In this book, John G. Sheppard, 19th century Anglican minister and Oxford academic, deploys soaring rhetoric, piercing logic, and human feeling, along with the twin tools of Scripture and history, to prove that national citizenship is both a privilege and requirement of every true Christian. Shephard's prose is commanding and, at times, arresting. He makes use of Augustine, Aristotle, various historians and theological sources, and more.
Must Christianity mingle with a given people's history, idiosyncrasies, achievements, and institutions? Without restraint or doubt, Sheppard answers in the affirmative. What is best fitted to the needs of man? to his longing for something higher, for brotherhood, for a creed and a social bond—beyond the imperfections of these things in nature? Only Christianity can answer the exigency, Sheppard says. And yet, Christianity is not given to obliterate, but to duly subordinate these same interests of nature.
"We, the leaders of that great Saxon race which, a thousand years ago, infused a new and vigorous element into the decaying energies of exhausted humanity, we have been entrusted by God with the management of the chief motive forces of civilization." —John G. Sheppard
