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- CHURCH AND NATION
-
-
-
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost
-no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
-under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
-eBook or online at http://www.gutenberg.org/license.
-
-
-
-Title: Church and Nation
- The Bishop Paddock Lectures for 1914-15
-Author: William Temple
-Release Date: October 05, 2013 [EBook #43896]
-Language: English
-Character set encoding: US-ASCII
-
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHURCH AND NATION ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by Al Haines.
-
-
-
-
- CHURCH AND
- NATION
-
- THE BISHOP PADDOCK LECTURES FOR 1914-15
-
-
- DELIVERED AT THE GENERAL THEOLOGICAL
- SEMINARY, NEW YORK
-
-
- BY
-
- WILLIAM TEMPLE
-
- HON. CHAPLAIN TO H.M. THE KING
-
- _Rector of St. James's, Piccadilly,
- Chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury
- Formerly Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford, and
- Headmaster of Repton_
-
-
-
- MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
- ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
- 1915
-
-
-
-
- _COPYRIGHT_
-
-
-
-
- TO
- MY MOTHER
- WHO FELL ASLEEP AS GOOD FRIDAY DAWNED
- APRIL 2, 1915
-
-
-
-
- *PREFACE*
-
-
-When I received and accepted the invitation to deliver the Paddock
-Lectures for the season 1914-1915, no one imagined that these years were
-destined to have the historical significance which they must now possess
-for all time. I was myself one of those who had allowed concern for
-social reform, and internal problems generally, to occupy my mind almost
-to the exclusion of foreign questions. I was prepared to stake a good
-deal upon what seemed to me the improbability of any outbreak of
-European war. For all who took this view the events of recent months
-have involved perhaps a greater re-shaping of fundamental notions than
-was required by people who had thought probable such a catastrophe as
-that in which we are now involved. I found it impossible to concentrate
-my mind upon any subject wholly unconnected with the war, while at the
-same time it would have been in the last degree unsuitable that in my
-lectures to American Theological Students I should deliver myself of
-such views as I had formed concerning the rights and wrongs of the war
-itself, or the questions at stake in it.
-
-These lectures, therefore, represent an attempt to think out afresh the
-underlying problems which for a Christian are fundamental in regard not
-only to this war but to war in general--the place of Nationality in the
-scheme of Divine Providence and the duty of the Church in regard to the
-growth of nations.
-
-But in a preface it may be permissible to say what would be
-inappropriate in the Lectures themselves, and first I would take this
-opportunity of reiterating certain convictions which have formed the
-basis of a series of pamphlets issued under the auspices of a Committee
-drawn from various Christian bodies and political parties, of which I
-have had the honour to be Editor:
-
-1. That Great Britain was in August morally bound to declare war and is
-no less bound to carry the war to a decisive issue;
-
-2. That the war is none the less an outcome and a revelation of the
-un-Christian principles which have dominated the life of Western
-Christendom and of which both the Church and the nations have need to
-repent;
-
-3. That followers of Christ, as members of the Church, are linked to one
-another in a fellowship which transcends all divisions of nationality or
-race;
-
-4. That the Christian duties of love and forgiveness are as binding in
-time of war as in time of peace;
-
-5. That Christians are bound to recognise the insufficiency of mere
-compulsion for overcoming evil, and to place supreme reliance upon
-spiritual forces and in particular upon the power and method of the
-Cross;
-
-6. That only in proportion as Christian principles dictate the terms of
-settlement will a real and lasting peace be secured;
-
-7. That it is the duty of the Church to make an altogether new effort to
-realise and apply to all the relations of life its own positive ideal of
-brotherhood and fellowship;
-
- 8. That with God all things are possible.
-
-These propositions were very carefully drafted by the Committee referred
-to above and entirely represent my own beliefs; but there is something
-more which I would add. The new Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria, and
-Turkey is no accident; it is the combination of just those three Powers
-which openly and avowedly believe in oppression--that is, in the
-imposition by force of the standards accepted by one race upon people of
-another race. All nations have at one time or another practised
-oppression; certainly Great Britain is not free from the charge, and the
-history of Russia has many dark pages in this respect. But we can all
-claim that when we have been guilty of oppression it has been under the
-influence of fear, whether of revolution, anarchism, or some other force
-thought to be disruptive of the State. With our enemies this is not so.
-We all know about Turkey; it is the essentially Mohammedan power, and
-Mohammedanism is the religion of oppression; it believes in imposing its
-faith by means of the sword. The Austrian Empire consists of three
-divisions in each of which one race is imposing its manner of life upon
-another. In Austria-proper the Germans oppress the Czechs; in Galicia
-the Poles have, in some degree at least, oppressed the Ruthenes; in
-Hungary the Magyars have systematically and avowedly oppressed the
-Roumanians in the east, and the Croats in the south and west. Germany
-has shown her political faith by her conduct in Alsace-Lorraine, and
-still more in Poland. Nothing has yet appeared so illuminating with
-regard to what is at stake in this war, as Prince Buelow's chapter on
-Poland in his book, _Imperial Germany_; he describes what seems to us
-the most grinding oppression with obvious self-contentment and without a
-question of its righteousness; and there have been abundant signs that,
-at least, many people in Germany are willing to impose German Kultur by
-the sword as Mohammedans impose belief in their prophet.
-
-If this is true, and if the analysis in my lectures of the Christian
-function of the State and of the principles of the Kingdom of God is
-sound, then it becomes clear that this war is being fought to determine
-whether in the next period the Christian or the directly anti-Christian
-method shall have an increase of influence. The three most democratic
-of the great Western Powers--Great Britain, France, and Italy--in
-conjunction with Russia, which is after all profoundly democratic in its
-local life though imperially it is a military autocracy, are linked
-together in a natural union on behalf of freedom as they understand it,
-against an idea embodied and embattled which is in exact opposition to
-all they live for. It was therefore no surprise to find that all the
-citizens of the United States with whom I came in contact were quite
-definitely upon the side of the Allies in sympathy. To advocate war in
-the name of Christ is to adopt a position which looks self-contradictory
-and which certainly involves immense responsibility, and yet if our
-people can maintain the attitude of mind in which they entered on the
-war and can secure at the end a settlement harmonious with that frame of
-mind, I believe they will have served the Kingdom of God through
-fighting, better than it was possible to do at this moment in human
-history by any other means.
-
-W.T.
-
-
-Lecture II. in this series is almost identical with the pamphlet _Our
-Need of a Catholic Church_--No. 19 of _Papers for War Time_. In
-Lectures I. and III. I am under great obligation to Professor A. G.
-Hogg, though my position is not at all identical with his.
-
-
-
-
- *CONTENTS*
-
-
- LECTURE I
-
-THE KINGDOM OF FREEDOM
-
- LECTURE II
-
-CHURCH AND STATE
-
- LECTURE III
-
-JUSTICE AND LIBERTY IN THE STATE
-
- LECTURE IV
-
-HOLINESS AND CATHOLICITY IN THE CHURCH
-
- LECTURE V
-
-THE CITIZENSHIP OF HEAVEN
-
- LECTURE VI
-
-GOD IN HISTORY
-
- APPENDIX I
-
-ON THE APOCALYPTIC CONSCIOUSNESS
-
- APPENDIX II
-
-ON MORAL AND SPIRITUAL AUTHORITY
-
- APPENDIX III
-
-ON JUSTICE AND EDUCATION
-
- APPENDIX IV
-
-ON ORDERS AND CATHOLICITY
-
- APPENDIX V
-
-ON PROVIDENCE IN HISTORY
-
-
-
-
- *CHURCH AND NATION*
-
-
-
- *LECTURE I*
-
- THE KINGDOM OF FREEDOM
-
-
-"And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan, and was
-led by the Spirit in the wilderness during forty days, being tempted of
-the Devil."--S. Luke iv. 1.
-
-
-Our Lord, in accepting for Himself the title of the Messiah, or the
-Christ, claimed that it was His function to inaugurate upon earth the
-Kingdom of God. Whatever else might at that time be believed about the
-Messiah, this at least was universally held, that the Messiah, when He
-came, would inaugurate upon earth the Kingdom of God. That is the task
-of the Lord's ministry; that is the task to which we, as His followers,
-are pledged; and at this time when the civilisation, which for nearly
-two thousand years has been under the Christian influence, has
-culminated in as great a catastrophe as has ever beset any civilisation,
-Christian or Pagan, it is well for us to go back and ask, What are the
-fundamental principles of the Kingdom which Christ founded, what the
-method by which He founded it, and what are the principles and methods
-which He rejected?
-
-There were various anticipations of the way in which the promised Christ
-would do His work; but broadly speaking there were two main types of
-expectation. There were those who supposed that the Messiah when He
-came, would rule in the manner of an earthly ruler, establishing
-righteousness by the ordinary methods of law and political authority,
-and this expectation undoubtedly derived some colour from the way in
-which Isaiah had envisaged the coming Christ:[#]
-
-
-[#] Isaiah ix, 6, 7.
-
-
- "For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given; and the
- government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be
- called Wonderful-Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father,
- Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace
- there shall be no end _upon the throne of David_, and upon his
- kingdom, to establish it, and to uphold it with judgment and
- with righteousness from henceforth, even for ever."
-
-
-It is a king ruling upon the throne of David that is suggested; and
-while it is only the most foolish literalism which will say that the
-Prophet himself was committed to such a view, it was natural enough for
-those who read his writings to conceive of the Messiah as acting after
-that fashion.
-
-The people went into captivity; and when they returned, it was not to
-any realised Kingdom of God upon earth, but rather to difficulties
-greater than had ever confronted them before, until at last Antiochus
-Epiphanes initiated the great persecution whose aim was to stamp out
-altogether the worship of Jehovah, setting up as he did in the very
-Temple Court at Jerusalem the altar of Zeus, on which swine were
-sacrificed--"the abomination of desolation standing where it ought not."
-Out of the fiery furnace of that persecution comes the glowing prophecy
-of Daniel. What is the answer which he conceives God as giving to the
-blasphemer Antiochus? It is nothing less than the divine judgment and
-the mission of the divine Deliverer:[#]
-
-
-[#] Daniel vii, 9, 10, 13, 14.
-
-
- "I beheld till thrones were placed and one that was ancient of
- days did sit: his raiment was white as snow, and the hair of his
- head like pure wool; his throne was fiery flames, and the wheels
- thereof burning fire. A fiery stream issued and came forth from
- before him; thousand thousands ministered unto him, and ten
- thousand times ten thousand stood before him; the judgment was
- set, and the books were opened.... I saw in the night visions,
- and, behold, there came with the clouds of heaven one like unto
- a son of man, and he came even to the ancient of days, and they
- brought him near before him. And there was given him dominion,
- and glory, and a kingdom, that all the peoples, nations, and
- languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting
- dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which
- shall not be destroyed."
-
-
-This conception of the Messiah, coming in the clouds of Heaven,
-establishing the Kingdom of God by so manifest an exhibition of the
-divine authority with which He is endowed, that all doubt and hesitation
-are quite impossible, is that which took the greatest hold upon the
-religious imagination of Israel, and particularly of that great body of
-people, the heirs of the tradition of the Maccabees, inheritors of the
-heroism which had stood out against the persecution, whom we know as the
-sect of the Pharisees--men who lived in the strength of a fellowship
-that had behind it the greatest religious tradition in all the world,
-but who, because they trusted more to their tradition than to the God
-who inspired it, were unable to recognise the still further call of God
-when it came to them. The literature of the period between the Old and
-the New Testament shows how wide and deep was the influence of Daniel's
-vision upon their Messianic hopes.
-
-At His baptism, the Lord is called to begin His Messianic work; the
-voice which He heard from Heaven spoke words which were by all
-interpreters of the time believed to refer to the Messiah:--"Thou art my
-beloved son; in thee I am well pleased." The Messiah will be endowed
-with Divine authority and power. How shall He use it? And immediately
-the Lord goes into the wilderness to face the temptations that arose
-from precisely the conviction that His Messianic work is even now to
-begin.
-
-The temptation has two sides to it--an inward and an outward. As
-regards Himself, what does the temptation mean? Let us remind ourselves
-that there was apparently no one with Him in this crisis; the story, as
-we have it, must come from Himself. It is His own account (of course in
-parable form, like so much else in His teaching) of the struggle of
-those early days. What is meant by the parable concerning the turning
-of stones into bread? Surely for Himself it is the temptation to use
-the power, with which us the Christ of Cod He is endowed, for the
-satisfaction of His own needs, and that in such a way as will do no kind
-of harm to anybody else. No one will be the worse for his satisfying
-His hunger in that way. It is a self-concern from which nobody can
-suffer; it is perfectly innocent and perfectly rational. But no! It is
-not for any selfish purpose, however harmless, that the power of God is
-given; selfishness in its most innocent form is set aside.
-
-How shall He set about His work? Shall He fulfil that expectation which
-Isaiah's vision had fostered? He looks out on the kingdoms of the earth
-and the glory of them, and He knows that they can be His, if He will
-fall down and worship the Prince of the power of this world. Shall He
-use worldly methods to convert the world to God? No; worldliness in its
-most attractive form is set aside.
-
-Or shall He fulfil the expectation encouraged by the vision of the Son
-of Man in Daniel, appearing with the clouds of Heaven, descending upon
-Jerusalem up-borne by angels, giving that sign from Heaven which the
-Pharisees, who particularly adopted this view of the Messiah, were
-afterwards going to demand so frequently? From His answer we know that
-this is a temptation not only to give them a sign, but to secure it for
-Himself, for the answer is "Thou shalt not tempt,"--that is, Thou shalt
-not put to the proof--"the Lord thy God." The promise of God is to be
-trusted, not tested. The test comes as we obey the command and in that
-sense every act of faith is an experiment, but there must be no test
-cases to see whether God fulfils His promise. Infidelity in its most
-insidious form is set aside.
-
-But there is an outward aspect also to the temptations. Shall He use
-His power to satisfy the bodily needs of men? Shall He exert a power
-parallel with that of political rulers, which will coerce their conduct
-without first winning their free allegiance? Shall He give such proof
-of divine authority that any doubt, intellectual or otherwise, becomes
-impossible? No; not any of these. And as He leaves the temptation
-vanquished, what He has set aside is precisely every method of
-controlling men's action without winning their hearts and wills. He has
-rejected coercion; He has decided to appeal to Freedom.
-
-What is left? At first, only the commission to proclaim the Kingdom;
-and He comes proclaiming it. All through the early part of the ministry
-He moves from place to place preaching or proclaiming the Kingdom of
-God. He does not at present announce that He is King of that Kingdom; it
-is the Kingdom itself on which all attention is concentrated. He has
-indeed the power to do works of mercy, and when with that power He
-stands in the face of human need, He must for very love exert the power
-and satisfy the need; so people come crowding around Him, attracted by
-His wonder-working. But that is not what He desires. The disciples are
-excited about it; but He has gone out a long while before dawn, and is
-alone in prayer; and when St. Peter finds Him, and says "All men are
-seeking Thee," He does not say, "Then let us go to them," but, on the
-contrary, "Let us go into the villages that I may preach--that I may
-make my proclamation--there also."[#] As the deadness, the
-indifference, and hostility of the people gradually shows itself to be
-invincible, He gathers about Him those whose hearts have been touched,
-and from among them chooses twelve, "that they may be with Him."[#]
-They are to live in His company, catching His Spirit, learning to
-understand Him. With them He goes on two long journeys--north-west to
-Tyre and Sidon, and then north-east, to Caesarea Philippi; through all
-those journeys they are alone with their Master, moving through country
-outside the boundaries of the Jewish religion, and therefore free from
-controversy.
-
-
-[#] S. Mark i, 35-38.
-
-[#] S. MArk iii, 14.
-
-
-At Caesarea Philippi He feels that the time is ripe, and asks them, "Who
-do men say that I am?" They mention the various conjectures ... Elijah;
-John the Baptist; one of the Prophets. "Who say ye that I am?" And St.
-Peter with a leap of inspired insight answers: "Thou art the
-Messiah."[#]
-
-
-[#] S. Mark viii, 27-30.
-
-
-The Lord recognises that this is the revelation of God to faith:
-"Blessed art thou, Simon, Son of Jonah; flesh and blood hath not
-revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven."[#]
-Immediately that He has been thus spontaneously recognised, He begins to
-say what He had never said before: "The Son of Man must suffer." The
-Son of Man is the title of the Messiah in glory, as He was conceived in
-Daniel's vision and the Apocalyptic writings which drew their
-inspiration from it. "The Son of Man must suffer;" that is the great
-Messianic act; that is the way in which the Kingdom of God shall be
-founded. But it was not what St. Peter meant. "Peter took Him, and
-began to rebuke Him ... Be it far from Thee, Lord; this shall not be
-unto Thee." And our Lord recognises the voice of the tempter in the
-wilderness, who bade Him take thought for self.... "Get thee behind me,
-_Satan_, for thou thinkest not God's thoughts, but men's thoughts."[#]
-
-
-[#] S. Matthew xvi, 17.
-
-[#] S. Matthew xvi, 22, 23.
-
-
-Just as, when once He was spontaneously recognised, He began to set
-forth the new conception of the Messiahship, "The Son of Man must
-suffer;" so too He immediately starts on that last journey to Jerusalem
-which culminates with the Cross. Arrived at Jerusalem, He arranges the
-triumphal entry. He carefully fulfils Zechariah's prophecy--thus
-claiming the Messiahship, and challenging the religious rulers. But the
-prophecy which He thus selects for deliberate fulfilment is one which
-represents the Messiah as a civil, not a military authority (for this is
-the meaning of the ass as distinguished from the horse), and as one who
-shall speak Peace to the nations.[#] It is the conception of the
-Messiah which in all the Old Testament has least suggestion of coercion
-and is therefore the nearest to His own.
-
-
-[#] Zechariah ix, 9, 10.
-
-
-But the primary purpose of the triumphal entry is no doubt to make His
-claim and issue His challenge. On the journey and after the entry
-itself He declares with increasing emphasis that the Kingdom of God is
-at hand; those who stood there should see it come with power; and as He
-stands before Caiaphas, He answers the question "Art Thou the Christ?
-with the words, I am, and from this time[#] there shall be the Son of
-Man seated on the right hand of power." Daniel's prophecy is here and
-now fulfilled. In the moment that love completes its sacrifice in
-death, the glory of God is fully made known and the power of His Kingdom
-is come; this is the Lord's own Apocalypse.[#]
-
-
-[#] Different words in St. Matthew and St. Luke, but agreeing in sense,
-which sense the authorised version spoils.
-
-[#] See Appendix I.: _The Apocalyptic Consciousness_.
-
-
-So He had spoken on that last journey. "Ye know that they which are
-accounted to rule over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great
-ones exercise authority over them. But it is not so among you; but
-whosoever would become great among you shall be your minister, and
-whosoever shall be first among you shall be servant of all, for verily
-the Son of Man came"--(again the title of the Messiah in Glory)--"not to
-be ministered unto, but to minister; and to give His life a ransom for
-many."[#]
-
-
-[#] S. Mark x, 42-45.
-
-
-So, too, St. John records His saying that in precisely this way he would
-win His royalty--"I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men
-unto me."[#] The Cross was foreseen by the Lord to be what, as we look
-back, we know that it has been--the throne of His glory and His power;
-and the capacity to realise it as such is for St. Paul the touchstone of
-character, the test of election--"We preach a Messiah on a Cross--to
-Jews a scandal and to Gentiles an absurdity, but to the very people who
-are called, whether Jews or Greeks, a Messiah who is God's power and
-God's wisdom."[#]
-
-
-[#] S. John xii, 32.
-
-[#] 1 Cor. i, 23, 24.
-
-
-Here then is the mode of God's power, and we know that it can be no
-other; for if God is truly King, He must be King of our hearts and
-wills, and not only of our conduct. There is only one way to win men's
-hearts and wills, that is by showing love; and there is only one way to
-show love, and that is by sacrifice, by doing or suffering what, apart
-from our love, we should not choose to do or suffer. Sacrifice is the
-Divine activity; Calvary is the mode of the Divine omnipotence. It is
-the actual Divine method and the ideal human method.
-
-
-As we come to consider how far it has become also the actual human
-method, we are confronted at the outset by the sheer impossibility of
-our applying this method, just because we have not in ourselves the
-necessary love.
-
-Our perfection, we are told, is to consist in just that quality which
-shows the Father's perfection, namely, that He is kind to the unthankful
-and evil, and makes His sun to rise on the evil and good and sends His
-rain on the just and on the unjust; and we are to be perfect in the way
-that He is perfect.[#]
-
-
-[#] S. Matthew v, 43-48.
-
-
-But until we reach that perfection we cannot imitate His action; for a
-man's act is not what He intends; nor is it the mere motion of his body;
-but it is the whole train of circumstances that he initiates. Christ in
-His perfect purity may stand before the woman taken in her sin and say,
-"Neither do I condemn thee," because there is no possibility that she
-will interpret His mercy as condonation of the sin; but if we said it,
-people would so interpret it, and usually quite rightly so.
-
-Our problem then is so to guide our conduct that we come as near as we
-are capable of coming to the divine ideal that is set forth in Christ,
-and that we come perpetually closer and closer to it.
-
-The Lord in His temptation rejected all use of force and substituted for
-it the appeal of love expressed in sacrifice, so far as the actual and
-positive building of His Kingdom is concerned. For us there must always
-be some use of the lower method, because we are incapable of applying
-the highest. If any man, when he is confronted with evil which he can
-prevent by the exercise of force, refrains from doing it, we must
-immediately put to him the question, "But did you so suffer under that
-act of evil that there is any hope of your suffering proving to be the
-redemption of the evil-doer? If so, well and good; but, if not, then
-you are idle and cowardly, not Christian." No one who is not a
-Christian in spirit can perform the Christian act; and the Sermon on the
-Mount is not a code of rules to be mechanically followed; it is the
-description of the life which any man will spontaneously lead when once
-the Spirit of Christ has taken complete possession of his heart.
-
-And yet there is a perfectly legitimate use of force also, and a use
-which our Lord Himself makes of it. We may use force in various
-circumstances in spite of the fact that for the positive work of the
-building His Kingdom the Lord rejected it. It is legitimate, in the
-first place, when it is applied to immature characters--characters which
-are, as all our characters are in early childhood, a chaos of impulses
-and instincts, as yet unregulated by any governing principle. Here it
-may be necessary simply to restrain the activity of one set of impulses
-without converting the heart or will of the person to whom that
-restraint is applied, merely in order to give the other side of nature
-its chance of development. So in education it is legitimate to employ
-force in this restraining way for the sake of the development which is
-made possible thereby in the other parts of nature.
-
-But our Lord's example also shows us that the use of force is
-permissible in dealing with those who are so case-hardened that the
-appeal of love can never reach them until their present state of mind is
-broken up. It is sometimes said that the Lord never made use of physical
-force; but whether or not that is true[#]--the question is unimportant,
-because for all moral purposes there is no difference whatever between
-physical and non-physical force. The appeal to force always means the
-appeal to pain or inconvenience, for these are the only things that
-force can inflict upon one. Physical force may break a man's bones; but
-one may enforce a certain kind of conduct by the threat, for example, of
-social ostracism, which might break his heart; and there is no
-difference whatever between the two, except that the second is a more
-refined form of cruelty. Now in our Lord's denunciation of the
-Pharisees, in those words which are thrown, burning and smashing, into
-the self-complacent contentment of those upholders of tradition, there
-is every moral quality of force and violence. Their aim is to batter
-down a state of mind, the state of mind which cannot receive the appeal
-of love, as it shows when it stands beneath the very Cross and only
-jeers. But this use of force is only negative and preparatory; it is
-the effort of love to make ready for the rebuilding which only love's
-own method can really accomplish. Only with characters quite immature
-and liable to develop in many different directions, can force be used,
-except in this wholly preparatory way; and even there its work is
-preparatory, for at that stage everything that is done is still
-preparatory.
