ABSTRACT
These lines, written by Cecil Spring-Rice against the backdrop of the First World War and later set to Gustav Hoist's stirring music, have served as one of the most enduring and emotive statements of the ambivalent relationships during the twentieth century between patriotic and religious loyalties. They were sung at the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales in 1981 and alluded to by the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, when she addressed the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1988. T always think', she said, 'that the whole debate about the church and the state has never yielded anything comparable in insight to that beautiful hymn'. She went on to identify herself with what she saw as a 'triumphant' and 'noble' assertion of secular patriotism, while emphasizing that spiritual loyalties to 'another country' were of an individual nature. For her, therefore, the primary function of churches and other religious groups was to provide spiritual resources for personal life rather than to be corporate social and political forces. 'Another country' was for her (as probably for Spring-Rice himself) the inner life of the soul, which would enrich and undergird, but not challenge, the secular politics of the nation (Wolffe, 1993, p.246).
