of
these times, and the extra-territorial activities in which foreign
states have embarked so restlessly and widely, feel that the nation,
however greatly against its wish, may become involved in controversies
not unlike those which in the middle of the century caused very
serious friction, but which the generation that saw the century open
would have thought too remote for its concern, and certainly wholly
beyond its power to influence.

Religious creeds, dealing with eternal verities, may be susceptible of
a certain permanency of statement; yet even here we in this day have
witnessed the embarrassments of some religious bodies, arising from a
traditional adherence to merely human formulas, which reflect views of
the truth as it appeared to the men who framed them in the distant
past. But political creeds, dealing as they do chiefly with the
transient and shifting conditions of a world which is passing away
continually, can claim no fixity of allegiance, except where they
express, not the policy of a day, but the unchanging dictates of
righteousness. And inasmuch as the path of ideal righteousness is not