-
-
-[#] _e.g._, whether or not He employed the scourge of small cords to
-drive men from the Temple Courts as He certainly did the animals; the
-Greek words suggest that He did not.
-
-
-It is sometimes said that society rests upon force. Of course it does
-not, and it could not, because force is a dead thing which can only
-operate as human wills direct it; and, however much force there may be
-in the maintenance of society, that force itself must be controlled by
-the consent of human wills. It is true, however, that society, as we
-know it, rests simultaneously upon two contradictory principles, upon
-the principle of antagonism and the principle of fellowship. So far as
-it is represented by the police force, it rests upon antagonism. Men
-are selfish; in their selfishness they are brought into conflict with
-one another. In order that anyone may be able to enjoy, however
-selfishly, any property or comfort in life, it is necessary to restrain
-to some degree the selfishness of all the rest; and to secure that
-restraint placed upon others, a man submits to a similar restraint upon
-himself. And so we arrive at that contract of which Plato speaks: "the
-contract neither to commit nor to suffer injury."[#] But, at the same
-time, as Plato immediately afterwards points out, society would arise
-quite equally if men were wholly altruistic, because men's natures are
-different, and they need one another for support, for protection, and
-for the very instinct of fellowship.[#] Now those principles are both
-present in all actual societies; and progress has consisted of the
-steady development of the principle of co-operation and fellowship, at
-the expense of the principle of competition and antagonism.
-
-
-[#] [Greek: mete adikein mete adikisthai.] _Republic_ ii. 359*a*.
-
-[#] The whole Ideal State. _Republic_ ii, 369*b* to vii end.
-
-
-That has been what we have meant in the last resort by political
-progress; but the conclusion inevitably follows that society makes
-progress precisely in that degree in which it realises more and more a
-relationship of love between its various members, and becomes the
-Kingdom which Christ came on earth to found. Thus, at the very outset of
-our enquiry we find that the principles of secular progress and of the
-Divine revelation in Christ are identical.
-
-I shall venture in a subsequent lecture to trace out the way in which,
-as I think, further progress in accordance with this principle will lead
-us.
-
-But let me close this lecture by recalling our thoughts to that ideal
-method for men, which is the actual method of God, setting this in the
-words of a fable which I take from the masterpiece of the most Russian
-of the Russian novelists--Dostoievsky--merely throwing it into my own
-language.
-
-In the days of the Inquisition, this fable runs, our Lord returned to
-earth, and visited a city where it was at work. As He moved about, men
-forgot their cares and sorrows. He healed the sick folk as of old, and
-meeting with a funeral procession where a mother was mourning the loss
-of her only son, He stopped the procession, and restored the dead boy to
-life.
-
-That was in the Cathedral Square, and at that moment there came out from
-the Cathedral doors the Grand Inquisitor, an old man over ninety years
-of age, clad now, not in the Cardinal's robe in which only the day
-before he had condemned a score of heretics to the stake, but in a
-simple cassock, with only two guards in attendance. Seeing what was
-done he turned to the guards and said, "Arrest Him." They moved forward
-to obey; and he sent the Prisoner to a cell in the dungeon.
-
-That night the Grand Inquisitor visited his Prisoner, and to all that he
-said the Prisoner made no reply. "I know why Thou art come," said the
-Inquisitor; "Thou art come to spoil our work, to repeat Thy great
-mistake in the wilderness, and to give men again Thy fatal gift of
-freedom. What did the great wise spirit offer Thee there? Just the
-three things by which men may be controlled--bread and authority and
-mystery. He bade Thee take bread as the instrument of Thy work; men
-will follow one who gives them bread. But Thou wouldest not; men were
-to follow Thee out of love and devotion or not at all. We have had to
-correct Thy work, or there would be few to follow Thee. He bade Thee
-assume authority; men will obey one who gives commands, and punishes the
-disobedient. But Thou wouldest not; men were to obey out of love and
-devotion or not at all. We have had to correct Thy work, or there would
-be few to obey Thee. He bade Thee show some marvel that men might be
-persuaded and believe. But Thou wouldest not; men were to believe from
-perception of Thy grace and truth or not at all. We have had to correct
-Thy work and hedge Thee about with mystery, or there would be few to
-believe. And which of us has served mankind the better? Thy appeal was
-to the few strong souls. We have cared for the weak. Many who would be
-disorderly and miserable have been made orderly and happy. And now Thou
-art come to spoil our work and repeat Thy great mistake in the
-wilderness by giving to men again Thy fatal gift of freedom, through
-trust in the power of love. But it shall not be; for to-morrow I shall
-burn Thee."
-
-The Grand Inquisitor ceased; and still the Prisoner made no reply; but
-He rose from where He sat, and crossed the cell, and kissed the old man
-on his bloodless lips. Then the Inquisitor too, rose, and opened the
-door; "Go," he said. The Prisoner passed out into the night and was not
-seen again.
-
-And the old man? That kiss burns in his heart. But he has not altered
-his opinion or his practice.
-
-
-
-
- *LECTURE II*
-
- *CHURCH AND STATE*
-
-
-"He put all things in subjection under his feet, and gave him to be head
-over all things to the Church, which is his body, the fulness of him
-that, all in all, is being fulfilled."--Ephesians i, 22, 23.
-
-
-If one of the great saints of the early Church had been told that in the
-year 1915 the world would still be waiting for the final consummation,
-and had tried to conceive the life of men and nations as it would be
-after that long period of Christian influence, what would his conception
-have been? Surely he would have expected that all nations would be
-linked together in the Holy Communion, the Fellowship of Saints. Roman,
-Spaniard, African, Syrian, those strange Germans, and the barbarous
-Britons who lived in the remotest corner of the earth, might have
-maintained their own varieties of culture, but each would find his joy
-and pride in offering his contribution to the life of the whole family
-of nations. Rooted in knowledge of the love of God, their life would
-grow luxuriantly and bear fruit in love of one another and service of
-the common cause. Inspiring each and knitting all together, the Holy
-Catholic Church, fulfilling itself in service of the world, would gather
-up all this exuberance of life and love into itself, and present it to
-the God and Father of mankind in unceasing adoration.
-
-But the world in 1915 is not in the least like that. The old man of our
-selfish nature, selfish himself and therefore supposing that others must
-be selfish too, so that he relies upon the methods of cajolery and
-coercion, has indeed received the kiss of Christ; and while that kiss
-burns in his heart, so that sometimes he is roused to an aspiration
-after an order of things altogether different, his opinions and his
-conduct remain fundamentally unchanged. And the contrast between what
-is and what might have been is due in part, at least, to the failure of
-the Church to be true to its own commission. It is also because of this
-that no practical man dreams of turning to the Church to find the way
-out from the intolerable situation into which the nations have drifted.
-
-An eminent politician is reported to have defined the Church on a recent
-occasion in the following terms: "The Church is, I suppose, a voluntary
-organisation for the maintenance of public worship in the interest of
-those who desire to join in it." And it is to be feared that many
-people regard it in some such way as that. But of course the Church is
-nothing of the kind; the Church is the Body of Christ.
-
-It is not a "voluntary organisation" any more than my body is a
-voluntary organisation either of limbs or of cells. No one could
-"voluntarily" join the Church, if by that were meant that the act
-originated in his own will. "No man can say Jesus is Lord, but in the
-Holy Spirit."[#] A man cannot make himself a Christian. The Apostles
-were made Christian by Christ Himself--"Ye did not choose Me, but I
-chose you"[#]; others were made Christian by the Apostles, or (as they
-always said) by Christ working in and through them; and so successive
-generations have been made Christian by the Spirit of Christ operative
-in the fellowship of His disciples--that is to say, in the Church. This
-is the aspect of truth expressed and preserved in the practice of infant
-baptism. We are Christians, if at all, not through any act initiated by
-our own will, but through our being received into the Christian
-fellowship and subjected to its influence. Just as we are born members
-of our family, so by our reception into the fellowship of the disciples
-we are "made members of Christ." In the one case as in the other, we
-may repudiate our membership or we may disgrace it; we can never abolish
-it. Let me hasten in parenthesis to add, that this is only one aspect
-of the truth, and the protest of those who object to infant baptism will
-be a valuable force in the Church, until we are finally secure against
-the temptation to regard a sacrament as a piece of magic. For of course
-it is true that, while no man can make himself a Christian by his own
-will, no man can be made a Christian against or without his will. It is
-precisely his will that the Spirit must lay hold of and convert, and the
-will can refuse conversion.
-
-
-[#] 1 Cor. xii, 3
-
-[#] S. John xv, 16.
-
-
-The Church, then, is not a "voluntary organisation," but the creation of
-God in Christ. In fact it is the one immediate result of our Lord's
-earthly ministry. When His physical presence was withdrawn, there
-remained in the world, as fruit of His sojourn here, no volume of
-writings, no elaborated organisation with codified aims and methods, but
-a group of people who were united to one another because His Spirit
-lived and worked in each. And the great marvel lay in this: whereas all
-men realise that fellowship is better than rivalry, and yet fail to pass
-from one to the other because they are radically selfish both
-individually and corporately, in Christ men found themselves to be a
-real community in spite of their as yet unpurged selfishness. By the
-invasion of the Divine Life in Christ, the ideal itself, the life of
-fellowship, is given, and is made into the means of destroying just
-those qualities which had hitherto prevented its own realisation. The
-ecclesiastical organisations of to-day are not fellowships of this sort,
-but if the members of the Church lose their hold on this central
-principle of fellowship, as they have largely done, we are thrown back
-upon the futile effort to build up fellowship on the foundation of
-unredeemed selfishness.
-
-As it is not true to say that the Church is a "voluntary" organisation,
-so also it is not true to say that it exists "for the maintenance of
-public worship," at least in the sense that most Englishmen would give
-to the words. Certainly the Church, consisting of men and women whom
-God of His sheer goodness has delivered from the power of darkness and
-translated into the kingdom of His dear Son, will find its first duty,
-as also its first impulse, in an abandonment of adoration. But if the
-God who is worshipped is not only some Jewish Jehovah or Mohammedan
-Allah, but the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, this love and
-adoration of God will immediately express itself in the love and service
-of men, and especially in the passionate desire to share with others the
-supreme treasure of the knowledge of God. The Church, like its Master,
-will be chiefly concerned to seek and to save that which is lost,
-calling men everywhere to repent because the Kingdom of God is at hand.
-Worship is indeed the very breath of its life, but service of the world
-is the business of its life. It is the Body of Christ, that is to say,
-the instrument of His will, and His will is to save the world.
-
-The spiritual life of men is not limited to this planet, and the
-fulfilment of the Church's task can never be here alone. The Church
-must call men from temporal to eternal hopes. But in this way it will do
-more than is possible in any other way to purify the temporal life
-itself. For most temporal goods are such that the more one person has
-the less there is for others, so that absorption in them leads
-inevitably to strife and war. But the eternal goods--love, joy, peace,
-loyalty, beauty, knowledge--are such that the fuller fruition of them by
-one leads of itself to fuller fruition by others also, and absorption in
-them leads without fail to brotherhood and fellowship.
-
-It is not of worship, the breath of the church's life, but of service,
-the business of its life, that I wish to speak. But this can only be
-misleading if the other has not first been given prominence. The Church
-serves because it first worships. Only because it has in itself a
-foretaste of eternal life, the realised Kingdom of God, can it prepare
-the way of the Lord, so that His Kingdom may come on earth as it is in
-heaven.
-
-One question which demands attention concerns the nature of the Church
-which is to perform this function. Is it enough that there should be
-vast numbers of Christian individuals gathering together in whatever way
-is proved by experience to be the most effective for edification,
-pursuing their profession as Christians, and so gradually leavening
-life? Or is there need for a quite definite society, with a coherent
-constitution and a known basis of membership? The former has much to
-recommend it; it avoids the deadening influence of a rigid machinery; it
-ensures freedom of spiritual and intellectual development; it may seem
-to correspond with that loosely constituted group of disciples, which
-was, as we have seen, the actual fruit of the earthly ministry of
-Christ. Yet it is condemned by all analogies, and is inadequate to the
-essential nature of religion.
-
-All relevant analogy suggests that a spirit must take definite and
-concrete form before it can be effective in the world, even as God
-Himself must become incarnate in order to establish His Kingdom upon
-earth. No doubt the form has often fettered the spirit and sometimes
-even perverted it; the history of the Franciscan movement is an instance
-of this; but the influence of St. Francis would never have done for
-Europe what it actually accomplished if the Order had not been founded.
-
-One of the clearest illustrations of the principle is before our eyes in
-our experience to-day. When the spirit of national patriotism makes its
-appeal, no one has to make any effort to understand its claim; our
-nation is a definite and concrete society in which we easily realise our
-membership to the full. We know that there is no escaping from it, and
-that, when it appeals for our service or our lives, we must either
-respond or refuse. But the Christian Church, as we know it, is
-powerless to bring home its appeal in the same way. Largely because of
-its divisions and endless controversy about the points, secondary though
-important, which separate the various sections, it has become curiously
-impotent in the face of any great occasion such as the present, and
-curiously unsuccessful in persuading either its own members or the world
-outside of the nature of its mission. We are not conscious, for
-example, that we are permanently either responding to, or else refusing,
-the appeal to "preach the Gospel to every creature." That appeal does
-not hit us personally as does the appeal, "every fit man wanted." Our
-membership in the Church does not in fact make us feel a personal
-obligation to assist the cause of the Church. We are content to "belong
-to it" without admitting that it has any power to dispose of its
-"belongings"; we think that we "support" it by "going to church" and
-contributing to "church expenses." But we feel no link with our
-fellow-Christians in Germany at all comparable to that which binds us to
-an agnostic but patriotic Englishman, or at all capable of bridging
-spontaneously the gulf fixed by national antagonism. By a deliberate
-effort we can realise that we and they are equally precious in the sight
-of God, and that they are our fellow-members in Christ. But there is no
-realised bond of corporate unity that binds us to each other, and we
-rely upon the very feeble resources of our personal good-will and
-personal faith for any sense of unity with them that we may attain. The
-Church is less powerful than the nation as an influence in our lives,
-partly at least because it is in fact less actual. The Church
-universal, whether as an organisation or as spirit of life, is an ideal,
-not a reality.
-
-Such an argument, however, simply invites refutation. It is pointed out
-that when the whole of one section of Christendom was organised as a
-single religious community under the Pope, men did, as a mere matter of
-historical fact, fight and hate even more bitterly than now. A common
-membership in one Catholic Church did not prevent Edward III. and Henry
-V. from making war upon their neighbours across the English Channel.
-And at this moment Roman Catholic Frenchmen appear to be fighting
-against Roman Catholic Bavarians with no more signs of fellowship
-between the opponents than appear in other parts of the field of war. So
-far as the Church is organised as a unity, this does not, in fact,
-create unity of spirit in its members sufficient to mitigate national
-antagonisms.
-
-And this, it will be urged, is only to be expected. "The wind bloweth
-where it listeth," and machinery cannot control the spirit. It is only
-a personal faith in Christ that will lift men above natural divisions so
-that they spontaneously recognise as brothers those who have similar
-faith. To build up again a great ecclesiastical organisation which
-shall include all Europe, or even all the world, will not of itself
-create friendship between the members who compose it if otherwise they
-are antagonistic. Individual conversion, not ecclesiastical
-statesmanship, is the one thing needful; nothing can take its place.
-
-No; of course nothing can take its place. And of course an
-all-comprehensive lukewarm Church will share the fate of its smaller
-counterpart at Laodicea. When it is said that the Universal Church is
-not a reality, it is not only the absence of a world-wide organisation
-that is deplored; still worse is the total absence of any typical manner
-of life by which members of the Church may be known from others. Men
-die for Great Britain, not because Britain is a united kingdom, but
-because there is a definite British character which is ours and which we
-love. But there is no specifically Christian type of character actually
-distinguishing members of the Church from others which may make men
-ready to die for Christendom. Christians differ from others, as Spinoza
-bitterly remarked, not in faith or charity or any of the fruits of the
-Spirit, but only in opinion. Assuredly individual conversion is the
-primary requisite.
-
-But half our troubles come from these absurd dilemmas. Do you believe
-in faith or in organisation? Well; do I believe in my eyes or my ears?
-Why not in both? Of course organisation cannot take the place of faith;
-of course faith without order is better than order without faith. But
-why cannot we have in the Church what we have got in the nation faith
-operative through order as loyalty is operative through the State and in
-service to it?
-
-The earlier objection, however, is equally serious. Catholicism has
-failed in the past and is failing now. One main ground of its failure
-is to be found, I believe, in its inadequate recognition of nationality,
-which has avenged itself by almost ousting Catholicism, and with it
-Christianity itself, where national interests are concerned.[#]
-
-
-[#] I am speaking throughout of the Western Church: the Eastern Church
-has perhaps been, if anything, too national.
-
-
-This failure to give adequate recognition to nationality arises from too
-exclusive emphasis on the principle which is, quite rightly, the root
-idea of Catholicism--the idea of transcendence. Here in the last resort
-is the fundamental distinction between naturalism and religion;
-naturalism may take a form which stimulates the religious emotions and
-supports a high ethical ideal; but it confines itself to the limits of
-secular experience. For naturalism the history of man and of the
-universe is the starting-point and the goal; this as fact is the datum,
-this as understood is the solution. The Will of God, on this view, is to
-be discovered from the empirical course and tendency of history. But
-religion begins with God; it breaks in upon what we ordinarily call
-"experience" from outside; in its monotheistic form it regards the world
-as created by God for His own pleasure, and lasting only during that
-pleasure; in its pantheistic form it regards the world as a phase or a
-moment of His Being which is by no means limited to that phase or
-moment. Its philosophy does not elaborately conceive what God must be
-like in order to be the solution of our perplexities, but, starting with
-the assurance of His Being and Nature, shows how this is in fact the
-answer to all our needs.
-
-It is one peculiarity and glory of Christianity that it unites both of
-those. Its faith is fixed upon One who "for us men and for our
-salvation _came down from heaven_," and who is yet the eternal Word
-through which all things were made, the indwelling principle of all
-existence. Transcendence and immanence are here perfectly combined.
-But because the former is the distinctively religious element, without
-which the latter would have been in danger of relapsing into naturalism,
-the deliberate emphasis was all laid on transcendence. We can see, as
-we look back, that when once the Incarnation has actually taken place
-upon the plane of history, it makes no jot of difference in logic,
-provided only that the Life of the Incarnate is taken as the
-starting-point and centre of thought, whether terms of transcendence or
-of immanence are used. The life of Christ is at once the irruption of
-the Divine into the world--(for the previous history of the world
-certainly does not explain it)--and is also the manifestation of the
-indwelling power which had all along sustained the world. In other
-words, the God who redeems is the same God who creates and sustains.
-But it is still true that the note of transcendence, of something given
-to man by God as distinct from something emerging out of man in his
-search of God, is the specifically religious note.
-
-And the Church, as the divine creation and instrument, shares and must
-express this character. It must be so constituted as to keep alive this
-faith. That is the meaning of hierarchies and sacraments. Whether any
-given order is the most adequate that can be designed, is of course a
-perfectly legitimate question. But every order that aspires to be
-catholic aims, at least, at expressing the truth that religion is a gift
-of God, and not a discovery of man. And certainly it is only the gift
-of God that can be truly catholic or universal. Man's discoveries are
-indefinitely various; the European finds one thing, the Arab another,
-the Hindu yet another, and none finds satisfaction in the other's
-discovery, though in all of them God is operative. Only in His own gift
-of Himself is it reasonable to expect that all men will find what they
-need; only in a Church which is the vehicle of this gift, and is known
-to be this, and not a mutual benefit society organised by its own
-members for their several and collective advantage--only in a Church
-expressive of Divine transcendence can all nations find a home.
-
-Yet just because of a too one-sided emphasis on this truth, the Catholic
-Church in the West has, as a rule, not tried to be a home for nations at
-all. "Christianity separated religion from patriotism for every nation
-which became, and which remained, Christian."[#] Patriotism is
-particular; religion ought to be universal. The nation is a natural
-growth; the Church is a divine creation. And so the primitive Church
-was organised in complete independence of national life, except in so
-far as its diocesan divisions followed national or provincial
-boundaries. No doubt the conditions of its existence made this almost
-necessary, for the organised secular life of the Roman Empire refused to
-tolerate it. But it was its own principle, true indeed but not the
-whole truth, which led to this line of development. The same principle
-is apparent in the Middle Ages, when there was no external pressure. The
-Church, as it was conceived in the sublime ideal of Hildebrand, was to
-belong to no nation, because supreme over them all, binding them
-together in the obedience and love of Christ, and imposing upon them His
-holy will.
-
-
-[#] "War and Religion" in _The Times Literary Supplement_, Dec. 31,
-1914.
-
-
-The inevitable result of this was that the instinct of nationality was
-never christened at all. It remained a brute instinct, without either
-the sanction or the restraint of religion. But it could not be crushed,
-and so the Church let it alone; with the result that, though murder was
-regarded as a sin, a war of dynastic or national ambition was not by
-people generally considered sinful. No doubt theologians condemned such
-war in general terms; St. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, seems to regard
-as fully justified only such wars as are undertaken to protect others
-from oppression, and some of the greatest Popes made heroic efforts to
-govern national policy according to righteousness. But in the general
-judgment of the Church, international action was not subjected to
-Christian standards of judgment at all. This way of regarding the
-Church sometimes leads people to speak of "alternative" loyalties so
-that they ask, "Ought I to be loyal to my Church or to my nation?" And
-while faith and reason will combine to answer "To my Church," an
-imperious instinct will lead most men in actual fact to answer "To my
-nation." The attempt to exalt the Church to an unconditional supremacy
-has the actual result of making men ignore it when its guidance is most
-needed.
-
-Whatever truth there may be in the statement that the Reformation was in
-part due to the growing sentiment of nationality, is evidence of the
-failure of the old Catholic Church in this matter. In England at any
-rate one main source of the popular Protestantism was the objection to
-anything like a foreign domination. No doubt the political ambitions of
-the Papacy were largely responsible for the feeling that the Catholic
-Church brought with it a foreign yoke. But the whole principle of the
-Church as non-national necessarily meant that the Church was regarded as
-"imposing" Christian standards rather than permeating national life with
-them. The Church tended to ignore the spiritual function of the State
-altogether, claiming all spiritual activity for itself alone; and thus
-it tended to make the State in actual fact unspiritual, and involved
-itself in the necessity of attempting what only the State can do. It
-thus not only tended to weaken the moral power of the State, but also
-forsook its own supernatural function to exercise those of the
-magistrate or judge, so that faith in the power of God was never put to
-a full test. The Reformation was not only a moral and spiritual reform
-of the Church, but the uprising of the nations, now growing fully
-conscious of their national life, against the cosmopolitan rule of Rome.
-But the Reformation did not fully realise its task. It expressed itself
-indeed in national Churches, but in actual doctrine tended to
-individualism; whereas Catholicism laid emphasis on religion as the gift
-of God, Protestantism, at least in its later development, laid stress on
-the individual's apprehension of the gift. But not only the
-individual--everything that is human, family, school, guild, trade
-union, nation, needs to apprehend and appropriate the gift of God. The
-nation, too, must be christened and submit to transforming grace.
-
-The uprising of the national spirit has had the deplorable result of
-contributing to the break-up of Christendom, but it is not in itself
-deplorable at all. All civilisation has in fact progressed by the
-development of different nationalities, each with its own type. If we
-believe in a Divine Providence, if we believe that the life of Christ is
-not only the irruption of the Divine into human history but is also and
-therein the manifestation of the governing principle of all history, we
-shall confess that the nation as well as the Church is a divine
-Creation. The Church is here to witness to the ideal and to guide the
-world towards it, but the world is by divine appointment a world of
-nations, and it is such a world that is to become the Kingdom of God.
-Moreover, if it is by God's appointment that nations exist, their
-existence must itself be an instrument of that divine purpose which the
-Church also serves.
