.. -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-

.. meta::
   :PG.Id: 43896
   :PG.Title: Church and Nation
   :PG.Released: 2013-10-05
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Al Haines
   :DC.Creator: William Temple
   :DC.Title: Church and Nation
              The Bishop Paddock Lectures for 1914-15
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1915
   :coverpage: images/img-cover.jpg

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CHURCH AND NATION
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      CHURCH AND
      NATION

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      THE BISHOP PADDOCK LECTURES FOR 1914-15

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      DELIVERED AT THE GENERAL THEOLOGICAL
      SEMINARY, NEW YORK

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      BY

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      WILLIAM TEMPLE

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      HON. CHAPLAIN TO H.M. THE KING

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      *Rector of St. James's, Piccadilly,
      Chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury
      Formerly Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford, and
      Headmaster of Repton*

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      MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
      ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
      1915  

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   *COPYRIGHT*

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      TO
      MY MOTHER
      WHO FELL ASLEEP AS GOOD FRIDAY DAWNED
      APRIL 2, 1915

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   PREFACE

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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
Bülow'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.

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   W.T.

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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.

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   CONTENTS

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LECTURE I

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`THE KINGDOM OF FREEDOM`_


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LECTURE II

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`CHURCH AND STATE`_


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LECTURE III

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`JUSTICE AND LIBERTY IN THE STATE`_


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LECTURE IV

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`HOLINESS AND CATHOLICITY IN THE CHURCH`_


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LECTURE V

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`THE CITIZENSHIP OF HEAVEN`_


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LECTURE VI

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`GOD IN HISTORY`_


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APPENDIX I

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`ON THE APOCALYPTIC CONSCIOUSNESS`_


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APPENDIX II

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`ON MORAL AND SPIRITUAL AUTHORITY`_


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APPENDIX III

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`ON JUSTICE AND EDUCATION`_


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APPENDIX IV

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`ON ORDERS AND CATHOLICITY`_


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APPENDIX V

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`ON PROVIDENCE IN HISTORY`_

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.. _`THE KINGDOM OF FREEDOM`:

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   CHURCH AND NATION

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   LECTURE I

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   THE KINGDOM OF FREEDOM

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"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.

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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:[#]

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[#] Isaiah ix, 6, 7.

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   "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."

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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:[#]

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[#] Daniel vii, 9, 10, 13, 14.

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   "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."

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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.

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[#] S. Mark i, 35-38.

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[#] S. MArk iii, 14.

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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."[#]


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[#] S. Mark viii, 27-30.

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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."[#]

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[#] S. Matthew xvi, 17.

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[#] S. Matthew xvi, 22, 23.

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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.

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[#] Zechariah ix, 9, 10.

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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.[#]

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[#] Different words in St. Matthew and St. Luke, but agreeing
in sense, which sense the authorised version spoils.

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[#] See `Appendix I`_.: *The Apocalyptic Consciousness*.

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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."[#]

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[#] S. Mark x, 42-45.

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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."[#]

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[#] S. John xii, 32.

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[#] 1 Cor. i, 23, 24.

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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.

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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.[#]

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[#] S. Matthew v, 43-48.

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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.

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[#] *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.

.. vspace:: 2

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.

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[#] [Greek: méte adikeîn méte adikîsthai.]
*Republic* ii. 359*a*.

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[#] The whole Ideal State.  *Republic* ii,
369*b* to vii end.

.. vspace:: 2

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.





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.. _`CHURCH AND STATE`:

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   LECTURE II


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   CHURCH AND STATE

.. vspace:: 2

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"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.

.. vspace:: 2

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.

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[#] 1 Cor. xii, 3

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[#] S. John xv, 16.

.. vspace:: 2

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.[#]

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[#] I am speaking throughout of the Western Church: the
Eastern Church has perhaps been, if anything, too national.

.. vspace:: 2

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.

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[#] "War and Religion" in *The Times Literary
Supplement*, Dec. 31, 1914.

.. vspace:: 2

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.

.. vspace:: 2

..
  
   "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...."

.. vspace:: 2

And then, without a change of phrase,
without even the compliment of a heightened
denunciation—

.. vspace:: 2

..

   "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...."[#]

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent small

[#] Amos i, 3-ii, 6.

.. vspace:: 2

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.

.. vspace:: 2

..

