25. These unsuppressed desires, this inordinate love of the things
of the world, are precisely the source of all international misunderstandings and
rivalries, despite the fact that oftentimes men dare to maintain that acts
prompted by such motives are excusable and even justifiable because, forsooth,
they were performed for reasons of state or of the public good, or out of love
for country. Patriotism - the stimulus of so many virtues and of so many noble
acts of heroism when kept within the bounds of the law of Christ - becomes
merely an occasion, an added incentive to grave injustice when true love of
country is debased to the condition of an extreme nationalism, when we forget
that all men are our brothers and members of the same great human family, that
other nations have an equal right with us both to life and to prosperity, that
it is never lawful nor even wise, to dissociate morality from the affairs of
practical life, that, in the last analysis, it is "justice which exalteth a nation: but sin maketh
nations miserable." (Proverbs xiv, 34)
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