-
-The whole course of Biblical revelation supports this view. It is quite
-true that if we were to read the New Testament for the first time,
-knowing nothing whatever about the Old, we should come to the conclusion
-that it almost entirely ignored nationality and everything which goes
-with it. But then the Church has always maintained that the New
-Testament grows by an organic life out of the Old, and presupposes it;
-and when we go back to that, there can be no doubt whatever about its
-view of nationality. The whole of the early books of the Old Testament
-are concerned with this, and almost nothing else. The task of Moses in
-the wilderness, of Joshua, of the Judges and the early Kings, is
-precisely to fashion Israel into a nation. So much is all attention
-concentrated upon this that we find a contentment with that contraction
-of the moral outlook which presents to many modern readers the chief
-stumbling block about the Old Testament. Almost everything that was
-serviceable to Israel is approved. Rahab is guilty of sheer treason to
-her own city of Jericho, but it is serviceable to Israel, and there is
-no word of condemnation. Jael is guilty of a very treacherous murder,
-but it was serviceable to Israel, so "Blessed shall she be above women
-in the tent."
-
-Everything is concentrated upon this primary object of fashioning Israel
-into a nation and persuading individual Israelites to put the welfare of
-the whole before the interest and ambition of their own clique or
-faction; and when the time came for an advance to a wider view, it came
-precisely not by way of saying that national divisions do not matter and
-that national life itself is unimportant, but by insisting that
-nationality is equally precious in these other nations all around Israel
-as it is within Israel itself.
-
-The turning point here as in so much else in the Old Testament is the
-Book of Amos, the first of the written prophecies. It is worth while to
-try to imagine the effect of those opening clauses. The prophet begins
-by securing a willing hearing from those to whom he writes: in other
-words he begins by abusing their neighbours.
-
-
- "Thus saith the Lord: For three transgressions of Damascus, yea
- for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof...."
-
- "Thus saith the Lord: For three transgressions of Gaza, yea for
- four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof....
-
- "Thus saith the Lord: For three transgressions of Tyre, yea for
- four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof....
-
- "Thus saith the Lord: For three transgressions of Edom, yea for
- four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof....
-
- "Thus saith the Lord: For three transgressions of the children
- of Ammon, yea for four, I will not turn away the punishment
- thereof....
-
- "Thus saith the Lord: For three transgressions of Moab, yea for
- four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof...."
-
-
-And then, without a change of phrase, without even the compliment of a
-heightened denunciation--
-
-
- "Thus saith the Lord: For three transgressions of Judah, yea for
- four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof....
-
- "Thus saith the Lord: For three transgressions of Israel, yea
- for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof...."[#]
-
-
-[#] Amos i, 3-ii, 6.
-
-
-It would be impossible more emphatically to insist that all nations,
-Israel and the rest, stand on an equal footing before the Judgment Seat
-of God, and are to be regarded as real entities, and real moral agents;
-but that is not enough for the prophet.
-
-
- "Are ye not as Children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of
- Israel?--saith the Lord."
-
-
-I have no more care for you than the Ethiopians--who then, as now, were
-black folk.
-
-
- "Have not I brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt, _and_
- the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Syrians from Kir?"[#]
-
-
-[#] Amos ix, 7.
-
-
-It is the God who had guided the history of Israel who has equally
-guided the history of the despised Philistine and the hated Syrian. And
-this line of thought reaches its culmination where we should expect to
-find it, in the works of the statesman-prophet Isaiah. His little
-country of Judah was likely to be destroyed by the hostilities of
-Assyria and Egypt, and in the middle of that peril, when these nations
-were at each other's throats, he looks forward and says:--
-
-
- "In that day there shall be a highway out of Egypt to Assyria
- and the Assyrian shall come into Egypt, and the Egyptian to
- Assyria; and the Egyptians shall worship with the Assyrians."
-
-
-There shall be free intercourse between them, and worship of the one God
-shall be the link between them.
-
-
- "In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and with
- Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth, for that the Lord
- of hosts hath blessed them, saying, 'Blessed be Egypt my people,
- and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine
- inheritance?'"[#]
-
-
-[#] Isaiah xix, 23-25.
-
-
-Just picture the pallid frenzy of the orthodox Jew at the words--"Egypt
-my people."
-
-The teaching of the Bible is plain enough; and as we come to the New
-Testament, with all this in our minds, knowing the emphasis that has
-already been laid upon nationality, we find that there, too, is the note
-of patriotism.
-
-No man has ever loved his nation more than the Lord loved Israel, and in
-the bitterness of disappointment in the lament over Jerusalem we have
-the measure of His patriotic love for the holy places of His people.
-
-St. Paul, the author of those great ejaculations--"That there can be
-neither Jew nor Gentile, Greek nor Scythian, bond nor free, but one man
-in Christ Jesus"[#]--is also the author of the most ardent expression of
-patriotism in all literature.
-
-
-[#] Gal. iii, 28; Col. iii, 11.
-
-
- "I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience bearing
- witness with me in the Holy Ghost, that I have great sorrow and
- unceasing pain in my heart. For I could wish that myself were
- accursed from Christ for my brethren's sake, my kinsmen
- according to the flesh; who are Israelites, whose is the
- adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of
- the law, and the service of God, and the promises; whose are the
- patriarchs, and of whom is Christ as concerning the flesh."[#]
-
-
-[#] Rom. ix, 1-5.
-
-
-One can almost hear him panting as he dictates the words.
-
-The Bible, then, strongly insists upon the nation as existing by divine
-appointment, and it looks forward, not to the abolition of national
-distinctions, but to the inclusion of all nations in the family of
-nations. So it was well that nationality should insist upon itself
-within the sphere of religion in the movement that we call the
-Reformation. But it left us with a broken Christendom, and with what
-are called national Churches. The old Church endeavoured to tyrannise
-over the State; under the influence of the Reformation the State tended
-to tyrannise over the Church. Then comes a movement towards a free
-Church in a free State; but we shall only find satisfaction when we have
-a free State in a free Church.
-
-The nation is a natural growth with a spiritual significance. It
-emerges as a product of various elementary needs of man; but having
-emerged it is found to possess a value far beyond the satisfaction of
-these needs. The Church is a spiritual creation working through a
-natural medium. Its informing principle is the Holy Spirit of God in
-Christ, but its members are men and women who are partly animal in
-nature as well as children of God. The nation as organised for action
-is the State; and the State, being "natural," appeals to men on that
-side of their nature which is lower but is not in itself bad. Justice
-is its highest aim and force its typical instrument, though force is
-progressively less employed as the moral sense of the community
-develops: mercy can find an entrance only on strict conditions. The
-Church, on the other hand, is primarily spiritual; holiness is its
-primary quality; mercy will be the chief characteristic of its
-judgments, but it may fall back on justice and even, in the last resort,
-on force.[#] Both State and Church are instruments of God for
-establishing His Kingdom; both have the same goal; but they have
-different functions in relation to that goal.
-
-
-[#] See Appendix II.: _On Moral Authority_.
-
-
-The State's action for the most part takes the form of restraint; the
-Church's mainly that of appeal. The State is concerned to maintain the
-highest standard of life that can be generally realised by its citizens;
-the Church is concerned with upholding an ideal to which not even the
-best will fully attain. When a man reaches a certain pitch of
-development, he scarcely realises the pressure of the State, though he
-is still unconsciously upheld by the moral judgment of society; but he
-can never outgrow the demand of the Church. On the other hand, if a man
-is below a certain standard, the appeal of the Church will not hold him
-and he needs the support of the State's coercion.
-
-Neither State nor Church is itself the Kingdom of God, though the
-specific life of the Church is the very spirit and power of that
-Kingdom. Each plays its part in building the Kingdom, in which, when it
-comes, force will have disappeared, while justice and mercy will
-coalesce in the perfect love which will treat every individual according
-to his need.
-
-The Church which, officially at least, ignored nationality has failed.
-The Church which allowed itself to become little more than the organ of
-national religion has failed. The hope of the future lies in a truly
-international Church, which shall fully respect the rights of nations
-and recognise the spiritual function of the State, thereby obtaining the
-right to direct the national States along the path which leads to the
-Kingdom of God. We are all clear by now that the Christian Church
-cannot be made the servant of one nation; we must become equally clear
-that it cannot be regarded as standing apart from them, so that in
-becoming a Churchman a man is withdrawn in some degree from national
-loyalty. We must get rid of the idea of "alternative" loyalties. The
-Church is indeed the herald and the earnest of that Kingdom of God which
-includes all mankind; but unless all history is a mere aberration, that
-Kingdom will have nations for its provinces, and nations like
-individuals will realise their destiny by becoming members of it.
-
-We shall, then, conceive the relation of the nation to the Church on the
-analogy of that between the family and the nation. There is in principle
-no conflict of interest or loyalty here. The family is a part of the
-nation, owing allegiance to it; but the nation consists of families and
-can reach its welfare only through theirs. So the nation (in proportion
-as it is Christian) must learn to regard itself as a member of the
-family of nations in the Catholic Church. No doubt in this imperfect
-world there is often a conflict of supposed interests, and sometimes
-even of real interests. Moreover, there is often room for doubt as to
-where the true interest lies. But the family finds its own true welfare
-in the service of the nation, and the nation finds its own welfare in
-the service of the Kingdom of God.
-
-The Catholic Church, which is itself not yet a society of just men made
-perfect, while upholding the ideal of brotherhood and the love which
-kills hate by suffering at its hands, and while calling both men and
-nations to penitence and renewed aspiration in so far as they fail to
-reach that ideal, will none the less recognise the divinity of the
-nation in spite of all its failures. It will not call upon men to come
-out from their nation or separate themselves from its action, unless it
-believes that then and there the nation itself is capable of something
-better, or unless the nation requires of them a repudiation of the very
-spirit of Christ, or an action intrinsically immoral. If it is doing
-the best that at the moment it is capable of doing, the Church will bid
-its citizens support it in that act, lest the nation be weakened in its
-defence of the right or its control handed over to those who have no
-care for the right.
-
-The Church then must recognise the nation having a certain function in
-the divine providence with reference to man's spiritual life. It must
-not try to usurp the State's functions, for if it does it will perform
-them badly, and it will also--which is far more serious--be deserting
-the work for which it alone is competent; and the State must, in its
-turn, recognise the Church as the Society of Nations, of which it with
-all others is a member.
-
-Nothing but such a spiritual society can secure fellowship among
-nations. Schemes of arbitration, conciliation, international police and
-the like, presuppose, if they are to be effective, an admitted community
-of interest between the nations. But this must be not only admitted but
-believed in sufficiently to prompt a nation which has no interest in a
-particular dispute to make sacrifices for the general good, by spending
-blood and treasure in upholding the authority of the international court
-or council. What will secure this, except the realisation of common
-membership in the Kingdom of God, and in the Christian Church, its
-herald and earnest?
-
-And yet the Church we know is not only divided but at war within itself.
-This, the Creation of God in Christ, is not more free from strife and
-faction than the nations, which are natural growths. If grace fails,
-how can nature succeed? Why should we expect the nations of the world
-to be at peace, when the sections of the Church are at war?
-
-Because the Church is so far from what we hope it may become, we can
-only sketch that future Church in outline. Its building will be the
-work of years, perhaps of centuries. And probably enough our attempt
-will fail as Hildebrand's failed; probably enough there will be scores
-of failures; but each time we must begin again in order that for Christ
-and His Spirit a Body may be prepared, through which His purpose may in
-the end of the ages find its accomplishment, and the nations of the
-earth bring their glory--each its own--into His Holy City.
-
-There is the goal; dimly enough seen; but the method is perfectly plain.
-"Thomas saith unto Him, Lord, we know not whither Thou goest; how know
-we the way? Jesus saith unto him, I am the way." And when that way led
-to the Cross, beside the innocent Sufferer there were two others. One
-cried to Him, "Save Thyself and us"; the other recognised His royalty in
-that utmost humiliation and prayed, "Jesus, remember me when Thou comest
-in Thy Kingdom." He, and he alone in the four Gospels, is recorded to
-have addressed the Lord by His personal name. Penitence creates
-intimacy, whether it be offered to God or to man.
-
-We have been made very conscious of the burden of the world's pain and
-sin, though perhaps that burden, as God bears it, is no heavier now than
-in our selfish and worldly peace. Will the Church pray to Him, "Save
-Thyself and us"? or will it willingly suffer with Him, united with Him
-in the intimacy of penitence, seeing His royalty in His crown of thorns?
-Will it, while bidding men bravely do their duty as they see it, still
-say that the real treasures are not of this world though they may in
-part be possessed here, suffering whatever may be the penalty for this
-unpopular testimony? For the kingdoms of this world will become the
-Kingdom of our God and of His Christ only when the citizens of those
-kingdoms lay up their treasure in heaven and not upon the earth, only
-when, being risen with Christ, they set their affection on things
-above--love, joy, peace, loyalty, beauty, knowledge--only when they
-realise their fellowship in His Body so that their fellowship also in
-His Holy Spirit may purge their selfishness away.
-
-Here is field enough for heroism and the moral equivalent of war. The
-Church is to be transformed and become a band of people united in their
-indifference to personal success or national expansion, and caring only
-that the individual is pure in heart and the nation honourable. In her
-zeal for that purity and honour, and in her contempt for all else, she
-may have to suffer crucifixion. It is a big risk that the Church must
-run; for if she does not save the world she will have ruined it, besides
-sacrificing herself. If there is no God nor Holy City of God, the
-Church will have just spoilt life for all her faithful members, and in
-some degree for every one else as well. But if her vision is true, then
-everything is worth while--rather the greatness of the sacrifice is an
-addition to the joy when the prize is so unimaginably great. Can we
-bring this spirit into the Church? On our answer depends the course of
-history in the next century, and a new stage in the Coming of the Lord.
-
- _The Spirit and the Bride say, Come._
- _And he that heareth, let him say, Come._
- _Yea: I come quickly._
- _Amen: come, Lord Jesus._
-
-
-
-
- *LECTURE III*
-
- *JUSTICE AND LIBERTY IN THE STATE*
-
-
-"Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to
-destroy but to fulfil."--S. Matthew v., 17.
-
-
-I.--In the last lecture I said that justice would seem to be the typical
-virtue of the State, as holiness of the Church. Let us, then, first
-consider this virtue of justice in the light of our Lord's teaching
-concerning one of the most familiar aspects of justice--its penal
-aspect.
-
-Those sayings that have of late given rise to so many searchings of
-heart among Christians--the sayings about turning the other cheek and
-the rest--are given by our Lord as explanations of the saying that He
-came "not to destroy the law but to fulfil it." The words "to fulfil"
-of course mean not only to obey and carry out, but to complete.
-
-In what sense is this teaching of our Lord the completion of the law?
-For the law of Moses, like every other law, was concerned with
-regulating the relations of men to one another, as well as their duties
-towards God; and it enforced what it enjoined by penalties.
-
-At first sight no doubt it looks as if He were directly contradicting
-what had been said to them of old time--
-
-
- "Ye have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth
- for a tooth: but I say unto you, That ye resist not him that is
- evil; but whosoever smites thee on thy right cheek, turn to him
- the other also, and if any man will sue thee at the law, and
- take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also."
-
-
-How is this the fulfilment or completion of the Mosaic or any other law?
-At this distance of time, it is hard to remember what was the original
-significance of the law of retaliation. We are inclined to think that
-the words "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" are intended to
-give a licence to that degree of vindictiveness; but on the contrary, in
-the primitive stage in which that enactment was given, it was not a
-licence given to man's instinct for vengeance, but a limitation set upon
-that primitive and animal instinct, whose natural tendency, if
-unchecked, is to take two eyes for an eye and a set of teeth for a
-tooth. The _lex talionis_ said--Only an eye for an eye, and only a
-tooth for a tooth.
-
-Our Lord carries the same principle further; not even that degree of
-vindictiveness is allowed. The first necessity was to put bounds upon
-man's natural and almost insatiable lust for vengeance. The next was to
-tell him that the whole method of vengeance could never succeed in what
-is its only really justifiable aim. For what is the true function of
-the law, whether that of Moses or any other? It is always two-fold; it
-must always aim not merely at checking the evil act, but at converting,
-if possible, the evil will.
-
-There has never, I suppose, been any legal system which was not
-justified by its upholders on this ground. No one is really content, to
-think that the punishment which he inflicts, or may imagine himself as
-inflicting through the agency of the State, or in any other way, is
-purely deterrent; he always thinks it will also be reformative. But,
-how are you as a matter of fact to attack the evil will? The mere
-infliction of penalty will not of any necessity achieve this goal at
-all. We know that it is very seriously debated whether our whole system
-of punishment in the civilised States of to-day has any really moral
-effect, at least upon those who fall under its most severe penalties.
-Probably most convicts leave prison worse men than when they entered.
-For if a man is below a certain level in moral attainment, pain, far
-from purifying, only brutalises and coarsens. It is only those who are
-already far in the path of spiritual growth who are purified by
-suffering, even as the Captain of our Salvation was thus made perfect.
-But it is still true that the aim of all penal law is twofold; to check
-the evil act and, if possible, to convert the evil will.
-
-Now, as I suggested previously, mere restraint may have indirectly a
-positive moral value; as for example in the case of a child, who is
-potentially of very diverse characters. He has the capacity to grow in
-many different directions, and it will depend very much upon his
-surroundings, and the influences which play upon his character, whether
-this set of instincts or that receives development; and here merely to
-keep forcibly within bounds the development of certain impulses, which
-tend to grow out of proportion to the proper harmony and economy of
-nature, may indirectly have the effect of preserving that harmony and
-thus develop genuine virtue in the soul. And again, with those whose
-characters are relatively formed, the direct restraint, for example, of
-State action may have positive moral value, inasmuch as it is the
-expression of the moral judgment of Society. What most of us would
-shrink from, if we were in danger of imprisonment, would not be the
-physical inconvenience, which is not very great, but the fact that we
-should have brought ourselves under the censure of Society, and acted in
-such a way as to put ourselves below the level which Society generally
-considers itself justified in enforcing. And so the purely restraining
-influence of the State, even operating through force, may have a
-positive moral value, because it represents, and is the only way at
-present devised of representing, the judgment of Society, and to shrink
-from the judgment of Society is, so far as it goes, a really moral fear.
-It is not indeed the highest ground for the avoidance of evil, but it is
-a moral ground, for it arises from our recognition of our
-fellow-membership in Society with those whose censure we fear.
-
-But the State in all its actions is of necessity mechanical, and cannot
-take account of the individual, and all that makes him what he is. The
-State officer cannot know the prisoner in such a way as really to
-determine the treatment allotted to him in the light of what is best for
-his spiritual welfare; and therefore he has to fall back upon rough and
-ready rules which will never be perhaps very far from the right
-treatment, though they may fail to allot the ideal treatment in any
-single case. And here, in parenthesis, let me just mention that this is
-the chief reason why metaphors and comparisons drawn from the law-courts
-are so sadly misleading when used to illustrate the relation between the
-human soul and God; our only fear of the judge is concerned with what he
-will do to us; but what we fear with our father, on earth or in Heaven,
-is not so much what he will do to us, as the pain we have caused--"There
-is mercy with Thee; therefore shalt Thou be feared."
-
-Our Lord's method is the only one that aims straight at the evil will;
-it is the only method which has in it any real hope of converting the
-individual. It may fail time and again; but it is the only one that has
-a chance of real and absolute success.
-
-Let us look for a moment at the instances which He chooses to illustrate
-the principle, and we shall see at once that they are carefully chosen.
-All the acts chosen are such as are particularly vexatious to the
-ordinary natural and selfish man--being struck in the face; having a
-vexatious suit brought against one; being pestered by a beggar; being
-compelled to do something for the public service when we are busy.
-Those are just the things which the natural man resents and which the
-real Christian will not mind at all. For, after all, there is no real
-injury in being struck in the face, or having one's coat taken away.
-What one minds is the insult to one's precious dignity; and the
-Christian who, by definition, has forgotten all about himself will not
-mind such injuries at all. Therefore if the acts commanded are
-spontaneously done and not done with a laborious conscientiousness--that
-is to say if they are done in the spirit of Christianity, and not in the
-spirit of Pharisaism--they will express a complete conversion in the
-will of him who does them; they will express absolute conquest of self,
-and a concern solely for the welfare of him with whom we are dealing;
-and there is no heart yet made that can resist the appeal of love which
-is constant in spite of every betrayal, the appeal of trust which is
-renewed in spite of endless disappointments.
-
-"He that loveth his brother"--says St. John--"walketh in the light." He
-is the man who knows where he is going, because he is the man who
-understands people and sees into their hearts. They will reveal to him
-secrets of their nature, which they will hide from the contemptuous and
-indifferent; and even if at first he is from time to time disappointed
-and betrayed, in the end his method will succeed, because love and trust
-create what they believe in.
-
-The justice then, which we find at work in the State, is always a
-provisional thing pointing us to something more, something which the
-State itself by its very constitution is unable to provide, but which
-God provides in Christ, and will enable us in our measure to provide, if
-we are faithful, at least in the circle of our immediate activities, so
-far, that is, as the range of our sympathy will carry us.
-
-II.--The value of the justice which the State is able to secure actually
-resides for the most part in the liberty which it makes possible.
-Justice, as the State interprets it, is of itself, as far as I can see,
-almost totally valueless. I can see no kind of advantage in merely
-allotting so much pain to so much evil. There is moral evil in a man
-and you put physical evil into him as well. I do not see how you have
-made him or anyone else the better. Only in so far as the punishment is
-either deterrent or reformative, has it any moral value at all; and only
-in the latter case, where it reforms the character, can the value be
-called in the strict sense moral. So far as it only deters men from evil
-acts which they would desire to commit, it may add to the convenience of
-the other members of Society, but it is not doing any direct moral good.
-
-Indirectly, however, it has moral results; for when we enquire in what
-sense we can say that such justice as the State secures produces
-liberty, the first answer is to be found in the obvious and elementary
-fact that the liberty of every one of us depends upon our knowledge that
-certain impulses and instincts in other people, should they arise, will
-be checked and not allowed to receive full expression. Our liberty is
-increased by that check put upon predatory or homicidal impulses in
-other people, and their liberty depends upon the suppression of such
-impulses in us.
-
-So far it would seem that there must be in the most obvious sense of the
-words a certain curtailment of everybody's liberty in order that anybody
-may have liberty at all. If we are all to be free to indulge our
-passions of anger and hatred, should such arise within us, then it is
-quite clear that there will be very little freedom of action in the
-Society which rests on that principle. Everyone will go about in fear
-of everyone else.
-
-But that is a very small part of the business. The chief contribution of
-such justice to human liberty is that it supplies the necessary
-conditions of discipline without which there can be no liberty. We
-think of liberty as meaning freedom from external constraint. We think
-that an act of ours is free when we can say, "I did it, and no one made
-me do it"; but very little reflection is sufficient to convince us that
-a man whose life is actually governed by one or several over-developed
-passions which he will, as a matter of fact, always gratify when
-opportunity offers, in spite of the damage that is done to his whole
-life and to his permanent and deliberate purpose, is not really a free
-man. To be tied and bound with the chain of our sins is just as much
-slavery as to be in the ownership of another man; and we can acquire the
-real liberty which is worth having, the liberty, that is, to shape our
-lives, to live according to our own purpose, following out our own
-ideal, only in so far as our natures have been welded by discipline into
-unity, so that we are no longer a chaos of impulses and instincts, any
-of which may be set in motion by the appropriate environment, but are
-self-governing persons controlling our own lives.
-
-Liberty, in so far as it is of any value, always means self-control in
-both the senses of that term: in the sense that we are only controlled
-by ourselves, and also in the sense that by ourselves we are controlled,
-and that every part of our nature is subservient to the purpose to which
-our whole nature is given. Legislation is really an instrument of
-self-discipline. The people who write books about political philosophy
-are mainly members of the respectable classes. They naturally find it
-rather difficult to envisage themselves as liable to commit murder and
-the like; and they are therefore very liable to represent the criminal
-law of the State as being enacted against a few undisciplined or
-recalcitrant members. But when we look at the thing more closely, we
-see that what a community does, especially a democratic community, when
-it passes a law, is to invoke, every member upon his own head, the
-penalties enacted by that law, if he should do the act which the law
-forbids.
-
-Let us consider, for example, an international convention. What is the
-use of nations agreeing with one another not to do something, for
-instance not to poison wells, unless there is some chance that in a
-moment of strong temptation they may desire to do it? They therefore
-strengthen their deliberate purpose to avoid such acts by entering into
-an agreement with one another always to avoid them. There would be no
-object in doing this unless they needed help, or thought that they might
-at some time need help, in living up to their own purposes.
-
-And we have to remember that in this way the law of the State is, as a
-matter of fact, perpetually operating upon every one of us. We are
-often liable to suppose that it is only active in relation to those
-people against whom it is definitely set in motion; but it does operate
-in the life of every one of the citizens of a community; because the
-fact that certain actions would involve us in State-penalty most
-undoubtedly does keep all of us from indulging in those actions at
-certain times, even though at calm moments we recognise that it would be
-wrong to do so. Trivial instances are nearly always the clearest. Most
-of us, I suppose, are sufficiently honest to desire in general terms to
-pay for what we buy; and we should perhaps usually pay for our places in
-the train, even if there were no ticket-inspector; still, the existence
-of the inspector just clinches the matter.[#] The possibility of the
-penalty as a matter of fact helps to maintain our general, permanent,
-and deliberate purpose of honesty against a momentary temptation to be
-dishonest; and so far it is helping us to live up to our purpose, or, in
-other words, is increasing our real freedom. In fact, one main test of
-good legislation is precisely whether it does or does not in this way
-develop real freedom by increasing people's power to live by their own
-deliberate purpose.
-
-
-[#] I owe the illustration to Mr. A. L. Smith, of Balliol.
-
-
-Now so far we have been considering Society as consisting of relatively
-free persons (though the freedom exists in varying degrees, both as
-regards the external constraint and capacity for self-control), these
-persons having various claims which have to be regulated by the justice
-which the State upholds; in other words, in this stage, we are regarding
-justice in the way in which I suppose it is most usually regarded,
-namely, as rendering to a man what is due to him. That is the
-definition with which Plato in _The Republic_ starts his enquiry, and he
-naturally found very soon that it would not work.[#] It will not work
-because the moral values of people are not determinable. You cannot, as
-a matter of fact, ever say what is the relative weight of the various
-claims that may be made on behalf of this or that man. Most
-particularly there is the perpetual conflict between the actual and the
-potential worth of any men.
-
-
-[#] He appropriately puts it in the mouth of Polemarchus, the
-well-brought up, but wholly inexperienced, young man.
-
-
-Suppose that we decide that we will give to all men in Society that
-which is their due. How are we going to determine what is due? Is it to
-be determined by their economic value, for example by the amount they
-are contributing to the economic or general welfare of Society? Well
-then, there are a large number of people at both ends of what we call
-the social scale who ought to receive nothing at all, because they are
-contributing nothing economically, or, indeed, in any other way, to the
-public welfare. And yet that is not their fault; they have been brought
-up, it may be in squalor, it may be in luxury, but in either case in
-circumstances which have made them almost incapable of anything like
-good citizenship. Are we to kill such persons, or leave them to starve,
-in the interest of the public welfare? All human instincts will protest
-that this is unjust, and that they can claim more than they can possibly
-be represented as contributing, simply because they have had, as we say,
-bad luck, and it is not their fault.[#]
-
-
-[#] See Appendix III, _On Justice and Education_.
-
-
-Let us try what happens if after Plato's example we turn the matter
-upside down, and instead of saying that justice will be found when there
-is rendered to each man what is due to him, we say that justice is found
-when each man contributes what is due from him.
-
-Now logically, of course, these two are the same, because duties and
-rights are absolutely correlative. My rights constitute other people's
-duties towards me, and their rights constitute my duties towards them.
-The only difference is that it is far more easy in any given case to
-determine what is due from somebody--what can be claimed from him--than
-to determine what is due to him.
-
-In this imperfect stage of the world, where we are passing through the
-transition from something like barbarism to Christian civilisation, as
-we hope, it is possible that of two correlative processes, one will
-actually carry us further than the other even though it is logically
-inseparable from it. And in fact we find at once, that if we put it
-this way, and say that the principle of justice is not that each man
-should obtain what is due to him, but that each should contribute what
-is due from him, we are coming to the central principle of God's
-administration of His world, which is that we should render to every man
-not according to his desert, but according to his need. Indeed for
-practical purposes, if we are wishing to bring justice into our own
-dealings, and into the dealings of any public body with which we may
-have influence, this principle will carry us further than any
-other--"Render to every man according to his need."
-
-Let us suppose that we meet on one day with two beggars. One of them is
-a man who has borne a good character throughout his life, and has lost
-his work through no fault of his own; the works on which he was employed
-were closed, and he is now tramping in search of more work. All of us
-of course will say--"He deserves help and we will help him." Yes; and
-it is quite easy to help him. We have only to set him up again, and all
-will be well. It is not his own fault and we can rely upon him to make
-use of another opportunity. The other beggar is a man who has lost this
-place, as he has lost many before, through indulgence in some vice, such
-as drink. There are very many people who will say, "Well, it is his own
-fault, and now he must suffer for it." If God had taken that line with
-us, where would our redemption be?--"It is his own fault, now he must
-suffer for it." To say that is to repudiate the Gospel in its entirety.
-It is to call the Cross absurd and scandalous. "God commendeth His love
-toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died."
-
-No; the Christian will say, "This man needs help more than the other."
-It will not be the same kind of help. It is no use merely to give him
-money. That may merely help him to go wrong quicker than he would
-otherwise. He needs something that will cost us, probably, more than
-money; he needs our time--time to make friends; time to remove his
-suspicions; time to enter into real sympathy with him, and to detect
-what elements of strength there are in his character, that we may build
-them up again. But he needs help more than the other, and the Christian
-will be bound to give it, and he will say--"It was his own fault; he
-cannot help himself; it depends entirely on us; we will render to him
-according to his need."
-
-And all of this would lead to another formula for describing the justice
-which we shall desire to practise in the State, and in all our secular
-life of which the State is the highest organisation--The recognition of
-personality.
-
-I do not know at all what forms your labour unrest in takes in this
-continent, but I claim to have considerable opportunities of knowing
-what is the root of that unrest in England, at least among the better
-type of working people; for I am concerned with an organisation which is
-at work among working folk all over England, having an enormous
-membership, and which aims at claiming for them, and supplying them
-with, further facilities for education. Those with whom I thus come in
-contact are picked men, no doubt, because those who join an educational
-association are thereby marked off at once as intellectually at least
-more alert than those who do not join; but as I go about them, I find no
-room whatever for doubting that the root of the labour unrest in England
-is a sense that the whole organisation of our life constitutes a
-standing insult to the personality of the poor man. Why, for example,
-he feels, should it be possible for a well-to-do man to secure for
-himself, or for his wife, or for his child, the medical attendance that
-may be needed, while he in very many parts of our country depends upon
-institutions maintained by voluntary contributions? It is quite
-compatible with gratitude to those whose generosity maintains these
-institutions to feel that for such service he should not be dependent
-upon anybody's charity at all--whether the solution is to be that the
-State maintain such institutions or that every man who is doing his fair
-share of the country's work receive for himself the wage that will
-enable him to deal with such emergencies as they arise.
-
-Above all, men feel the denial of their personality in the organisation
-of industry itself. Men have fought and died for political liberty,
-which means the right to have a voice in making the laws by which you
-are to be governed. But the laws of the State do not for the most part
-invade a man's home, whereas the regulations of an industrial firm do.
-They determine when he shall get up in the morning and when he shall go
-to bed; they determine whether he shall have any leisure for the pursuit
-of any interest of his own. In the making of those regulations he has,
-as a rule, no voice whatever, and no opportunity of making his views
-understood except by threat, the threat of a strike. The men feel that
-they are what they are sometimes called, "hands" not persons. They are
-the tools of other men. You must apply all this to your own country, if
-and so far as it does apply. But one might easily imagine a village in
-Lancashire, or any other industrial district where all the inhabitants
-are dependent upon one industry; there are many such; and the control of
-that industry may be in the hands of a Board of Directors, settled
-perhaps in London; it may only meet a few times a year for the
-transaction of business, and otherwise not exist at all. They never see
-the people whose lives and destinies they thus control. The shareholders
-who want their dividends make no enquiries as a rule about the
-conditions in which the work is done. If that Board of Directors
-mismanages its business the village in Lancashire goes hungry. If that
-Board of Directors, when they have already got a full supply of work,
-takes on another large contract, that village in Lancashire works
-overtime; and the people have no say in the matter. Whatever else that
-is, it is not liberty, and in the judgment of the people themselves it
-is not justice. And indeed it is not either justice or liberty as we
-have learned in other spheres to understand those terms. The economic
-organisation of life comes far closer to the individual citizen than the
-political organisation, and the development of justice remains
-incomplete until it has secured liberty of an economic as well as a
-political kind.
-
-If it is true that the method of Christ is to appeal to the free
-personality of the man, so that he obeys out of love and devotion and
-not from fear of penalty nor hope of reward, other than the reward of
-realising the love of the Master, then surely it is in the true line of
-development towards the perfected Christian civilisation if we demand
-that these opportunities for the development of free personality shall
-be afforded. No doubt it must be done with wisdom. Rough and ready
-methods, however well-meant, might do far more harm than good, and leave
-us in a situation even worse than that which we know. But the Church
-has paid scarcely any attention to those things in England. It is very
-difficult to persuade Church-people that, because they are followers of
-Christ, and therefore might be assumed to recognise that they are
-"members one of another" with all these others, they are therefore bound
-(for example) in investing their money to find out the conditions under
-which their dividends are going to be earned. In almost every
-department of life we have left such things alone. Under the stress of
-war, we have suddenly become acutely conscious of the drink evil. It
-was there before; and we have been content that the great majority of
-our fellow citizens should have no opportunity for gratifying those
-instincts of social life and merriment, which are the birthright of all
-God's children, except in places where the influence of alcohol was
-supreme. We have been content with that. We have not thought it was our
-duty to find a means of supplying them with other places of recreation
-and amusement; we have saved our money. And then we have the
-impertinent audacity to claim our own redemption by the blood of Christ.
-
-One can go on with one evil after another in the same way. This is what
-makes the Church weak. It is no sort of use for us to say that Christ
-is the Redeemer of the world, and the Revealer of the way of life, if
-with regard to just those evils which press most heavily on men we have
-to say that for them He has unfortunately not supplied a remedy.
-
-No doubt if these evils are to be dealt with on a large scale, the work
-must be done by the State, for nothing else is adequate; and the Church
-here has two main tasks. It is no part of the Church's task to advocate
-general principles or particular maxims of economic science, though its
-members, in their capacity of citizenship ought to be active in these
-ways. The first task of the Church is to inspire the State, which after
-all very largely consists of the same persons as itself, with the desire
-to combat the evil; and the second is to counteract the one great
-difficulty which the State experiences. When the State takes up such
-work as this, there is one thing which we all fear: "Officialism." What
-is "Officialism"? Simply lack of love; nothing else in the world. It
-consists in treating people as "cases," according to rules and red tape,
-instead of treating them as individuals; and the Church which must
-inspire the State to want to deal with these things, must then supply
-the agents through whom it may deal with them effectively, inspiring
-them with the love of men which is the fruit and test of a true love of
-God.
-
-But beyond all this, the Church must be making demands far greater than
-it has ever made upon man's spiritual nature and spiritual capacity, and
-must then point to the organisation of our social life and say--"That
-organisation, because and in so far as it deprives men of the full
-growth of their spiritual nature, because and in so far as it prevents
-them from taking the share which belongs to God's children in His
-worship and the enjoyment of his gifts of nature and Grace, is proved to
-be of the devil."
-
-In our worship we find for the most part what we expect to find. There
-may be gifts offered us, gifts from God, that we never receive because
-we have not looked for them. It is in our intercourse with Christ that
-we shall find the means of solving the horror of our social problem, if
-we are expecting to find it; but we have not expected it. We have not
-really believed that He is the Redeemer of the World; we have not looked
-to Him for the redemption of Society. The State by itself, until the
-Church comes to its help, can do something indeed, but something which
-by itself is almost worthless.[#] It supplies the indispensable
-foundation without which a spiritual structure cannot be built up; but,
-if that building never comes, the foundation by itself is little more
-than useless. To those whom the social order favours it offers real
-liberty and life, but no inspiration; a perfect social order would offer
-liberty to all, but still no inspiration. The State alone can never be
-the house of many mansions wherein every soul is truly at home.
-
-
-[#] It is to be observed that the State is by its very nature largely
-limited to the regulation of those human relationships where men oppose
-each other with rival claims; as soon as men rise to the reciprocity of
-friendship the method of the State is inappropriate. People do not go
-to law to determine whether either loves the other adequately.
-
-
-
-
- *LECTURE IV*
-
- *HOLINESS AND CATHOLICITY IN THE CHURCH*
-
-
-"This is the law of the house: upon the top of the mountain the whole
-limit thereof round about shall be most holy. Behold, this is the law of
-the house."--Ezekiel xliii, 12.
-
-"And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty, and the Lamb,
-are the temple thereof."--Revelation xxi, 22.
-
-
-The Bible gives us two elaborately conceived pictures of the perfected
-life of man. The first is that which occupies the closing chapters of
-Ezekiel's prophecy; its leading feature is the immense separation which
-is insisted upon between the Temple and the secular City. The Hill of
-Zion has become a very high mountain; upon the top of it the Temple is
-set, and there is a wide space, at least two miles, between it and the
-City of Jerusalem, which has been moved away by that distance to the
-south.
-
-Indeed, if we take the description as intended to be complete, the City
-seems to exist chiefly to provide a congregation for the Temple's
-services, and the Prince only to offer representative worship on behalf
-of His people. All attention is concentrated upon the place of the
-worship of God, and the holiness which is to be characteristic of that
-place. By thus keeping the Temple holy, through separating it from the
-body of the City and its secular life, the Prophet attains no doubt the
-end he has in view, but he also, of necessity, though probably
-unintentionally, leaves the suggestion that the secular life itself
-cannot be wholly consecrated.
-
-In sharp contrast with this is St. John's picture in the Book of
-Revelation; here there is no specific place of worship at all, for the
-whole City is the Temple of God; more than that, the whole City is the
-very Holy of Holies, for it is described as being a perfect cube, and
-the Holy of Holies in Solomon's Temple was a perfect cube.
-
-
- "And the city lieth four square, and the length thereof is as
- great as the breadth: and he measured the city with the reed,
- twelve thousand furlongs; the length and the breadth and the
- height thereof are equal. And he measured the wall thereof, and
- it was one hundred and forty and four cubits."[#]
-
-
-[#] Rev. xxi, 16, 17.
-
-
-The City thus corresponds in symbolic form with the Holy of Holies. It
-is become the dwelling place of God. No special shrine is needed, no
-place to which men draw apart, because their whole life is an act of
-worship, and God dwells among them in their daily activities.
-
-There is one feature about this Heavenly City, which is obscured through
-the use of the old terms of measurement, for this cube is described as
-being 1,500 _miles_ high, 1,500 _miles_ broad, and 1,500 _miles_ long;
-but the wall which stands for defence against foes without and for the
-containment and order of the life within, and indeed represents in
-general the principle of organisation--the wall is only 216 _feet_ high;
-so small a thing is order in comparison with the life which it
-safeguards.
-
-It is between those two poles, which are set for us as the extreme terms
-in a process, that the Church must live its life. There is truth in
-both of them.
-
-We were considering in the last lecture justice and liberty, which are
-the supreme achievements of the National State. Let us to-day consider
-the Holiness and Catholicity, which are the supreme treasures of the
-Church.
-
-Holiness must come first, Holiness which means absolute conformity to
-the will of God. Whatever obstacles there may be to overcome, whatever
-seductions to avoid, the Church is to remain absolutely devoted to the
-Divine Will. Only so can it be catholic or universal. It might for a
-moment achieve an all-embracing unity by giving up everything that is
-offensive to men, and gathering all within it under the glow of a
-comfortable sentiment; but then its life would be gone, and after a
-little while the men who had all become members of it would be just as
-though they had not. Only a Church which is perfectly loyal to the Will
-of God, can possibly be the home for all mankind.
-
-But Holiness has always had two meanings--an outward and an inward, a
-ceremonial and a moral. We shall agree, I suppose, in saying that the
-outward and ceremonial is in itself of no consequence, and exists only
-in order to preserve and make possible the inward and spiritual
-conformity to God's Will; but for that purpose, as all human experience
-has always shown, it is quite indispensable. We are made of bodies as
-well as souls, and if our whole being is to be permeated, there must be
-bodily expression of that which our souls enjoy or need. We must
-worship with our bodies as well as with our souls. So St. Paul, after
-all his emphasis upon the spirit as against dead works, begins his
-practical exhortation with the words, "I beseech you, therefore,
-brethren, by the mercies of God to present your bodies a living
-sacrifice."[#] The physical and bodily expression is always necessary,
-in this human life of ours, to the full efficacy and to the survival
-through the ages of the spiritual, though this no doubt is alone of
-ultimate consequence.
-
-
-[#] Rom. xii, 1.
-
-
-If the Church is to maintain its Holiness, it must of necessity be to
-some extent separated from the world; it cannot mix as a Church in all
-worldly activities. It cannot simply set itself out to permeate the
-general life of men, maintaining nothing that is separate and apart for
-itself. If it does that, it will simply be lost in the general life of
-the world.
-
-In the last resort our characters depend almost entirely upon the
-influences that play upon them in our environment; the one place where
-we have effective choice is in determining the influences to which we
-will submit ourselves. If there is no place in our society, or in the
-world, where men may count upon finding the power of God in purity, then
-men will inevitably fail to rise above that sort of character, which
-their worldly environment happens to be forming in them.
-
-The Church then, precisely in order to do this work in the world, must
-keep itself in some sense separate from the world; but the vast majority
-of its members are people in the daily life of the world, pursuing their
-avocations there; and it would plainly be wholly disastrous to require
-that all Christian people, in virtue of their Christianity, should
-withdraw themselves from the ordinary concerns of men.
-
-There is, therefore, no means by which this separateness of the Church
-can be achieved unless there are certain persons set apart to be
-representatives of the Church, and of the Church only; and who, because
-they are official representatives of the Church are thereby deprived of
-the right to take part in many worldly activities, though these in
-themselves are right enough.
-
-It is not because they are more truly members of the Church than others,
-nor because there is a different moral standard for clergy and laity,
-but because in the whole life of the Church there are certain functions
-which are incompatible with others, just as in the State a man cannot be
-at the same time an advocate and a judge, or commander-in-chief and
-ambassador.
-
-Thus, for example, as it seems to me, one who is called to be a priest
-of the Church, inevitably forfeits the right to take part in the
-hurly-burly of party politics; partly because, in a world which consists
-of many parties, he is responsible for bringing before men the claim of
-God to which all the parties ought to bow; partly also because a man's
-activities inevitably affect the quality of his own mind, and if we are
-to be as it were repositories of the Eternal truths, if we are to have
-ready for dispensation all the treasures which God commits to His
-Church, we need a type of mind which cannot, at least by most men, be
-maintained, if we are engaged in heated controversy and frequent debate.
-
-Another example may be found in the question whether a priest should
-serve as a combatant in his country's army. He is called to represent
-the Church; and the Church is essentially, not accidentally,
-international; it is not international merely as a scientific society
-may be, in that it is not concerned with political frontiers and men of
-all nations are welcome within it; but it is international in the sense
-that it exists to bind the nations of the earth in one. The officer of
-such a society may be as patriotic in his feeling as anyone else, but,
-just because he is an official, for him to take positive action on one
-side of the other weakens the Church's international position, and is,
-therefore, a more serious act than it is in the case of the layman. Here
-again there are not two standards, but there are diverse circumstances.
-If the Church called on all its members to refuse to serve, the result
-would be to interfere with the freedom of the State to act in its own
-sphere; if it allows everyone to serve, it is deprived of its Catholic
-witness just when that is most vitally needed. The only way of doing
-justice to the legitimate claims of both nationalism and Catholicity, is
-to differentiate between persons; and there is no practicable or even
-sensible way of doing this except to make the Church's officers
-responsible for the Catholic witness and its lay, or unofficial, members
-for the national.
-
-But does this not involve the danger of a priestly caste? Yes, no doubt
-it does; but there are two ways in which we may avoid falling into that
-danger. The first is perpetually to remember that men are called by God
-to the different kinds of work which He has for them to do; and we shall
-avoid unctuousness, which is no doubt what men most dread about a
-priestly caste, if we keep it perpetually in our mind that we are not
-personally holy because our calling is. We are entrusted with this
-great charge. We have to fulfil it. It is our work for Him. But there
-are those whom He calls to serve Him as politicians and as soldiers; if
-they do their work as in His sight, and to His glory, they are serving
-Him every bit as much as we are. All the work of all the kinds of men
-is needed in the world, and it is only if we suppose that we are made
-more holy because our calling is concerned with the specifically holy
-things that we shall fall before that danger.
-
-And the other safeguard, paradoxical as it may sound, is a very complete
-specialised training. One of the reasons, I am quite sure, why lay
-people often find us rather stilted and uncongenial is because we have
-not secured a sufficient grasp upon what is our own special subject to
-feel full liberty in conversation and to speak naturally. We are
-perpetually wondering at what point we shall be suddenly compromising
-that for which we are responsible. We tend to utter (and even to hold)
-merely conventional opinions and to express ourselves only in the
-stereotyped phrases, because we have not sufficient grasp of spiritual
-and moral truth to trust ourselves in forming individual opinions, or in
-finding our own language for expressing the opinions which we form.
-Precisely in the degree in which we know our own work and have full
-possession of what is entrusted to us, shall we obtain liberty and ease
-of manner, and be in general behaviour just like other people, which is
-what we ought most to desire.
-
-Still it is in the person of its priests that the Church must maintain
-that outward holiness, that separation from the world, which alone makes
-possible a concentration upon things divine; and without this
-concentration it can never become a catholic or universal body.
-"Universal," here does not, of course, mean all-inclusive. There are
-those who definitely and deliberately reject the claim of Christ, and
-those have never been submitted in any way to His influence. The
-unbaptized heathen are not members of the Catholic Church; and if they
-refuse the Gospel when it comes, they remain outside. Moreover, as we
-have seen, there is possible a vicious as well as a holy catholicity.
-There is nothing so seductive as the temptation to suppose that doctrine
-which evokes a response is on that account true, or particularly to be
-emphasised. Sometimes people dislike the truth. There are people who
-are alienated by it; and the attractiveness of our gospel to people,
-irrespective of their frame of mind, is no evidence of its divinity.
-There is a picture in the Old Testament where Moses the Prophet is apart
-upon the mountain top, communing with God, while at the foot of the
-mountain, Aaron, the official priest, is ministering to the people the
-kind of religion they like. He was encouraging them, as the Psalmist
-satirically says, to worship: "the similitude of the calf that eateth
-hay." There was nothing very dignified about it. But it was what the
-people liked; and the response to his ministrations was immediate and
-immense. Our task is to lay hold, so far as we may in our infinite
-feebleness, of the truth that was given to the world in Christ in all
-its sternness as well as its love--or rather in that sternness which is
-an essential part of its love; and this is what we must present to men.
-
-Again, it is not in proportion to their virtue in the ordinary moral
-sense that men are drawn to the Church; it is in proportion to their
-conscious need of God. It is perhaps worth while just now especially to
-emphasise the peril of a faithless virtue, and the depth of error
-involved in any attempt to take for the basis of a Church "the religion
-of all good men." What will happen to a man who sets his effort upon
-the building up of his whole character according to an ethical ideal?
-One of two things. Either he may in part succeed, perhaps as much as he
-himself desires to succeed, and then he may become self-satisfied and a
-Pharisee; or else he will find himself either failing altogether, or,
-having succeeded in part, incapable of carrying the success to its full
-completion, and not knowing where to find the power that will take him
-further; and so he ends in despair.
-
-No, the appeal of the Church, as universal, is simply that it has within
-it that which answers the real and deepest need of every human being.
-There everyone will find his home, when once he has found his need of
-God, if indeed the Church is holy.
-
-And this is also its distinction from the sects; for it endeavours to
-uphold the entire body of the truth, every particle of it that may be of
-service to anyone. I suppose there are very few of us to whom the whole
-of the Creed is a living reality. We may believe it all, but what we
-live by is usually a small part of it, and it is a different part with
-different persons. The essence of sectarianism, as I understand it, is
-the gathering together of those people who live by the same part of the
-Creed, in order that, like mingling with like, they may develop a great
-intensity and fervour of devotion. For a moment, indeed, they may be
-far more effective than the great body of the Church, and yet they
-cannot become universal. There is something lacking from what they
-uphold, which someone needs.[#] The aim of the Church is to be
-universal here also, and to uphold the entire body of the truth,
-presenting it in its entirety, even though the priest who is called upon
-to fulfil that office of presenting it to the people may himself be
-actually living by the slenderest portion of it. No doubt we shall
-present most forcibly that part of the whole truth which is most real to
-ourselves; and for that reason, if no other, we ought to try our utmost
-to gain a personal apprehension of the whole. But men's spiritual
-diseases are of many kinds, and all the healing truths must be offered
-by the Church in which all men are to find life.
-
-
-[#] This is a description of Sectarianism, not of any particular
-Denomination. We are all infected with the sectarian spirit. In many
-respects Rome is far more sectarian than the great Presbyterian bodies
-in Scotland. With all its faults I sincerely believe that the Anglican
-Communion is, in spirit, more of a Church and less of a sect than any
-other body. But then it contains several sects within itself, both
-"High," "Broad," and "Low."
-
-
-The truth which it thus presents, the Church believes to be the gift of
-God. This above all is the idea which it tries to safeguard by the
-outward signs of regular orders and sacraments.
-
-Our belief about the communion service is that there Christ comes to us
-just as once the eternal Word, which was present with all His creation,
-none the less came in full manifestation under the limitations of time
-and space at a particular moment and in a particular country. So in the
-communion the Divine presence which fills the whole world ("Heaven and
-earth are full of His glory," as we say in the service itself) is
-offered to us, and draws near to us; and that not because of any virtue
-in us; it was while we were yet sinners that Christ came and died; it is
-while we are yet sinners that Christ offers Himself to us; and it is as
-guarding against any conception that we can determine how He shall come,
-or when and where, and that we can, as it were, manufacture His presence
-in our own way, that the Church maintains with the utmost emphasis the
-order that is necessary for that service.
-
-It is to preserve the conception of spiritual life as a gift of God, and
-of the Church as the society which recognises and receives it as such a
-gift, in distinction from a mutual benefit society organised for the
-edification of its own members, that the Church insists upon the due
-order of its administration; and it is through concentration upon this
-idea of holiness, and all that it ought to mean in our personal lives,
-that we can make our greatest contribution towards bringing into
-existence again a real Catholic Church, a Church which shall genuinely
-include all the persons who believe in Christ in one order and
-fellowship. The first and indispensable condition of re-union is fuller
-dedication to the will of God in Christ. We shall be united to one
-another when we are all truly united to Him.
-
-But, if that work is to be accomplished, we shall also need wisdom, in
-order rightly to counteract the effects alike of folly and of sin in the
-past history of the Church; and here every man must be willing to make
-what suggestions he can, merely submitting them for acceptance or
-rejection by the whole body of the Church; because unless people are
-prepared to speak of the problem as they see it, leaving the final
-judgment to be formed by the body of which they are members, there is no
-hope of our making any progress at all.
-
-I will therefore, venture to suggest to you six principles, upon which,
-as my vision is at present, I think we might come near to agreement
-among ourselves; and if we should agree upon them, then we could offer
-these or whatever modifications of these the Church thinks fit, to those
-bodies which are at present in separation from us.
-
-I.--First, what do we mean by the Church? Ideally and in its eternal
-reality it is the Body and Bride of Christ, the instrument of His will
-and the object of His love, worthy as both. But in the process of time
-and upon the stage of this world, what are we going to mean by it, and
-who are we going to account its members? When people begin to think of
-this question, they always start with various enthusiastic schemes. The
-members of the Church are the people who have faith, or the people who
-are conscious of the need of pardon, and the like; but all of this
-breaks down because you can never tell who these people are. We must
-have some perfectly plain outward sign if the Church is to be an
-operative agency in this world; and you will find, I think, that there
-is none which you can reach except that it is the fellowship of the
-baptized. Baptism is the Lord's own appointed way by which men should
-be received in the fellowship of His disciples. We must take that as our
-basis.
-
-It is no business of ours to pronounce judgment upon the spiritual state
-of other persons. We shall thank God for every sign of the Christian
-virtues and graces shown in other persons who have not been brought to
-baptism; we may believe that they are members of the Church in heaven;
-but still, I would submit, we must say for all purposes of practical
-working, that the Church on earth is the fellowship of the baptized.
-
-II.--That fellowship exists in fragments and sections. What is the
-peculiar mark of our fragment? This is authoritatively defined for us
-in the Lambeth Quadrilateral,[#] but our special character may be
-expressed briefly by saying that we are trustees for the Catholic order,
-who yet reject what seem to us the accretions which the Church of Rome
-upholds.
-
-
-[#] (_a_) The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. as
-"containing all things necessary to Salvation," and as being the rule
-and ultimate standard of faith.
-
-(_b_) The Apostles' Creed, as the Baptismal Symbol; and the Nicene
-Creed, as the sufficient statement of the Christian faith.
-
-(_c_) The two Sacraments ordained by Christ Himself--Baptism and the
-Supper of the Lord--ministered with unfailing use of Christ's words of
-institution, and of the elements ordained by Him.
-
-(_d_) The Historic Episcopate, locally adapted in the methods of its
-administration to the varying needs of the nations and peoples called of
-God into the Unity of His Church.
-
-
-Now some such order as that which we maintain, is necessary, as it seems
-to me, to the fulfilment of the duty of charity. I hope I am not unfair
-to those who are separated from us, and are influenced by the ideals of
-Puritanism; but it has seemed to me that their discipline is not always
-charitable. Indeed, a Church must either excommunicate freely or else
-possess a recognised order if it is to avoid becoming indistinguishable
-from "the world" about it; if it is to be both holy and a friend of
-sinners it must have an order. The order which we maintain is simply
-that which has come down to us as the actual order of historic
-Christendom.
-
-III.--Thirdly, I would submit that the Body with its orders is a living
-whole, and that it is illegitimate to discuss such a question as the
-"validity" of Orders out of all relation to the historic life of the
-Church. The question of Orders must be considered in relation to the
-whole life of the Body of which they are an organic part.[#]
-
-
-[#] See Appendix IV. _On Orders and Catholicity_.
-
-
-Thus, if we take the famous Quadrilateral as our starting point, a body
-which stands by the Canonical Scriptures, the Creeds and the two great
-Sacraments, though not upholding the episcopal succession, is closer to
-the ideal than one which is indifferent to any of these three as well as
-to the succession; it has maintained many of the (ex hypothesi)
-essential features of a true Church; it approximates to the complete
-requirement. Moreover, within the field of the problem of Orders, there
-are degrees of approximation; it is generally considered that an
-agreement between the Anglican and Presbyterian communions could be far
-more easily reached than between the Anglican and some other Protestant
-bodies. We must, therefore, avoid two kindred errors. One is to set up
-the abrupt dilemma--"Either a true Church or not," and the other is to
-regard the possession of "valid" Orders as being the one and only
-condition of the Catholicity of the body possessing them.
-
-The Church Visible cannot be identical with the Church Invisible; it is
-its sacrament. And the question resolves itself into one concerning the
-degree of adequacy with which it expresses, _and thereby maintains
-through the ages_, the fulness of the truth.
-
-Our actual divisions in the West date from the Reformation. No one
-disputes that the Church just before that time was corrupt to a horrible
-degree. It is possible to hold that the corruption could have been
-purged away without schism if the reformers had been wholly free from
-pride and impatience; I see no means of reaching a sound judgment on
-such a point; but at least it would seem that the guilt for the great
-division was as much in Catholics as in Protestants. In so far as there
-really was necessity of choosing between moral purity with schism on the
-one hand, and organic unity with sales of indulgences and the like on
-the other, there can be no doubt which the whole teaching of Christ
-required His followers to choose. "I will have mercy and not
-sacrifice"; "the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath"; yet
-the Sabbath and the sacrifice were of Divine appointment.
-
-If then a fragment of the Church, confronted as it believes, with such a
-choice, breaks off and organises itself afresh, intending to maintain in
-purity all the Church's life and means of grace, I cannot assert that it
-is for all its generations deprived of Christ's sacramental presence.
-But assuredly the loss of the continuous order which so impressively
-symbolises the Divine origin of the Church and of its Sacraments tends
-to undermine the intention to preserve the whole truth and to obscure
-belief in it. For Orders, as we understand them, are the pledge of the
-unity of the Church across all space and through all time, so that the
-priest who celebrates, does so as the organ and instrument of the
-universal Church, and the congregation at every Eucharist is not the few
-persons gathered together in that building, but Angels and Archangels
-and all the company of Heaven, with whom we join in prayer and worship.
-
-IV.--Consonantly with this I would come to my fourth principle--that the
-whole question of Orders and Sacraments must be considered in reference
-to the Church's life through the ages, and not with direct reference to
-the gift received by any individual at any given service.
-
-How are we to secure (this is our problem) that from generation to
-generation men shall continue to feel that in the service of the Holy
-Communion Christ comes to them as by His own appointment, and they have
-only to be ready to meet with Him; and that in meeting with Him they are
-united with the whole Church in the Holy Communion, the Communion of
-Saints? I believe that the continued recitation of the Creeds in our
-own and other branches of the Church is the main safeguard, not only for
-ourselves but also for those who do not say the Creeds, against that
-combination of Pelagianism and Unitarianism to which men always tend to
-drift; similarly I can conceive that, just because we uphold the full
-conception of sacramental worship, others are enabled to receive
-sacramental grace at their communions. It may be so; I know not. Of
-course it cannot be received if it is not there; but even if it is
-there, its full benefit will not be enjoyed except by those who believe
-in its full power. Two men may stand opposite the same picture; both
-see the same lines and colours, the accidents; but it may be that only
-one sees the artistic reality or substance--the Beauty--while the other
-is blind to it. But the man who finds it does not put it there; the
-artist put it there; and if he had not done so no one could find it
-there; so too the reality of the Sacrament is the work of God. But our
-fruition of it depends on our faith, and even on the exact content of
-our faith. Now I do not for a moment believe that that faith in the
-full doctrine of sacramental grace can survive through the centuries, if
-it is once separated from the whole order which expresses it. Therefore,
-while I am not entitled to deny, as I am equally not concerned to
-assert, that the members of other denominations at their communion
-service receive the same gift that we do; still I say that as trustees
-for the Catholic order, and considering the matter in the light of the
-centuries, we have no right to sacrifice any of those means by which
-this full doctrine has been given to us, and by which perhaps it has
-been also preserved for them.
-
-V.--Fifthly, I would suggest that in any scheme for practical reunion no
-man must be required to repudiate his own spiritual ancestry.
-
-After all, if the Church is the fellowship of the baptized, then our
-brethren of the separation, as we sometimes call them, are members of
-the Church; but they are not members of our branch of the Church; and
-their faith is corporate and active in their membership of their own
-bodies; consequently we are bound to hold that they and their bodies are
-parts of the Catholic Church in this time of the division--the division
-which is due to sin.
-
-If it is true that it was largely, and perhaps mainly, the fault of the
-medieval Church that the split became a necessity; if it is true that it
-was partly, and perhaps mainly, the fault of the Church of England that
-the Wesleyan movement (for example) ever broke off, because we refused
-to make room for what was in its early stages most undoubtedly a
-movement of the Spirit of God in the world, then we have no right to
-condemn those who by reason of our sin, at least as much as their own,
-are outside our fellowship; and we must recognise that, just as in St.
-Paul's argument about the true Israel, blindness in part happened to
-Israel, and so God used the Gentiles to provoke them to jealousy--so
-blindness in part happened to Catholicism, and God is using the
-Protestant bodies to provoke us to jealousy.
-
-We must, I believe, maintain that our order is for us the only possible
-order for the reunited Church. But order is not everything. The wall
-of the Holy City is minute. When the time for reunion comes, we must
-insist upon our own part of the truth in such a way as to avoid all
-condemnation of other bodies for having been separated during this
-time--at least, all condemnation which we do not pronounce quite equally
-upon ourselves. What has happened in the divisions of the Church is a
-severance from one another of elements which are every one of them
-necessary to the healthy life of the Body. If one set of people could
-only get dry food and no drink, and another set could only get drink and
-no food, neither would be healthy. They would have to combine their
-stores before health was possible. Catholics have preserved perhaps a
-fuller sense of worship and of the gifts of God; Protestants have
-perhaps a truer zeal for righteousness and a more intimate access to God
-in prayer. Let us not judge the past; God will judge. But let us
-recognise our need of one another and accept from each other the
-positive truth and life which God has given to either.
-
-VI.--Meanwhile, in the time of the division, different bodies have
-developed different types of religious life. There is a wealth of
-spiritual activity in the world now such as it is difficult to imagine
-under a rigidly united Church; but we can easily preserve that if we are
-ready that there should be within the United Catholic Church different
-Orders--an Order of St. George Fox for example, testifying to the great
-ideal which Christ brought into the world, not as I think, and as I have
-already explained, the right ideal to be followed by all men in all
-sorts of circumstances, but undoubtedly the one method by which in the
-end the work of God can be finally accomplished, and for testimony to
-which I believe some men, and indeed the whole Society of Friends, are
-even now called by God. Also there may well be an Order of St. John
-Wesley, insisting more especially upon the need of individual
-conversion, which the Church, as a vast organisation concerned with
-world movements, is perpetually tempted to leave too much on one side.
-These Orders can quite well govern themselves to a very large extent,
-and order their worship in very many ways, just as is the case in the
-Orders familiar in the medieval Church, and in the Church of Rome at
-this time.
-
-
-These are the principles which I would venture to submit. Probably not
-one of them will win universal assent even in our own communion. But
-amid all our amiable sentiments it is time for somebody to say something
-definite, or as definite as the complexity of the problem allows. In
-criticising and rejecting individual utterances we may at last reach a
-corporate mind.
-
-But let me add one particular warning about the way we go: for in my own
-mind I am quite sure that the Communion is just the place where we need
-to be divided until our unity is real. People say "How terrible to be
-separated there." Yes, terrible indeed! It is the measure of the sin
-of schism. But we must not try to escape the consequences of the sin
-until we have got rid of the sin itself. I say nothing of the problem
-of the mission field or of the possibility of exceptional occasions.[#]
-But I am quite sure that in normal Church life, where all people have
-access to their own services, intercommunion can only be disastrous, as
-tending to obscure the need for real unity, and the difference between
-the various excellences whose combination is to be desired.
-
-
-[#] It must of course be recognised that the problem of intercommunion
-in the mission field is of urgent practical importance. On the present
-situation, the Archbishop of Canterbury's statement, _Kikuyu_.
-
-
-But let us come back to what after all is the only true guarantee and
-the only condition of reunion--the achievement of holiness; that
-holiness needs, as we have seen, to be safeguarded, and the safeguarding
-of it is peculiarly entrusted to us, the ministers of the Church. What
-need then for personal dedication! For upon the degree in which we are
-wholly given to our work depends in large measure the time when God will
-reunite His Church.
-
-We keep separate even from many right activities, but only in order to
-keep pure that spirit by which we are to permeate the whole life of the
-world, bringing it to bear, so far as we are able in our detachment,
-upon every sort of problem, private or public--industrial, commercial,
-political, international--till at last the whole world is governed by
-that spirit, and there is no need for separation any more nor for any
-special place of worship nor special order of religious ministers; for
-then the world and the Church will be indistinguishable in the Holy City
-of God, wherein is no temple, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb
-are the temple of it.
-
-
-
-
- *LECTURE V*
-
- *THE CITIZENSHIP OF HEAVEN*
-
-
-"Our citizenship is in heaven."--Philippians iii. 20.
-
-"He that hath seen me hath seen the Father."--S. John xiv. 9.
-
-
-We have considered in outline the functions of the State and of the
-Church, the two great instruments of God for the furthering of His
-kingdom. Let us now turn to consider, still in mere outline, for
-nothing more is possible, the nature of that Kingdom itself.
-
-There are very many ways in which the subject might be approached, but I
-think that it will be most consonant with the general line of our
-thought in these meditations that we should consider it as the home of
-man's spirit, the fulfilment of his spiritual being. And to that end,
-inasmuch as the Kingdom can only be known by living according to the
-principles of its citizenship, and our present effort is by its very
-nature intellectual only, we must try to reach it in thought as the goal
-towards which the whole spiritual life of man is tending.
-
-No life can be set forth in scientific terms. The moment it is analysed,
-the vitalising power is gone. And even the poet, who has far more
-chance than the logician of making us realise what the life signifies
-for those who live it, is still speaking of it from outside. It is only
-by life itself that we can truly know the Kingdom of God.
-
-We find, all through the New Testament, a contrast drawn between earth
-and heaven. And it is worth while to consider the logical principle of
-that contrast, even though the result is somewhat dry and barren. The
-place of careful analysis here is analogous to that which criticism
-holds in relation to art. The critical analysis of a work of art will
-never of itself enable us to appreciate it, if we are without the
-cultivated artistic faculty; but it may enrich our appreciation. We may
-thereby find more than we should otherwise have found of the elements
-that are combined together to make up the total effect. And then in the
-unity of the renewed experience we receive more enjoyment than we had
-done before. So, too, the Kingdom of God, which for us is something
-that we still hope to reach, and of which the foretaste that we have as
-yet received is a very slight earnest of the glory that shall be
-revealed, may be a goal more potent in its attraction to our wills, when
-we have seen it as the fulfilment of the principles of our whole
-spiritual life as these are discoverable in other departments and
-activities.
-
-The goods of this world, as we have already noticed, are such that the
-more one has the less there is for others. The goods of heaven are of
-such a kind that the more one has the more there is on that account for
-others. So it is with the true virtues of the spiritual life, with love
-and joy and peace, the fruits of the spirit. So it is too with other
-excellences which belong to man as a spiritual being, and which are out
-of the reach of our animal nature: loyalty, beauty and knowledge.
-
-Now the principle of this whole spiritual life is precisely the
-principle of unity, not as distinct from variety but as distinct either
-from antagonism or transitoriness. The two things that distress the
-soul of man are enmities, and the passing away of that which he loves.
-It is by rising above these evils, which beset us in this earthly state,
-that the satisfaction of the soul is found.
-
-There are four main departments of the spiritual life which aspire in
-this way to rise above the evils which beset our mortal state. They are
-Science and Art and Morality and Religion. As we know them in our
-experience, they are all of them due on the human side to a
-dissatisfaction with our experience as we find it. The scientific man
-is disturbed by the apparent chaos in his experience, and he sets out to
-give order to it, and he is satisfied in so far as he discovers that all
-the while it was not chaotic, as it seemed, but orderly. The artist is
-craving for a beauty which, in his ordinary experience, he does not
-find. He selects, he concentrates attention on certain aspects, to reach
-a satisfaction which the world otherwise seems not to give. The man of
-moral aspiration is dissatisfied with the world as he sees it, and he
-sets himself therefore to alter both himself and it, that it may be
-modelled more in accordance with the heart's desire. And the religious
-man finds all of these sources of dissatisfaction working together
-within his soul; he seeks, and in faith finds, that which gives him both
-peace and power.
-
-Let us then begin with what is in itself the least rich of these forms
-of human activity, and consider how it is that Science reaches its
-unity. Let us first recall that there are two forms of multiplicity or
-division which we are seeking to overcome: that which arises from the
-clash of various ideals or desires, the antagonism of man with man; and
-that which arises from the changeableness of the world as we see it.
-With regard to the latter, science does indeed reach real unities; but
-they are unities which leave Time out of sight. Sometimes, no doubt, the
-subject matter which is handled is itself non-temporal, but not in the
-sense of being eternal. So, for example, geometry is entirely without
-relation to time. There is no temporal sequence between the equality of
-the sides and the equality of the angles in the isosceles triangle. But
-where the subject studied is something that changes in Time, it remains
-true that the aim of science is to reach an unchanging principle. So,
-for example, the student of biology may be trying to discover the
-unchanging principle which governs the successive variations of species.
-But when he has found it he has not really mastered the transitoriness;
-he has not in any way gathered up the past and dead into his present
-experience; he has merely found the principle which applies to every
-stage as that stage comes. He reaches some superiority to the
-transitoriness of things, only by abstracting from Time altogether.
-
-And, similarly, the unity between men which is produced by a common
-absorption in such pursuits does not strike very deep. For a man's
-temperament has nothing in the world to do with his scientific
-conclusions, or at least ought not to have. In the ideal pursuit of
-knowledge, all of the things that set men at variance count for nothing
-whatever. Consequently the differences, just because they are ignored,
-are not overcome, with the result that, as at the beginning of this war,
-we may find professors of the various nations, who had been linked
-together, as one might think, closely enough in the pursuit of
-knowledge, hurling manifestoes at one another across their national
-frontiers.
-
-When we pass to the second of the great departments, a real progress may
-be noted in just these points. For in the experience of the artist Time
-is genuinely mastered. We get some illustration of this from the
-absorption which marks the aesthetic contemplation of a picture or a
-statue. For the time that we are really held by it, we forget about
-time altogether. But the case is clearer with regard to those arts
-which handle temporal processes--music and poetry. For it is the whole
-point, let us say, of a drama, that it shall follow a certain
-succession; it is vital to its significance that the scenes shall be in
-that order and no other. If you have two plays, each in three acts, in
-one of which the first act is cheerful in tone, and the second is
-neutral, and the third depressing, while in the other the first act is
-depressing, the second neutral, and the third cheerful, the total effect
-of the two plays is not the average of the three acts in each case,
-which would be neutral for both, but is in the one particularly
-depressing, and in the other particularly cheering. For the play is
-grasped as a whole. It makes a single impression, if it is a good play.
-We know what it means--not indeed because we can state it in other
-words, for it is the only expression of its own meaning; but it has a
-definite significance for us. And the name of the play comes to stand
-for that significance. This is especially noticeable in tragedy, where
-the Greeks, with their sure instinct, chose a story whose plot is known
-to the spectator in advance, so that we have throughout the play both
-the impression of the entire story and the particular impression of each
-scene as it comes and passes. It is significant that the Greeks did so
-choose for tragedy stories whose plot was known, while their comedians
-invented their own plots. And most will agree that we enjoy a great
-play better when we have read it in advance, or when we have already
-seen it on the stage before; because then we do reach something that may
-serve perhaps as the nearest image that we can get for eternity--a grasp
-of the whole stretch of time, realised in its successiveness and in the
-meaning which that successiveness gives to it, and having the sense of
-the whole throughout and seeing each moment, as it comes, in the light
-not only of the past but of the future too.
-
-On this side, then, art is able, for the moment at least, and with
-regard to a period definitely limited by our capacities of
-comprehension, to master Time and give us a unity which includes its
-successiveness within it; so that the past, and even the future, are
-gathered up into the real experience of the present, and we are not only
-conscious of what is before our eyes, but are conscious of it as a part
-of the whole to which it belongs.
-
-In a similar way we notice that while different temperaments are needed
-for the production of different types of art, yet in appreciation all
-are united. For example, it would be quite impossible for the great
-Russian novels to be produced in any other country than Russia; it would
-have been quite impossible for the great German philosophy to have been
-produced in any other nation than Germany; it would have been quite
-impossible for the great English poetry to have been produced in any
-other nation than England. These literatures belong to the soil out of
-which they spring. But the people of all the other nations can
-appreciate them, and all are glad because they are different. And so
-far as the artistic side of our nature governs our whole being, it is
-capable of linking us together in a real fellowship, which includes and
-is based upon our differences and the appreciation of them, and is
-therefore firmly rooted, because what might have been the source of
-antagonism is become itself the bond of unity.
-
-But we must notice that each of these only reaches a very provisional
-attainment. If science likes to mark off a certain department of
-reality for its investigation, it can reach something like finality
-concerning just that department. I suppose that mechanics is something
-like a complete system of truth, so far as the mechanical aspect of
-things can be isolated from all other aspects. But then, nothing in the
-world is mechanical and only mechanical. Nothing in the world is
-chemical and only chemical. There are always other qualities there,
-from which abstraction has been made. Science therefore inevitably sets
-before itself as its goal the understanding of the universe, and it
-could not reach any absolute certainty concerning any real fact except
-so far as it had obtained omniscience. In mathematics it reaches
-certainty, because in mathematics the object is what it is defined to
-be, and nothing else. But no given material thing is just a triangle.
-It may even be disputed whether any given thing can be, according to the
-definition, a triangle at all.
-
-Science then is marked by a restlessness until it reaches this
-omniscience. It began when the first man said "Why?" The moment that
-question is asked, Science is launched upon its course. But the answer
-to that question merely prompts anyone of scientific instincts to say
-"Why?" to the answer. Why is there a war? Historical science will
-point to the diplomatic documents, and from them to the course of
-history moulding national aspiration. Then if we say, "Why was the
-cause of war such? And, why were there such national aspirations?" we
-shall find ourselves soon investigating the literature of the countries
-and then their climates; from this we are shortly involved in astronomy
-and geology and all the other sciences. You can have nothing that is
-final until you reach omniscience. And so Science moves, perpetually
-saying "Why?" to every statement that is made. Far in the distance, in
-the infinite distance, is its goal of a complete satisfaction gained
-through understanding the universe in its entirety.
-
-Art can similarly only achieve a provisional attainment of its goal; but
-the attainment while it lasts is more substantial. Its method, as
-distinct from that of science, is mental rest. The aim of the artist is
-to concentrate attention upon the object, holding it there by various
-devices. That is why pictures are put into frames. Something abruptly
-irrelevant, although not discordant, is put round the object to help us
-fix our minds upon it. That is why poetry is written in metre. The
-mind is abruptly brought back by the recurrence of the rhythm or the
-recurrence of the sound in rhyme, and held within the total composition.
-We notice that it is precisely where the subject matter of the poem is
-slight that the rhythm needs to be strongly marked or the system of
-rhyme complicated; where the subject matter itself has a strong appeal,
-any rhyming seems to be out of place and tiresome. The aim is simply to
-grip the attention and hold it upon the object and make us see it as it
-is; not after the fashion of science, connecting it with other things,
-but understanding it by getting to know it in and for itself as
-thoroughly as may be.[#] Now in thus concentrating attention upon some
-one object and claiming complete absorption in that object, art is
-implicitly claiming to give a perfect mental satisfaction and an
-absolute peace. But it can never succeed in that unless the object upon
-which it is concentrating our attention is an adequate symbol for the
-whole truth of things in which the whole of our nature will find such
-satisfaction.
-
-
-[#] This is why no great work of art over becomes out of date, whereas
-the work of a great scientist is always liable to do so, because his
-successors revise it in the light of ever widening knowledge.
-
-
-Moreover, these activities of the mind or spirit fail to govern our
-lives as a whole precisely because they are contemplative and not
-active. We stand before the world gazing at it, setting our minds
-indeed to work upon it in certain ways, yet not fundamentally changing
-it. But we are active beings, with wills as well as contemplative
-minds, and our volitional action lies very largely outside the range
-which these activities and interests can control. And therefore it is
-that so little real unity is reached by means of them.
-
-In Morality the practical instincts and impulses are for the first time
-included. Morality is the science or the art, or both, of living in
-society; of living, that is to say, as fellow members with other beings,
-who also have aspirations and ideals as legitimate as our own, so that
-our own claim to pursue our own ideals must be won by recognition of
-their equal claim to pursue theirs. And the man who, with full mastery
-of himself, if such a man exists, is following out a great purpose that
-is adequate to satisfy his whole nature, is a man who has achieved the
-conquest of Time in the completest way. It is essential to the pursuit
-of a purpose that we move from stage to stage, as we adapt means to our
-end, and yet all of it is one thing, thought and experienced as one.
-Indeed a test that we always instinctively apply to a biography is
-whether it enables us to see the different stages of a man's life as
-constituting one spiritual whole. That is just what we desire the
-biographer to set forth before us.
-
-At the same time Morality conquers antagonism because it is the life of
-fellowship. It begins with the recognition that other men have as much
-right to live as we have, and we buy our rights precisely by conceding
-theirs. Its root principle is the recognition of this brotherhood or
-fellow-membership. And yet it, too, never reaches its goal; it fails in
-two ways; every man in this world, however perfectly he may achieve
-mastery of his own nature--and it may be doubted if any man has ever
-done even that by his own strength--is so conditioned by circumstances
-that he is never able to make his life a perfect masterpiece of art; and
-as regards the whole fellowship of which he is a member, and his own
-relation to it, he can find no absolute rules except the command to
-reach a state of mind which he cannot reach by his own will. There are
-no moral laws that are absolute except the law to love one's neighbour
-as oneself. All the rest have exceptions somewhere. "Thou shall not
-kill," was the formula of the old law. But we have altered it into,
-"Thou shalt do no murder." It is always wrong to murder, because murder
-is such killing as is wrong. But it is not always wrong to kill. And so
-we find no principle that can be made entirely binding and universal,
-except the law to love our neighbour as ourselves. But how are we to do
-it? Is there any man who seriously thinks that by taking thought he can
-make himself love somebody else?
-
-All of these three then, and the last as emphatically as any, in spite
-of its comprehending a greater section of human nature, fail to reach
-their own achievement.
-
-In the fourth stage, in Religion, all would find their fulfilment. For
-the purpose of God, if there be a God, is the principle of unity which
-the scientist is seeking. The nature of God, if there be a God, is that
-perfect beauty which would be the culmination of the life of Art. The
-righteousness of God, if there be a God, is the satisfaction of the
-moral aspiration. But we are not left so to conjecture what life would
-be like if we could carry our own spiritual faculties to their own
-highest development. We are given the express image of the person of
-God. "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." We shall not indeed
-have perfect knowledge of the sphere of religion until we have seen how
-the whole of history and every detail of our lives is, after all, the
-result and work of creative Love; but while Science and Art and Morality
-struggle towards their goal and only realise their need for it, God
-gives Himself as the satisfaction of that need. It is His gift, not our
-discovery; but we see that in this principle all Time is gathered up,
-for if the life of Christ is the manifestation of the nature of God,
-then it is the manifestation of the root-principle of all history.[#]
-
-
-[#] I am aware that the argument here is _per saltum_, but space forbids
-its full development. I hope soon to have completed a book which will
-fill in the outline sketch offered in this Lecture. Meanwhile I would
-refer to my essay on _The Divinity of Christ_ in _Foundations_,
-specially pp. 213-223, 242-263.
-
-
-Then we see, too, how all men may be united in perfect fellowship,
-because all men loving God will find themselves loving those whom God so
-loves. This hope or conviction remains in the region of faith, not of
-knowledge; what of that? In the other departments also we have found no
-knowledge. We have only found approximation towards it. We have, as it
-were, converging lines which never meet; and we have also the point at
-which we see they would meet if produced. Is that not enough? Here we
-find is the principle that will give unity, as we work it out, to the
-whole scheme of our spiritual life. Morality says, "Love all men." How
-can I? Science says, "Realise the truth which explains the universe."
-How can I? But I can gaze upon the manifestation of God in Jesus
-Christ; I can meditate upon His Cross and Resurrection. I can see here
-and there how it may be true that this is indeed the explanation of all
-the sorrow, even of all the sin. For if it is true that the supreme
-manifestation of the love of God was historically conditioned by the
-supreme sin of humanity in the treason of Judas, then surely one begins
-to see how even out of the grossest evil the glory of God wins triumph
-for itself, which we too may share if we are first drawn to share the
-sacrifice.
-
-As I become absorbed in that contemplation I find in the first place a
-new power to love all men, as I remember that He died for them just as
-He died for me. In the degree in which I really believe that this is
-the manifestation of the power of God and the governing authority of the
-universe, I find this thought over-ruling other thoughts and temptations
-to hostility or enmity. As I remember that those whom I am inclined to
-despise or hate are those for whom He thought it worth while to die, my
-contempt and my hatred are rebuked and cancelled.
-
-And similarly, if I realise--or in the degree in which I realise--that
-here is set forth the power that governs all things, that this is the
-way in which God rules the world, and that Calvary is the mode of His
-omnipotence, I begin to find myself indifferent, and that increasingly,
-to those things which are called sorrow and pain.
-
-But we shall only find this as we expect to find it. All through our
-spiritual life we may be perpetually in contact, as it were, with the
-means of receiving what is good, and never receive it because we are not
-expecting it. We have not expected peace of mind from our worship, we
-have not expected a sense of security against evil; that is why we have
-not found it; but it is our fault. And certainly most of us have not
-expected to find fellowship from worship. We have known something of
-the grace of Jesus Christ, perhaps even of the love of God; but of the
-fellowship of the Holy Spirit, of the sense of being linked to one
-another because all dominated by that one power, most of us have found
-nothing, because we have not expected it.
-
-But if we are expecting this, all the testimony of the saints in every
-generation goes to show that we shall find what we have expected.
-
-The power that can give us security against the transitoriness of the
-world and against the instincts of antagonism is there in the faith that
-we place in God. "I will put my trust in God," the Psalmist says, "I
-will not fear what flesh can do unto me." This is not because flesh
-will not do such hurt as it can to the man who puts his trust in
-God--the Jews crucified Christ--but because to the man who puts his
-trust in God, anything whatever that happens becomes part of God's
-purpose for his life, and therefore he will not fear it. For "all
-things," sorrow as well as joy, pain as well as pleasure, sin as well as
-righteousness, "all things work together for good to them that love
-God."
-
-
-
-
- *LECTURE VI*
-
- *GOD IN HISTORY*
-
-
-"I am the Alpha and the Omega, saith the Lord God, which is and which
-was and which is to come, the Almighty."--Revelation i. 8.
-
-
-We have considered the two great instruments of God by which He fashions
-the spiritual life of man, and we have considered that spiritual life
-itself in the outline at least of its four main departments; and now, as
-we close our line of thought, we need still to consider how it is that,
-in these fields and by these instruments, God carries forward His work.
-
-The conception of God as at work in human history, guiding it,
-controlling it, and judging men by its course, is the great contribution
-of Israel to the religion of the world. It is linked of course with
-that belief in the union of perfect righteousness with the divine, power
-which we usually speak of under the somewhat cumbrous title of Ethical
-Monotheism. We remember what was really at stake in that great day upon
-Mount Carmel when Elijah confronted the priests of Baal; it was whether
-the conception of God as righteous and demanding righteousness should
-prevail, or the conception of God as a capricious Being, needing only to
-be propitiated, and in connection with whose very worship licentiousness
-was tolerated and even encouraged.
-
-But, after all, the greatest souls, at least in every highly-developed
-religion, have believed that God is righteous in Himself. What gives to
-Israel its supreme significance in the spiritual history of mankind is
-the conviction that this righteous God is daily and hourly at work in
-the history of men; and that conviction gives to the faith of Israel a
-primacy and supremacy over all the other partial faiths, even though
-they may be superior in certain departments.
-
-If we think of some of the conceptions by means of which we try to bring
-before our minds the meaning of the word "God," we may find that with
-regard to several of them, other nations had advanced further than
-Israel before the coming of the Lord.
-
-God is Spirit. The Hindu knew that, and knows it still, quite as much
-as Israel.
-
-God is Law. The more thoughtful at least among the ancient Romans, and
-particularly the great Roman Stoics, knew that with a vividness that was
-scarcely ever attained in Israel.
-
-God is Beauty. Assuredly the ancient Greeks knew that as Israel never
-realised it at all.
-
-But the conception of Israel that God is at work in history means that
-the God of Israel gives to these other gods or conceptions of God, each
-its own time and place of emergence and decay. The God who is revealed
-to us in the Old Testament is Himself the Being who appoints that the
-Indian or the Roman or the Greek should reach these particular
-convictions; and in these partial apprehensions of the Divine, before
-the full revelation came, the faith of Israel is determinative and
-regulative for all the other faiths; and moreover, it is this faith that
-God is at work in the actual daily history of men, which makes the faith
-of Israel the natural and proper introduction to the Incarnation, where
-God Himself took flesh and lived among men and died at a time and in a
-place--in Palestine and under Pontius Pilate.
-
-This exaltation of the Holy God, actually at work within men and at
-their side, while it leads to a sense of awe before the Holiness of the
-Almighty, also leads to a sense of the dignity of this world, and of
-man's life in it, which is lacking, as a rule, from other great
-religions, and that too in proportion as those other religions are
-spiritual. For the Hindu, for example, this world and all that is in it
-is mere illusion. He is spiritual enough but he is not material enough;
-and we find there that contempt for the things of the body which
-invariably issues in a contempt for moral conduct; for our moral conduct
-here, while we live upon this planet, is wrought out through our bodies.
-But the religion of Israel, and especially its completion in the
-Incarnation, wherein God Himself came in the flesh, gives at once a
-dignity to this world of ours, to our bodies, and to all the material
-side of life.
-
-When Christ stood before Pilate, the Kingdom of God was in appearance,
-at least, undergoing judgment at the hands of the kingdom of this world;
-but it is not merely a contrast of good with evil. It is a contrast of
-the perfect with the very imperfect, but yet not merely evil, power.
-Pilate is not Satan; and the Lord Himself, in the moment of His trial,
-recognises that the authority by which He is condemned is an authority
-that is derived from God--"Thou couldest have no power at all against
-Me, except it were given thee from above." The kingdoms of this world,
-which are to become the kingdoms of our God and of His Christ, are not
-simply something evil. The contrast of Church and World is not the
-contrast between good and evil; but it is the contrast between two
-stages in the work which God is accomplishing in history, and those two
-may often come into conflict.
-
-Let us then ask what is the central principle of God's guidance of His
-people, so far as it may be deduced from the tiny fragment of history
-that we really know. In that fragment at least, we may say, I think,
-with little hesitation, that its method and its aim is spiritual growth,
-or, if you like to put it an expansion and enrichment of personality.
-
-We are sometimes inclined to think our own personality is something that
-is given to us from the outset, and entirely belongs to us; but that
-idea will not stand examination for a moment. Individual personality is
-a social product. It can only be developed under social influences. A
-man may be born with many great talents, but if his environment does not
-encourage their development, these talents will remain for the most part
-undeveloped and unknown--either to himself or to anybody else. Indeed
-the greater the talent with which a man is endowed, the more difference
-is made to him by the kind of surroundings in which he is put. A man of
-very few gifts and little natural capacity will be much the same,
-whether he has abundant opportunity for mental and spiritual growth or
-little opportunity; but the man of great capacities, needing for their
-development the encouragement of surroundings, is an entirely different
-being according as those surroundings are favourable or the reverse; and
-so we reach the curious result that the greatest personality, while no
-doubt he must have brought into the world something given to him by God
-that was capable of development, is yet more entirely dependent upon the
-society in which he is living than people with a less wide range of
-gifts.
-
-Again, it is only within a society which has developed some character
-for itself, which has indeed a personality of its own, that individual
-personality can reach very much development. You cannot have genius in a
-savage tribe. Genius is the focal expression of the personality of a
-whole people. It is that people coming to life, and possessed of voice;
-and you do not find it where there is little social development. It is
-only as the tribe or the nation begins to have some definite character
-of its own that it is itself sufficiently organised to develop from its
-own individual member those gifts, and elicit those activities, which
-are the signs of genius.
-
-We find then, that individual personality, or spiritual life, is
-dependent upon the spiritual life of society; and we need to notice that
-this society has every mark by which we distinguish personality in the
-individual. It has aspirations: it has a predominant character; it has
-claims, and it has duties. It has in fact, in the literal sense of the
-word, corporate personality, and just as the many instincts and impulses
-which are to be found in human nature, and may be very discordant with
-one another, are welded together to make up the single life of a human
-being, so the whole gifts and instincts and ambitions and aspirations of
-all the individual citizens are welded together, to make up the
-personality of the whole society.
-
-Moreover, every nation is in itself not only the combination of
-individual citizens, but also of minor groups within itself, all of
-which have these same marks, and all of which are in the real genuine
-sense persons, spiritual individuals with a life of their own.
-
-Now, as we look over the history of the development which thus goes on
-side by side in the individual and in society, we find that its
-principle in the fragment of history that we really know has been that
-isolated excellences should be brought to perfection first; and after
-something like perfection has been reached in the separate departments
-taken singly, the combination of them is brought about, in order that
-the richer and fuller life may be perfected, in which all of them find a
-place.
-
-European history derives its whole life from Palestine, Greece and Rome;
-and in each of those three peoples, some one excellence was developed to
-a peculiar degree. Rome perfected and has bequeathed to us the
-instincts for social order, as embodied in law. The history of the Roman
-people is of significance, precisely because one may there trace the
-growth and working out of this instinct for social or political life.
-There has never been anything to rival it in history. No modern nation
-has shown the same extraordinary political sense and sanity. The Romans
-were not great political philosophers. They did not think very much
-about the principles on which they acted; but simply because of their
-peculiar gift in this direction they welded together a social order
-which lasted throughout their Empire in a wonderful way; and to this day
-the law of Europe is to an enormous extent the law of ancient Rome.
-
-To ancient Greece, it is hard to say what we do not owe. Her peculiar
-characteristic is intellectual passion; a passion for reaching
-perfection in just what the intellect is particularly qualified to
-grasp, truth and beauty. No doubt the ancient Greeks themselves thought
-a great deal about their ordinary politics and their military
-activities, and the wars between the various States; but these matter
-very little. The Greek people are significant for evermore not because
-of the Athenian trireme or the Macedonian phalanx, but because Aeschylus
-stood in astonished awe before the operation of the Divine Justice;
-because Sophocles reflected the whole of human life, even its ugliest
-manifestations, in the mirror of a soul so calm and pure, that as we
-look at that reflection all life seems bathed in peace and beauty;
-because Euripides entered into the sorrows of simple folk; because
-Thucydides, with a still unrivalled zeal for the genuine truth of
-history, said the wise word about nearly every political condition that
-has arisen since his time; because Plato dreamed "a Vision of all time
-and all existence," proclaimed that it can never be just to do harm to
-any man whatever harm he may have done to us; proclaimed also that "God
-is in no way unrighteous, but in all ways absolutely righteous, nor is
-anything more like to God than whosoever among men shall become
-perfectly righteous;" foreseeing also that if a perfectly righteous man
-should come on earth he would die, scourged and crucified.[#] There is
-nowhere before the New Testament anything that comes nearer to its own
-highest truths, not in the Old Testament itself, than what you will find
-in Plato.
-
-
-[#] _Republic_ i. 335*d*; _Theaetetus_ 176*c*; _Republic_ ii. 361*e*.
-
-
-This influence,--the influence of this intellectual passion--has been
-the driving force in nearly all the movements since that time. It has
-been said there is nothing in the world which moves that is not Greek in
-origin, and it is almost true; it is from the Greeks that we have learnt
-"the use of reason to modify experience" and they derived it from the
-intellectual passion for truth and beauty.
-
-To Palestine we owe the inspiring and governing faith of which I have
-already spoken--the one faith that can give real significance to these
-other two, faith in the Holy God at work in history.
-
-It is noticeable that each of these countries was conspicuously weak in
-those other qualities which were not especially entrusted to it.
-Ancient Rome was not at all specially religious and was conspicuously
-unintellectual. The people of Greece again are not conspicuously
-religious, though in their cults there is a haunting beauty; and they
-were not at all politically successful; the history of Athens, the
-flower of Greece, is the history of a State in which almost every
-generation threw up a supreme genius who proceeded to change the
-constitution in accordance with his magnificent ideas; the result was
-political instability of an appalling character.[#] And Palestine has
-contributed very little to us as regards social organisation, and is
-markedly lacking in the scientific and artistic gifts. We have only to
-consider the great images that are set before us, let us say in the Book
-of Ezekiel, or again in the Book of Revelation, to see that there is no
-attempt in these efforts of the imagination to achieve a beautiful or
-harmonious whole. The symbolic elements are added one to another
-because of the value of their meaning; but there is no effort to
-visualise the whole; and if we try to make it, we quickly find that such
-a thing was never intended.
-
-
-[#] It is of course true that the Greek genius gave us what we now mean
-by civilisation, namely, the combination of political unity and personal
-freedom. On this see the admirable first chapter of Mr. Edwyn Bevan's
-_The House of Seleucus_. But it remains true that the race from whose
-intellectual genius this whole product sprang had not in any
-considerable degree the capacity for controlling their own invention.
-
-
-Each of these then reached a genuine supremacy in its own department;
-and the history of Europe is to an enormous extent the history of the
-inter-action of these three forces as they mingle and combine in the
-polities of the barbarian invaders who wrecked the Roman Empire. We
-watch the periods of domination of each successively. Christianity grew
-up within the Roman Empire, and the fascination of that great Empire
-cast a glamour about it in the minds even of those who destroyed it, so
-that the life which emerges out of chaos in the Middle Ages is
-predominantly very Latin. The Renaissance is precisely the invasion of
-Greek influence, and the Reformation is very largely the rediscovery of
-the Hebrew.
-
-For a while the three new forces worked together, carrying men's thought
-and action forward; and then in the 18th century it would seem that
-there was, in England at any rate, a torpor due to their exhaustion;
-when revival came it was because Wesley and his friends revived the
-Hebrew element in our life, because Newman and Pusey with their friends
-revived the Latin element, and because F. D. Maurice and the Broad
-Church movement revived the Hellenistic, and this, with its passion for
-more adequate comprehension and expression, is the dominant force of our
-time. We watch these three influences still at work; but as they
-interact upon one another and within the persons of the new races, a new
-product is gradually being produced, and in those corporate
-personalities which we call nations, we see a character being born which
-is something that history has not known before.
-
-
-The first requirement of personality is always freedom--freedom as we
-have already said in its two senses, that conduct is not dictated from
-without but is governed by the whole person, and not by isolated
-elements; and the corporate persons need freedom just as much as the
-individual; hence the need, the vital and absolute need, for political
-sovereignty in any State which is conscious of itself as a person, that
-is as having a single spiritual life.
-
-But that life and freedom are exercised only in the citizens who are
-members of the State. We cannot surely assert that the corporate person
-is immortal, as the individual is; and therefore, to destroy a State is
-to inflict a more irreparable loss than to kill a man, which is one
-reason at least, perhaps the chief reason, why a man should die for the
-political freedom of his country, and even, if need be, kill for it;
-but, as freedom is the first requirement of personality, fellowship is
-its first duty, for it is true of corporate personalities quite as much
-as of individuals that they only find themselves and fulfil themselves
-in their inter-action upon one another, and the nations of the world do
-in fact need one another, and need one another's full life.
-
-In economics we found out long ago that in order to be wealthy, a
-country needs rich neighbours who may afford good markets. It is so in
-every other department. We need the gifts of the other peoples. We
-need that they shall be free and vigorous. Indeed the chief lesson
-which the world at this time needs to learn is just this--that all the
-nations of the world need one another, each needing also that the others
-should be free, in order that they may bring their contributions to the
-common life in which all share.
-
-But we should, I think, be reading the signs of the times amiss if we
-did not also take account of the fact that there has been growing up
-lately a new type of corporate personality, not known to history before,
-and exemplified by your own United States and by the British Empire; the
-conception of sovereign States linked together in a single life, and
-exercising therein a joint sovereignty in dealing with those who lie
-outside the federation, is something of which history bears no record;
-and we need to try to understand its principle, and see what it is
-capable of contributing to the life of men in order that we may not fail
-to use our opportunity, and bring our contribution.[#]
-
-
-[#] See Appendix V. _On Providence in History_.
-
-
-
-There is our outline sketch of the way in which the history of our own
-civilisation has grown, within which the Church and Nation are at work.
-We are members of both. What duty falls upon us as the result of that
-dual membership? The Christian citizen is called of necessity to fulfil
-one of three functions--prophet, priest and king.
-
-The prophet is one who is called to testify to the ideal unflinchingly,
-not considering consequences, not perhaps considering ways and means of
-reaching the ideal, but simply insisting on its nature and calling men
-and nations to penitence so far as they fail to reach it. It may
-require more courage than the office of the king or statesman, and yet
-in itself it is the easiest, because it is relatively simple.
-
-In all modern nations, and more so in the degree in which they are
-democratic, every citizen partakes of the duty of kingship. He has some
-share in determining how his nation shall act, either in the management
-of its own internal affairs or in its dealings with other people, and
-one who has this responsibility and is also a Christian, is involved in
-the absolute duty of trying to think, and to think with genuine effort,
-how he may be actually guiding his nation toward the ideal. He must not
-be content with pious platitudes leading to no action, nor content to
-consider only his own country's welfare; but as a member of the Church
-of Christ which embraces all mankind, he is called to think out and,
-having thought, to pursue in act the methods by which his nation may
-genuinely be doing its part to build up the one great Temple of God--His
-Holy City.
-
-The priest is prophet and statesman, both at once. He, as minister of
-the Word of God, must perpetually insist upon the true ideal, and bid
-men to guard against all self-contentment so far as they fail to reach
-it; and yet he must be ready to take his stand by the side of every
-individual or group of individuals, even of the nation itself, nerving
-each to do the best of which it then and there in the circumstances of
-the day is capable. And meanwhile he is a wretched human being like the
-rest, terribly liable to pride if he upholds an ideal higher than is
-usually recognised; terribly liable to worldliness, alike in his own
-soul and in his teaching, if for a single moment he forsakes the Divine
-Presence; and uniquely exposed to the deadliest of all temptations; for
-while we preach what neither we nor anybody else can practise, we are
-sorely tempted to be content with spiritual mediocrity ourselves.
-
-But above all, at this time the necessity, I think, is for a clear
-testimony concerning the purpose of God for His people, and His kingdom
-that shall surely come. We have made our precepts so tame; our efforts
-for peace and fellowship have been so much less exhilarating than other
-men's efforts for war; we have been very mild; and that is not the
-spirit of Christ, or of His Kingdom. The spirit of Christ is the spirit
-of all heroism in all ages.
-
-In 1848, a little republic was founded in Rome to stand for justice and
-purity of government amid the corrupt States all round. It was attacked
-by those States, and at last it yielded; on the day when the
-capitulation was signed masses of people were gathered together in the
-great Piazza outside St. Peter's, and there rode among them the man
-whose faith and heroism had sustained that siege for more weeks than the
-wiseacres thought it could last days. When the cheering had subsided,
-he made no acknowledgment, but simply said:
-
-
- "I am going out from Rome. I offer neither quarters, nor
- provisions, nor wages. I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches,
- battles, death. Let him who loves his country with his heart
- not with his lips only follow me."
-
-
-And they streamed out after him into the hills. His name was Garibaldi;
-and because of his heroism and theirs the kingdom of Italy is in the
-world to-day.
-
-But the invitation of Christ is in exactly that spirit--"I offer neither
-quarters, nor provisions, nor wages. I offer hunger, thirst, forced
-marches, battles, death." "If any man would come after Me, let him deny
-himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me."
-
-The cross, when our Lord spoke those words, was quite a real thing. To
-take up the cross did not mean bearing life's little inconveniences with
-equanimity. It meant literally to put the rope round one's neck, and be
-ready simply for anything that might come. That is the spirit in which
-we are summoned to work for Christ. Can we rise to it? The Prince of
-Peace was not a "mild man." This is the vision that His disciple had of
-Him:
-
-
- "His head and His hair were white, as white wool, white as snow;
- and His eyes were as a flame of fire; and His feet like unto
- burnished brass, as if it had been refined in a furnace; and His
- voice as the voice of many waters. And He had in His right hand
- seven stars: and out of His mouth proceeded a sharp two-edged
- sword; and His countenance was as the sun shineth in its
- strength. And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as one dead."
-
-
-Can we present the figure of Christ as endowed with anything like that
-compelling power? If so, we are worthy ministers. It not, we are making
-dull the one great adventure of the world.
-
-There is only one way in which we can succeed. It is that we cling to
-faith in God, the Author of the drama, in which we play our part; God,
-Himself the Guide along the path we are to follow; God, not only the
-Guide, but the very Way in which we are to walk; God, not only the Guide
-and Way, but the Strengthener within our souls, enabling us to follow;
-and God the Guide, the Way, the Strengthener, Himself also the Goal to
-which we would come. "For in Him we move and live and have our being."
-
- Yea thro' life, death, thro' sorrow and thro' sinning
- He shall suffice me, for He hath sufficed;
- Christ is the end, for Christ was the beginning,
- Christ the beginning, for the end is Christ.
-
-
-_I am the Alpha and the Omega, saith the Lord God, which is and which
-was and which is to come, the Almighty._
-
-
-
-
- *APPENDIX I*
-
- *ON THE APOCALYPTIC CONSCIOUSNESS*
-
-
-It is very difficult for the modern reader to recover the frame of mind
-in which Apocalypse has its origin, but we may do this more easily if we
-look for parallels outside the field of religious history. It has been
-well said that the mediaeval man looked upwards and downwards--to Hell
-and to Heaven; his view of the world is on a vertical plane; the modern
-man has a horizontal view, looking to the past and future--the past as
-it has existed, and the future as it shall exist, in the history of
-human society upon this earth. We need if possible to combine these
-two, but it is a very difficult achievement. With our point of view we
-inevitably read Apocalypse as if it were a literal history of the future
-written before the event; but this is not its primary significance. The
-religious consciousness from which it springs was highly indifferent to
-the lapse of time: very likely the seer expected the speedy realisation
-of his vision so far as he thought about things in that way at all, but
-this was not his primary concern. Let us take a parallel, as was
-suggested a moment ago, from another field. The socialistic movement in
-its early days seemed committed to an immediate expectation of the
-millennium following upon a catastrophic change in the structure of
-human society. The arrival of the millennium now seems postponed
-indefinitely and evolution has taken the place of revolution as a
-method, and yet a socialist who is really in the movement does not feel
-any breach of continuity; he knows that he is one in spirit with the
-earlier writers and that they were never mainly concerned either with
-the date at which the millennium would come or the means by which they
-imagined it brought about, but precisely with the contrast between the
-ideal as they conceived it and the actual as they saw it.
-
-We may take another instance from a slightly different department of
-thought. Dante imagined that the Mount of Purgatory was the immediate
-antipodes of the Hill of Zion, but if some traveller had gone round the
-world and assured him that the Mount of Purgatory was not there, it
-would not in the smallest degree have affected his doctrine of
-Purgatory. So it is with the apocalyptists; there is an immense amount
-of machinery provided by which this world is to be abruptly changed into
-the Kingdom of God, and because that Kingdom is so present to the
-consciousness of the writer, he can speak of it as even now about to
-appear upon the earth. But this is not what chiefly interests him: his
-point of view is vertical, not horizontal; all time-spans are
-foreshortened into a moment, because his whole interest is in the
-contrast between the Kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world; we
-therefore do him wrong in supposing that the postponement of his hope is
-any grievous disappointment, or any proof of real error. The date of
-its fulfilment was never a matter of much concern to him.
-
-So we may, I think, reverently believe that our Lord Himself passes
-through the experience of the apocalyptists at moments of great
-exultation, as, for example, when the seventy return and say that the
-devils are made subject to them, or when He realises the imminence of
-the fall of Jerusalem, and therefore the removal of the chief barrier to
-His Kingdom's progress. All time is foreshortened; Satan falls from
-Heaven and the Son of Man appears in glory; but this is no forecast of
-history as we understand history. One evangelist tells us of a parable
-which He uttered precisely because of His perception that the disciples
-erroneously supposed "that the Kingdom of God was immediately to
-appear." All His insistence upon the coming Kingdom is focussed in the
-Passion, as has been shown in the text. When the revelation of God's
-inmost nature was completed in the completion of His own self-sacrifice,
-this brought with it the power that could change the kingdoms of this
-world into the Kingdom of our God and of His Christ. From then onwards
-"He cometh with the clouds"; but the completion of His Kingdom when
-"every eye shall see Him, and they which pierced Him," lies still in the
-future. The contrast of tenses in this passage can hardly be accidental;
-from the moment when He was lifted up from the earth in the Passion,
-Resurrection and Ascension (which are the revelation in successive
-phases of the one unchanging glory of God) His coming is a present fact;
-but our perception of His coming is something still growing as His
-Spirit guides us into all the truth, until at last we know even as we
-are known.
-
-
-
-
- *APPENDIX II*
-
- *ON MORAL AND SPIRITUAL AUTHORITY*
-
-
-It may be objected that the Church should never in any circumstances
-employ force--at any rate, physical force. But I believe the objection
-is due, partly to a latent Manichaeism which holds that matter is always
-evil, or at least "unspiritual," and partly to a very just fear that
-force may be wrongly used if its use is permitted at all. Yet there are
-some cases where the Church would plainly be not only at liberty, but
-morally bound, to use force.
-
-Suppose a clergyman begins to give teaching that is absolutely at
-variance with the doctrine of the Church, the Church may appeal to his
-better feelings and ask him to resign; but if he will not, the Church
-must assuredly have the right to turn him out, and that, if necessary,
-by force.
-
-No doubt in a civilised country what the Church does as a rule is to ask
-the State to act against the man, on the ground that he has broken
-contract and holds his position on false pretences. This is what the
-Mediaeval Church called "handing the offender over to the secular arm."
-
-But let us imagine the situation in a Mission Church where a convert
-has, for penance, been excluded from attendance at public worship for a
-period. Suppose he insists upon coming; then certainly the congregation
-would be right forcibly to remove him. Again, supposing the use of
-force as discipline may be of advantage to moral development (and up to
-a certain stage I am sure it may), and supposing there is no civilised
-State to employ it, the Church will be right to do what is best for the
-character of those for whom it is concerned. But no doubt all this is
-purely preparatory to the positive spiritual work of the Church, which
-must always take the form of appeal and not of force.
-
-There is, however, so much confusion on the subject of moral and
-spiritual authority in general, that it may not be out of place to add
-here some remarks upon it.
-
-The word "authority" is derived from a Latin word which may perhaps be
-best translated by "weight."
-
-When we speak of a man of weight, or an opinion that carries weight, we
-have something very near the original meaning of the term authority.
-Sometimes we are inclined to think of authority as best represented by
-the political ruler, or the military commander. But these are not really
-typical kinds of authority. They are very special cases where authority
-is clothed with compelling force. But in the spheres of which we are
-thinking there is not necessarily present any compelling force at all.
-When we think of authority in religion, in its connection with morals
-and such questions, there is no force, at any rate necessarily, present
-at all, and the Church's authority in the true sense is not any the less
-because it does not practise the methods of the Inquisition: nor was it
-any greater in the days when to its own proper authority it added
-coercive power, appealing to people in the name of what is in itself not
-authority strictly speaking, at all. For if I believe just because the
-Church is an assembly of the saints of God and its formularies are
-summaries of their experience, then I am believing on the ground of the
-Church's authority. But if I believe because an officer of the Church
-threatens me with the rack in the case of disbelief, I am believing not
-because the Church has authority, but because I dislike physical pain.
-
-So authority always in the end means weight--what carries weight with
-our judgment. We can weigh one authority against another; we may weigh
-the authority of one theologian with that of another by considering
-which has shown the greater knowledge of the subject in question and the
-sounder judgment in dealing with it. In moral questions we do as a
-matter of fact perpetually come back to the man of moral weight. And
-what constitutes his weight is to begin with a certain uprightness in
-his own character, and then a certain sympathy and insight which enables
-him to understand how he would apply to the circumstances of other
-people the principles by which he lives in his own. So, for example,
-Aristotle in the end determines all moral questions by reference to the
-standard which the man of moral sense would use; everything in the last
-resort is determined simply by his judgment. Virtue, he says, resides
-in a mean between two vicious extremes, and the mean is to be determined
-by a principle which the man of moral sense would use. Later on, after
-an interlude of two or three books wisely interpolated, he comes to ask,
-Who is the man of moral sense? and he turns out to be the man who has
-the right principle enabling him to determine the mean between vicious
-extremes; that is to say, that his standard of judgment in the end is
-simply the good, sensible man, and for practical purposes that does well
-enough, because for practical purposes we do know whose judgment we
-value, we do know who it is whose approval we should care to win, whose
-approval would of itself assure us that our conduct was right, and whose
-disapproval would of itself go far at least to assure us that our
-conduct was wrong, or at any rate that the matter needed careful
-reconsideration.
-
-There is indeed another method than this of reliance upon the authority
-of a wise man, and it is represented by the other great thinker of
-Greece, by Plato. Plato's ideal method in moral questions was to try to
-determine the purpose of the whole universe and then determine how in
-any given circumstances a man may serve that purpose. The basis of his
-morals, in other words, was what we should call theological; and so far
-as we are able to apply this, it is the only finally satisfactory
-method; so far as we can say that the principles of Christianity
-imperatively demand some particular action or attitude of mind, we shall
-not care how little other authority we can quote, but shall say that we
-can see quite clearly that our allegiance to Christ and His religion
-involves a certain point of view for us; and if no one else has taken
-that point of view, provided we can find no flaw in our reasoning, we
-shall say none the less, This is the point of view which we, as
-Christians, are bound to take.
-
-That has been the method by which, as a matter of fact, most Christian
-reforms have been carried out. That was the way by which, in an
-instance to which I shall return in a moment, slavery was abolished.
-Slavery had been tolerated by the Christian Church for centuries. The
-authority of the Christian Church might therefore have been quoted as
-substantially in favour of it. A very large number of Christians did,
-in fact, favour retaining it, because, of course, the abolition of the
-slave trade was an interference with property, and heartrending appeals
-were made in the name of "the unfortunate widow with a few strong
-blacks," as in our day appeals are made against legislation in the name
-of the widow who has shares in breweries. But Wilberforce's point of
-view was simply this, that whatever the Church may have said through all
-these centuries, when you look at the Christian principle of the right
-way to treat human beings it condemns slavery; and if all the Christians
-in all the ages had denied that, it would not have altered the fact
-that, as we see it--so Wilberforce and his friends would have urged--as
-we see it, slavery is condemned; that is enough for us; we go forward in
-the certainty that we are carrying out the will of God. Wilberforce
-brought people round to his point of view; now you will hardly find a
-Christian to defend slavery as an institution. Some day, perhaps, it
-will be the same with war.
-
-But in most moral questions the authority to which we appeal is not that
-of the good and wise individual, but that of the moral sense of our
-civilisation. We can very seldom give an adequate reason for those
-points on which we have the strongest moral convictions. For example, in
-argument I suppose we should most of us find it very difficult to
-produce a case for monogamy as against polygamy anything like so strong
-as the feeling which we have in favour of the one against the other.
-That feeling is implanted in us by the experience of our civilisation, a
-civilisation which has, in fact, emerged from one into the other, and
-these very strong instinctive feelings, which are common to great masses
-of people and for which usually any one individual in all that mass can
-only give a most inadequate reason, are something to which an enormous
-volume of human experience has contributed. Generation after generation
-has come to feel that certain relations of the sexes are, as a matter of
-fact, the only ones that can be maintained with real wholesomeness, and
-this belief becomes so strong in the community that it is received with
-the air we breathe all through the formative years of our life, and the
-result is an intense conviction for which, as I say, we can hardly give
-any argument--an intense conviction that one sort of thing is right and
-the other wrong; and what most of us mean by our conscience is just this
-body of feeling concerning right and wrong which has been implanted in
-us as the result of the accumulated experience of civilisation. From
-the point of view of the individual it is usually more an emotion than a
-reasoned judgment; and it is much more of the nature of prejudice than
-of an argumentative conclusion. When people talk about conscientious
-objections to obeying the law, it is always quite impossible to
-distinguish between their prejudice and their conscience; there is no
-standard by which to determine. But the fact that it is unreasoned in
-the individual does not mean that it is irrational, or without reason in
-itself. What has been built up by the steady pressure of whole
-centuries of experience has enormous weight of pure reason behind it,
-even though the individual cannot himself give the reason, and even
-though there may be no individual alive who can give it; it has come out
-of the logic of experience; it has been built up in the strictly
-scientific way by a whole series of facts. There is an enormous
-inductive background, an enormous scientific basis for the moral
-convictions of the better, more self-controlled members of any civilised
-society. The moral verdict of society, and the conscience of the
-individual, which is his own echo, for the most part, of that moral
-verdict, is a thing of quite enormous authority.
-
-But, it will be urged, the authorities clash. The verdict of European
-civilisation is for monogamy; the verdict of certain other civilisations
-is quite as emphatically against it. Does this mean that the whole
-distinction of right and wrong is a mere matter of convention? No, it
-does not. But even if it did, the thing would not be as bad as people
-often imagine, because convention is not something artificial in the
-sense of contrary to nature or fictitious; a convention is simply the
-expression of human nature working on a large scale. Man is a being
-whose nature it is to set up conventions, and a convention is a product
-of human nature, a property and mark of human nature, just as much
-gravitation is a property and mark of mechanical nature; and it only
-becomes contrary to nature and a nuisance when it has survived the
-purpose for which it originally grew up. But none the less there is
-something more than any convention or social growth about the
-distinction of right and wrong; the distinction in itself is absolute
-and fundamental. It is the distinction between recognising oneself as
-member of a community and not so recognising oneself. Morality is
-always recognition of a claim on the part of other persons, the
-recognition that their point of view and their interests have to be
-taken into account in the determination of my conduct. As man is by
-nature social, as by nature he is designed to live in communities, the
-distinction of right and wrong, that is the recognition of the claim of
-the community and of the members in it, is absolute and final.
-
-But what is the content of the two terms right and wrong, what actual
-action shall be called right and what wrong on any given occasion, may
-vary easily according to circumstances, according to the degree of
-social development and the like. There is conduct which is right at one
-stage of society and wrong at another, precisely because at one stage it
-tends to the health of society, while at another it will be bad for the
-health of society; just as there are ways in which it is good from time
-to time to train children in which it would not be well to train
-grown-up people; and there is conduct which is appropriate to earlier
-stages of society, because beneficial to society, which becomes
-inappropriate and harmful at any other stage. What is right and what is
-wrong may depend very largely upon circumstances, stage of development,
-spiritual receptiveness, and a host of other things; but the distinction
-between right and wrong itself remains unaffected by all these, and
-absolutely fundamental and invariable.
-
-Now, how is it that in society progress is actually made in morals? The
-appeal to authority can always be made in two ways. It can be made in
-the most obvious form in the interest of mere stagnation, by saying,
-"What was good enough for our fathers is good enough for us," a thing
-nobody ever does say; or by saying, "What is good enough for us is good
-enough for our children," a thing which numbers of people say. While
-the first form may be some safeguard against wild experiments--and wild
-experiments in morals are more dangerous than wild experiments anywhere
-else in life, for a reason I will mention in a moment--yet the tendency
-of this appeal is to pure stagnation. But the right appeal is to ask,
-not what the great men of the past actually did, but what were the
-principles upon which they acted. What we want to be doing with the
-prophets of the last generation is not saying again, like parrots, just
-what they said, but finding out the principles and spirit of their life
-and applying that same spirit to circumstances which are changed just
-because those prophets lived and wrought. They would not have been
-prophets, they would not have been great men, if they had not changed in
-some degree the world they lived in. Then just because they have
-changed the world their action may no longer be appropriate; it is not
-the action which they themselves would now take if they were still alive
-and retained their power of development. What we do then is to appeal,
-not to their conduct but to the principle of their conduct. So when
-Wilberforce started the campaign against slavery what he did was to
-appeal from the conduct of the Church to the principle of that conduct
-which it professed and admitted. In other spheres it admitted the
-sanctity of human personality; but it had never applied this principle
-to the particular problem of slavery.
-
-In this way the appeal to authority is both just, safe, and progressive.
-It is only a fool who will throw away all that the experience of the
-ages has built up. But the wisest man of all is surely he who,
-rejoicing in that great inheritance, can still appeal not to its outward
-form, but to its indwelling, living spirit, and carry forward the work
-which the past has done. The ages in the past that we value are not
-those in which people were mainly concerned to praise their
-predecessors, but those in which men were agreed to press forward to
-whatever new life God has in store. So it must be here: if we would be
-true to the great men of the past, to the authority of those who have
-built up our moral life, it will not be by standing still, but by moving
-on in the direction to which they point.
-
-The appeal to authority, then, will not be an appeal to practice, but
-always an appeal to principle; and so we shall be saved from that danger
-of moral experiment, a danger that is so immensely great because the
-individual who has made the experiment has thereby very often spoilt
-himself. One cannot experiment in the moral life with the detachment
-that we use in science. I may try mixing a couple of fluids together to
-see what happens, and I can regard the result quite accurately; but I
-cannot try the experiment of stealing, or of murder, in order to see
-what the real moral value of the thing is, because in the process of
-doing the act I shall vitiate my own soul; here the material in which we
-experiment is itself the instrument by which we have to judge; and the
-man who has once done an evil thing himself, very seldom has the same
-clearness of vision concerning its good and evil as the man who has kept
-true to some lofty purpose. The mere experiment, the mere trying what
-it feels like to be a murderer--not that anyone would take so extreme an
-instance as that--is always a method condemned in advance to futility,
-because in the process of making the experiment we destroy our power of
-judging the result. We want therefore to rely upon some authority;
-being unable to experiment for ourselves, we must follow the general
-rule that I have stated; the authority to which we appeal must be an
-authority of principle and not of practice.
-
-But what of the authority of our Lord Himself? To us who have accepted
-it, or who are trying to accept it, it is final; yet still, surely, in
-the spirit rather than in the letter. Why did He teach by a series of
-amazing paradoxes if it was not to prevent us setting up a code of rules
-as His legislation, if it was not to force us back upon the spirit of
-His teaching, behind the detailed regulations in which that spirit was
-embodied? Even here it is still true that the appeal is to the authority
-of His Spirit and not to that of detailed action or individual precept.
-
-And beyond all this, it is certain that He Himself wins His authority by
-first submitting Himself to the moral judgment of His people. He
-rejects, in the second and third of the Messianic temptations after His
-baptism, the method of coercion. He rejects this, and stands before men
-submitting Himself to their moral judgment, to their conscience, to
-their capacity to understand pure goodness and love, as that capacity
-has grown through the civilisation which God Himself had guided as the
-preparation for His final revelation in His Son. So He submits Himself
-first of all to our moral judgment; and thus our conscience, coming down
-to us, as it does, out of the Divinely-guided history of the past, is
-the supreme authority; if we choose Him to be the Guide of our life it
-is because our conscience has first pronounced Him to be the highest and
-the holiest, which we must needs love when we see it.
-
-
-
-
- *APPENDIX III*
-
- *ON JUSTICE AND EDUCATION*
-
-
-As long as there are great numbers of citizens whose faculties are
-undeveloped it is impossible for society to be justly ordered. The
-democracies of the world have been curiously blind to this truth, as
-they have to the parallel truth that education is essential to true
-liberty.
-
-As long as there is a vast difference between a man's actual worth to
-society and his potential worth, there will be two just claims
-concerning him, and no possibility of adjudicating between them. To
-treat a man who is in fact useless as though he were useful, is to
-injure the community by encouraging a parasite; to treat him as useless,
-when only lack of opportunity has prevented his becoming useful, is to
-injure him. A vast amount of the existing social order is an attempt to
-compromise between these two injuries, by inflicting a little of both.
-The only real solution is to be found in a complete educational system
-which will raise the actual worth of every man to the level of his
-potential work precisely by enabling him to realise his potentialities.
-
-But education which is to have this effect, without producing mere
-selfishness and aggressiveness and thereby defeating its own object,
-must be a moralising force; and that means, if the argument of Appendix
-II is sound, that its processes must be largely sub-conscious. In fact,
-one root of the great sin of Germany is to be found in the effort to
-control life through the highly developed conscious intellect. The
-specialised training of administrators and the attempt to guide human
-action by scientific method is doomed to failure. If it were possible
-to collect all the relevant facts, it might be right merely to form an
-inductive conclusion and act upon it. But in regard of any human
-problem it is never possible to collect all the facts; they are at once
-too numerous and too subtly differentiated. Consequently the English
-method, though grotesquely deficient just where the German is strong, is
-yet morally preferable and politically more successful. It takes a boy
-and throws him into a society of boys which largely governs itself;
-appalling risks are taken and disasters are not unknown; boy standards
-are allowed to prevail, with the result that form-work is regarded as a
-tiresome though inevitable adjunct rather than the chief business of
-school life. Perhaps it is as well to mention here that the exaltation
-of games over work, however disastrous in its exaggeration, is yet
-morally sound; for the boy feels that in his games he plays for his
-house and school, while his work is done for himself. Wise seniors will
-tell him from the pulpit that he should work hard at school so as to fit
-himself for the service of the community in later years; and this is
-true enough; but the boy will be a terrible prig if he is continually
-conscious of its truth.
-
-The same principle determines our University ideal. The primary test
-for a degree is "residence"--that is, an adequate share in a general
-life. Colleges may require attendance at lectures, but the University
-does not. It demands that a candidate for a degree should have some
-knowledge--not very much, it is true--but it never asks where or how he
-got it; it only asks if he has "kept his terms."
-
-At the end of the process there are some failures, of course; but those
-who represent the system's success, and they are the great majority,
-though they may not have any large amount of knowledge, have acquired
-the instinct to act wisely in almost any emergency with which they may
-be confronted. Very often they could not give any theoretical ground
-for acting as they do, for their wisdom is largely sub-conscious or
-instinctive; but the action is right all the same.
-
-In England we are at the present time witnessing the collision of two
-educational types, of which I have outlined the older and more
-traditional. But this collision is itself of such exceeding interest
-that, at the risk of some repetition, I would venture to sketch out the
-two opposing types and attempt to indicate the mode of their
-interaction.
-
-The aim of education may be defined as the attempt to train men and
-women to understand the world they live in, so that they may be able to
-assist or resist the tendencies of their time in the light of ideals and
-standards resting on the widest possible foundation of knowledge and
-experience.
-
-Now, our educational history for the last hundred years has been the
-result of the interaction between two predominant educational types,
-which I may call, simply for the purposes of description, the
-traditional and the modern. The traditional type comes down to us (with
-modifications, no doubt) by a continuous history from the Middle Ages,
-and its chief representatives in England at the present time are those
-large private institutions which are called public schools, and the two
-older universities. The first great mark of this type of education is
-that in practice--whatever its theory may have been--in practice it is
-corporate. It has believed in educating people rather through influence
-than through instruction, and it has believed in educating them in
-direct relation to their social context and setting. Now that, in a
-country of aristocratic organisation, inevitably involved an exclusive
-and aristocratic type of education. If you have got a society
-stratified in layers one above the other, and you are then going to
-educate people in direct relation to their social context, your
-educational system is bound to be similarly stratified. That is
-inevitable, and consequently, through the social conditions of the time,
-the education which is most strongly corporate in tone and spirit has
-also tended to be aristocratic. As I have said, this method deals with
-people rather through influence than through instruction. Of course, it
-does not ignore instruction, but it is true that not very long ago I
-heard a very distinguished lady asked whether a certain school was what
-we call a public school; "Oh, yes," she replied, "it is a real public
-school. I mean they don't learn anything there." The instruments which
-for the most part this education has used have been the great
-literatures of all ages, and particularly the literatures of Greece and
-Rome, and their civilisations. These literatures and civilisations have
-a great advantage over all others as instruments of education, because,
-while they are in many ways closely akin to our own, which are descended
-from them, they are complete and can be studied in their entirety. The
-aim of this type of education has been to bring the student's mind into
-closest possible contact with the greatest minds of the human race in
-all ages, with the minds that have done or attempted most (in history),
-with the minds that have thought most accurately and deeply (in science
-and philosophy), with the minds that have felt most tenderly and truly
-(in poetry). It may, or may not, succeed in that aim. It may attempt
-it in the case of individual students who are particularly ill-suited
-for it; but that is its aim, and no one is going to say that it is an
-ignoble aim. In doing this, it has supplied to those who have been most
-able to profit by it standards of judgment, standards of criticism.
-This enables a man to stand apart from the tendencies of the moment and
-to pronounce judgment on them in the light of what has been best in
-human experience. Those are the strongest points, as I consider, of the
-old traditional type. But it has certain faults, one of which I have
-already mentioned, which is a fault in our day if it was not a fault in
-the day in which this type of education became predominant. I mean that
-it is liable to be exclusive, to shut up people within the limits of
-their own class so that they are unable to acquire any living
-acquaintance with the great movements going on in the world around them.
-
-The other system has not these particular evils; this more modern type
-of education, so far as you can draw lines across history at all, may be
-said to begin with Rousseau; it is predominantly individual rather than
-corporate, intellectual rather than spiritual, democratic rather than
-aristocratic; it supplies people with knowledge of facts rather than
-with standards of judgment. It is individual rather than corporate, for
-it began to take possession of the world when the forces of progress
-were almost all of them strongly individualistic; at that time the
-demand of democracy was for the abolition of privileges, the breaking
-down of class restrictions and the insistence that the individual must
-be able to live his own life; with all of which we entirely agree,
-though we think it needs a good deal of supplementing; and,
-consequently, its tendency has been to suggest to people that the aim of
-education is that they may get on in the world. The instrument which it
-has used has been for the most part instruction, and its appeal has
-been, not as in the traditional system to sympathy and imagination, but
-to intelligence and memory. This, it seems to me, is precisely because
-it believes in the career open to talent, and so far cuts across all
-social divisions.
-
-Its ideal is the educational ladder. Now there would be no objection to
-the educational ladder if people went down it as well as up, if, that is
-to say, men of small ability and character always sank in the social
-scale and men of great ability and character always rose. But so long as
-you have social classes maintained in their position, not by ability and
-character alone, but by the mere accident of possession, so long it will
-be true that to lift a man by education from one social stratum to
-another is to expose him to a terrible temptation--the temptation to
-despise his own people. And when once a man's native sympathies have
-been rooted up, it is hard for any more to grow. There is real danger
-that the more modern type of education may serve to produce a race of
-self-seekers. But this modern type has great advantages. It is alive
-and in touch with the world at the moment; and the people who receive
-education of this kind will probably be very vitally aware of most of
-the living interests of their own time. But it fails to supply
-standards of judgment.
-
-Now, of course, no existing institution belongs purely and entirely to
-either of these types; but we can all think easily of institutions in
-which one or the other is the predominant characteristic. And one of
-our troubles is that most parents like the faults and dislike the
-virtues of both types. They like the aristocratic and exclusive tone of
-the traditional type; and they like the pushfulness and
-"get-on-in-the-world" tone of the modern type.
-
-The great problem before the educational world in the next period is to
-draw the two types and tendencies in education closer together, to leave
-the whole strength of both unimpaired, but to unite them. It is not
-easy to do. It is a very big problem, easily stated, but very hard to
-solve in practice. I would suggest that one of the flaws of the modern
-tendency is that it leaves people very strongly aware of what is going
-on at the moment, but not always equally aware of what has been thought
-by the greatest men in the history of the world. This is very liable to
-lead people to suppose that whatever is modern is on that account good.
-Now that is exactly as foolish as to suppose that whatever is ancient is
-therefore good. The fact its antiquity or modernity has nothing to do
-with its value at the present moment. Of course, it is true that any
-institution which has lasted through many centuries is likely to be of
-use again, though we may always have just reached the point at which it
-begins to be an incubus. Of course, it is true that an idea which
-arises out of the stress of life at the moment is very likely to be very
-well adapted to the realities of that moment in which it arises, but,
-also, it may be well adapted to assist a downward course. What we want
-is that the people shall know the facts and also have the power to judge
-them--to be able, as I said, to assist or resist the tendencies of their
-time, in the light of the best ideals and standards. There is a very
-strong inclination among many of us (I am personally very much aware of
-it in myself) to think that the new thing must be good; and yet one
-remembers the words of Clough:--
-
- "'Old things need not be therefore true,'
- Oh, brother men! nor yet the new."
-
-
-Again, the old type which trains people through their social setting is
-very largely co-operative in its methods. It merges the individual in
-his school, or his college, so that he comes quite genuinely to care
-more keenly for the welfare of his house and school and college than for
-his own progress. Nobody who has had any intercourse at all with the
-life of public schools or universities can doubt that. The modern
-method, on the whole, I suppose, trusts mainly rather to competition.
-It aims at assisting people to put out their best energy by pitting them
-against one another. I want to raise a very serious question to which I
-am not prepared to give an answer. I want all people interested in
-education to consider it. Is it worth while to get the greatest effort
-out of a person at the cost of teaching him that he is to make efforts
-in his own interest? I am very doubtful.
-
-I heard a little while ago a distinguished schoolmaster describe the
-visit of the father of one of the boys in his house; the boy was being
-very idle, and this distinguished man said, "I wish you would speak to
-him as seriously as ever you can"; the father said, "I will." He saw
-the boy and when he came back he said, "I spoke to him very seriously,
-in fact I spoke to him quite religiously. I said 'You must be getting
-along, you know, or other people will be pushing past you.'" The
-religion would appeal to be of a "Darwinian" type.
-
-Now I wish to express a purely personal conviction with regard to these
-two types of teaching, and it is this: while we have got to incorporate
-all, or at any rate, nearly all, that the more modern type of education
-has given us, it has got to be used in such a way as to leave the great
-marks of the traditional type predominant. Education, I hold, should
-remain primarily corporate rather than individual, primarily spiritual
-(that is, effective through influence, and through an appeal to sympathy
-and imagination), rather than primarily intellectual (that is, effective
-through an appeal to intelligence and memory), primarily concerned with
-giving people the power to pronounce judgment on any facts with which
-they may come in contact rather than supplying them simply with the
-facts. It should be primarily co-operative and not primarily
-competitive.
-
-It is mainly the new democratic movements in education which have
-emphasised this view. Indeed, the Workers' Educational Association has
-understood more definitely than any other body I am aware of, that what
-it finds of supreme value in the great centres of education is the
-spirit of the place rather than the instruction; and those of us who
-have received the best, or at all events have been in a position to
-receive the best, that Oxford can give, and those who have had just a
-taste of her treasures at the Summer School, will agree that Oxford does
-more for us than any lectures do. But while we say that, we need also
-to insist on a greater energy and efficiency, a greater and more living
-contact with the world of to-day in some, at least, of the centres of
-the old traditional type. Yet it is the traditional type that must
-control, because the traditional type on the whole stands for spirit
-against machinery. I have no doubt it is true that the old schools and
-universities are amateurish in method; and I have no doubt that we ought
-to organise ourselves more efficiently. There is a good deal of waste
-that may be saved; but I shall regret the day when we become efficient
-at the cost of our spirit.
-
-I believe that in the University Tutorial Classes organised by the
-Workers' Educational Association you will find upon the whole the
-soundest educational principles which are at this moment operative
-anywhere in England. The classes choose their own subjects, and, as a
-general rule, they choose those subjects about which nobody knows the
-truth. Those are always the best instruments of education; for if
-anyone knows the truth, he has only to say what it is and his hearers
-believe him. That may be instruction, but it is not education. Real
-education is always best conducted as a joint search for truth; and in
-these Tutorial Classes we have, not one teacher and thirty hearers, but
-thirty-one fellow students, one of whom has commenced the study earlier
-than the rest, and can therefore act as guide.
-
-These are wide-reaching problems; and, indeed, there is no limit to the
-range of the influence of education. It is the supreme regenerative
-force. What is the chief obstacle of all who work for progress in any
-department of life? Always the apathy of those whom we especially wish
-to help. And why are they apathetic? Simply because they have had no
-opportunity of finding out what is the life from which they are
-excluded. But open by the merest chink the door of that treasure-house
-wherein are contained the garnered stores of literature and science, of
-history and art, and they will be foremost in demanding that they shall
-no longer be excluded from the birthright of the sons of civilisation.
-These are the good things of which no one is deprived because another
-possesses them; they are the true social goods of which possession by
-one redounds to the enrichment of all. It is the taste of them that can
-most stimulate the zeal for progress; and as it supplies the motive
-power, so it supplies also the directive wisdom. The perfecting and
-expansion of our education is just what is most vital for social
-progress to-day, and for the establishment of real justice in our social
-life, for it alone can bring within the reach of all that knowledge
-which is at once the source of power and the guarantee that the power
-shall be beneficent.
-
-
-
-
- *APPENDIX IV*
-
- *ON ORDERS AND CATHOLICITY*
-
-
-The position taken in the text of these lectures might be summarised as
-follows: It is the living body which gives authority to its Orders; it
-is not the possession of valid Orders which gives authority to the body.
-In support of this view I have the kind permission of Dr. Headlam to
-quote the following from his article--"Notes on Reunion: The Kikuyu
-Conference," in the _Church Quarterly Review_ for January, 1914.
-
-"On December 20th, 1912, the Bishop of Madras delivered an informal
-speech to the members of the National Conference of Missionaries, at
-Calcutta. This created in India and elsewhere a considerable amount of
-sensation. As in that speech he referred to something which the present
-writer had written and to an article in the _Church Quarterly Review_ by
-Dr. Frere,[#] and as his speech has been very widely misunderstood, I
-think I may be allowed to refer briefly to the points he raised. The
-views which he propounded were those which I had put forward in the
-'Prayer Book Dictionary,' and I should like to be allowed to quote them
-again:
-
-
-[#] "The Reorganisation of Worship," by W. H. Frere, D.D., Superior of
-the Community of the Resurrection, Mirfield (_Church Quarterly Review_,
-October, 1912).
-
-
-"If we combine the Patristic theory of Orders with the rule of
-ordination, we shall be able to put the idea of Apostolic Succession
-into its right place. It is really a deduction from the right theory of
-Orders, and the mistake has been to make Orders depend upon Apostolic
-Succession and transmission.
-
-"The authority to consecrate and ordain, or to perform all spiritual
-offices, resides in and comes from the Church to which God gives His
-Holy Spirit. From the beginning this work of the Church has been
-exercised by those who have received a commission for it, and the rule
-of the Church has been that that commission should always be given by
-those who have received authority from others with a similar commission.
-The historical fact, therefore, of Apostolic Succession has resulted
-from the rule of the Church being always regularly carried out. If this
-be correct, the following further deductions may be made:
-
-"1. The idea of 'transmission' is an additional and late conception
-which, instead of expressing the idea of Succession, has, by its
-exaggeration of it led to a rigid and mechanical theory of the Ministry.
-
-"2. As the grace of Orders depends upon the authority of the Church and
-not upon mechanical transmission, all objections from supposed
-irregularities of ordination are beside the point, and the opinions of
-churchmen and others who have maintained that in certain circumstances a
-presbyter may ordain are explained. Ordination depends upon the
-authority of the Church, and not the Church upon ordination.
-
-"3. The idea of Succession, which results from the Church's rule of
-ordination, is an historical fact, and not a doctrine. It represents an
-external connection with the first beginnings of Christianity of
-infinite value for the Church; and nothing should be done to break such
-a connection, as it acts like a link for binding together the Churches
-as parts of a living whole.
-
-"4. One part of the work of Christian reunion should be to restore and
-secure the links of Succession throughout the whole Christian world; but
-no rigidity or mechanical theory of Orders need compel us to deny divine
-grace to those separated from us.[#]
-
-
-[#] _The Prayer Book Dictionary_ (Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons, Ltd.,
-1912), p. 42.
-
-
-"The particular point that I wish to emphasise is that there are two
-things to be separated--the one the rule of the Church, the other the
-theory of that rule. I do not believe that it would be possible on any
-Catholic principle to depart from the rule of the Church with regard to
-Orders; I should go further and say that I believe that no real reunion
-would ultimately be possible except on the basis of that rule. At the
-present time, however, continuous emphasis is laid on the theory of
-Orders, and that theory is often put as an extreme form of a mechanical
-conception of the Apostolic Succession. Now it is quite true that from
-the beginning Bishops have been looked upon as 'the successors' of the
-Apostles, but I can find no authoritative interpretation of that phrase
-other than that they perform at the present day those functions of the
-Apostles which were not miraculous or extraordinary.[#] Neither the
-formularies of the Church of England nor, so far as I am aware, those of
-any other Church, lay down any theory of ministry, and to impose,
-therefore, any such theory on the Church is to depart from Catholic
-tradition.
-
-
-[#] See, for example, Van Espen, i. 16, 1. Council of Trent, Sessio
-xxiii., Cap. iv.
-
-
-"An incidental result of this is that our attitude towards Sacraments of
-Nonconformist bodies will not partake of that rigid character which is
-so characteristic of some in the present day. We are glad to see that
-Dr. Sanday takes exception to these. 'It seems to me to be a very
-delicate matter, and, indeed, scarcely admissible for one Christian body
-to take upon itself to pronounce upon the validity or otherwise of the
-ministrations of another. I think that at least the question ought not
-to be put in that bald and sweeping form.' It is interesting to note
-that Dr. Pusey would have been equally averse to such language. He of
-course accepts the doctrine of Apostolic Succession in very definite
-form, but he writes as follows:
-
-"'But while maintaining that they only are commissioned to administer
-the Sacraments who have received that commission from those appointed in
-succession to bestow it, we have never denied that God may make His own
-sacraments efficacious even when irregularly administered; we should
-trust it might be so.'
-
-"It would be of great advantage if we were to speak of non-episcopal
-orders and sacraments as 'irregular,' which we know they are, not as
-'invalid,' about which we know nothing."
-
-
-With these words of Dr. Headlam I am in profound agreement. But there
-is another quite different matter to which I would allude. If the Church
-is indeed to be the vehicle of the power of Christ in its plenitude, it
-must be Catholic not only in principle and right, but in actual fact.
-Deeper than all divisions of "Catholic" and "Protestant" is the division
-of the great human family--European, Indian, Chinese, and so forth.
-These great civilisations must each bring its own gift, consecrated by
-the Spirit of Christ, to the life of the whole Body before that Body
-reveals the measure of the fulness of the stature of Christ. A merely
-European Church cannot be fully Catholic, nor can it ever do, even for
-Europe, what the Catholic Church is called by God to do for the nations
-which become its provinces.
-
-
-
-
- *APPENDIX V*
-
- *ON PROVIDENCE IN HISTORY*
-
-
-The most outstanding facts in the history known to us, which plainly
-reveal the providential guidance of its course, are the careers of
-Alexander the Great and Napoleon. There had developed in Greece the
-whole spirit of civilisation in reference to the small problems of the
-city-state; the whole principle of civilisation which had been thus
-worked out was now established; Greek civilisation was so perfectly
-developed that it had even a perfect theory of itself in Plato and
-Aristotle. Just at this moment there appears upon the scene the
-absolutely amazing figure--Alexander of Macedon, himself the pupil of
-the man in whom the Greek spirit reached its final formulation. He
-carries that spirit in his astounding triumphs through Asia Minor and
-Syria to the Western Provinces of India. As a military achievement the
-mere leading of his troops to the banks of the Indus is one of the
-supreme wonders of the world. No doubt he was conscious of a mission to
-spread the gifts which Greece held in trust for humanity; but also no
-doubt he was very much concerned with the political fabric which his
-conquests set up. The moment his work is finished, he himself dies.
-Politically his Empire was not established and it immediately fell to
-pieces. Spiritually it remained. It supplied the inspiration of
-Chandra gupta, and the career of Asoka is unintelligible apart from
-Alexander. The arrival of the Greeks in India is, I am assured, the
-beginning of all that we now understand by Indian art. Far more
-important to the history of the world was the bringing of Greek culture
-into Palestine; this culture in itself was no doubt decadent, and the
-Chasidim and Pharisees were right enough to resist it: yet the leaven of
-this humanising influence is an essential part of the preparation for
-the Incarnation in the soil of Judaism. It is to be noticed that
-Galilee was a region particularly affected by the Greek influence and
-the settlement of Decapolis was still mainly Greek in the Gospel period.
-Asoka and St. Paul are not at all the kind of successors that Alexander
-would have anticipated or desired, but his conscious desires were
-utilised by Providence to serve an end of which he never dreamed. His
-early death before his Empire could be consolidated in a political sense
-is as markedly providential as his emergence at the precise moment of
-history when he appears upon the scene.
-
-The case is similar with Napoleon. Alexander at his death was 32 years
-old. Napoleon was 52. He also appears at a critical moment, is active
-precisely as long as he can serve what we now see to have been the cause
-of progress, and is then removed. The great feature of the period is
-the growth of the sentiment of nationality. This is the sense of
-membership in a people united by common characteristics and a common
-purpose; it is therefore always democratic in spirit though it need not
-at all necessarily be democratic in machinery. The old European
-constitutions, which had been valuable enough in their time, were
-becoming a barrier to its further development; the flood of progress
-burst the dam in France, and soon after there appears the supreme
-genius, not himself a Frenchman, who was to carry the spirit of which
-France had just become consciously possessed through the entire length
-and breadth of Europe. Napoleon, like Alexander, was conscious of his
-mission; he thought of himself as being the organ of the Revolution; he
-is reported to have said that moral principles did not apply to him;
-they applied only to persons, and he was a force. But there can be no
-doubt that he was as much concerned with establishing a vast French
-Empire as he was with merely carrying the principles of the French
-Revolution into the other nations. He is allowed success so long as the
-work of destruction is still needed; his activities first as general and
-then as ruler began the unification alike of Italy and Germany; but as
-soon as the spiritual work which he was to do is fully accomplished, the
-political construction, which was as a great scaffolding surrounding it,
-falls to pieces, and he is driven into exile to end his days in solitude
-and impotence. Perhaps some day people will look back upon the horror
-that now lies upon the world and not only believe that God was active in
-it, but see the blessings which He was conferring by its means.
-
-
-
- PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
- RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED,
- BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E.
- AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
-
-
-
- * * * * * * * *
-
-
-
-
- _*By the Rev. WILLIAM TEMPLE.*_
-
-
-THE FAITH AND MODERN THOUGHT. SIX LECTURES. With an Introduction by
-Professor Michael Sadler.
-
-THE KINGDOM OF GOD. A COURSE OF FOUR LECTURES.
-
-THE NATURE OF PERSONALITY. A COURSE OF LECTURES.
-
-STUDIES IN THE SPIRIT AND TRUTH OF CHRISTIANITY. BEING UNIVERSITY AND
-SCHOOL SERMONS.
-
-REPTON SCHOOL SERMONS. STUDIES IN THE RELIGION OF THE INCARNATION.
-
-FOUNDATIONS. A STATEMENT OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF IN TERMS OF MODERN THOUGHT.
-By Seven Oxford Men: B. H. STREETER, R. BROOK, W. H. MOBERLY, R. G.
-PARSONS, A. E. J. RAWLINSON, N. S. TALBOT, W. TEMPLE.
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-*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHURCH AND NATION ***
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