   "Are ye not as Children of the Ethiopians
   unto me, O children of Israel?—saith
   the Lord."

.. vspace:: 2

I have no more care for you than the
Ethiopians—who then, as now, were black folk.
   
.. vspace:: 2

..

   "Have not I brought up Israel out of
   the land of Egypt, *and* the Philistines
   from Caphtor, and the Syrians from
   Kir?"[#]

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent small

[#] Amos ix, 7.

.. vspace:: 2

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:—

.. vspace:: 2

..

   "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."

.. vspace:: 2

There shall be free intercourse between
them, and worship of the one God shall be
the link between them.

.. vspace:: 2

..

   "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?'"[#]

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent small

[#] Isaiah xix, 23-25.

.. vspace:: 2

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.

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent small

[#] Gal. iii, 28; Col. iii, 11.

.. vspace:: 2

.. 
   
   "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."[#]

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent small

[#] Rom. ix, 1-5.

.. vspace:: 2

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.

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent small

[#] See `Appendix II`_.: *On Moral Authority*.

.. vspace:: 2

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.*





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`JUSTICE AND LIBERTY IN THE STATE`:

.. class:: center large bold

   LECTURE III


.. class:: center medium bold

   JUSTICE AND LIBERTY IN THE STATE

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent small

"Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets:
I came not to destroy but to fulfil."—S. Matthew v., 17.

.. vspace:: 2

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—

.. vspace:: 2

..

   "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."

.. vspace:: 2

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.

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[#] I owe the illustration to Mr. A. L. Smith, of Balliol.

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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.

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[#] He appropriately puts it in the mouth of Polemarchus,
the well-brought up, but wholly inexperienced, young man.

.. vspace:: 2

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.[#]

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[#] See `Appendix III`_, *On Justice and Education*.

.. vspace:: 2

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.

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[#] 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.





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.. _`HOLINESS AND CATHOLICITY IN THE CHURCH`:

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   LECTURE IV


.. class:: center medium bold

   HOLINESS AND CATHOLICITY IN THE CHURCH

.. vspace:: 2

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"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.

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"And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty,
and the Lamb, are the temple thereof."—Revelation xxi, 22.

.. vspace:: 2

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.

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.. 

   "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."[#]

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[#] Rev. xxi, 16, 17.

.. vspace:: 2

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.

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[#] Rom. xii, 1.

.. vspace:: 2

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.

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[#] 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."

.. vspace:: 2

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.

.. vspace:: 2

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[#] (*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.

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(*b*) The Apostles' Creed, as the Baptismal Symbol; and
the Nicene Creed, as the sufficient statement of the Christian
faith.

.. class:: noindent small

(*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.

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(*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.

.. vspace:: 2

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.[#]

.. vspace:: 2

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[#] See `Appendix IV`_.  *On Orders and Catholicity*.

.. vspace:: 2

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.

.. vspace:: 2

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.

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[#] 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*.

.. vspace:: 2

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.





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.. _`THE CITIZENSHIP OF HEAVEN`:

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   LECTURE V


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE CITIZENSHIP OF HEAVEN

.. vspace:: 2

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"Our citizenship is in heaven."—Philippians iii. 20.

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"He that hath seen me hath seen the Father."—S. John xiv. 9.

.. vspace:: 2

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.

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[#] 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.

.. vspace:: 2

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.[#]

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[#] 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.

.. vspace:: 2

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."





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.. _`GOD IN HISTORY`:

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   LECTURE VI


.. class:: center medium bold

   GOD IN HISTORY

.. vspace:: 2

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"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.

.. vspace:: 2

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.

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[#] *Republic* i. 335*d*; *Theaetetus* 176*c*;
*Republic* ii. 361*e*.

.. vspace:: 2

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.

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[#] 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.

.. vspace:: 2

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.

.. vspace:: 2

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.[#]

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent small

[#] See `Appendix V`_.  *On Providence in History*.

.. vspace:: 3

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:

.. vspace:: 2

.. 

   "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."

.. vspace:: 2

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:

.. vspace:: 2

..

   "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."

.. vspace:: 2

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.*





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`APPENDIX I`:
.. _`ON THE APOCALYPTIC CONSCIOUSNESS`:

.. class:: center large bold

   APPENDIX I


.. class:: center medium bold

   ON THE APOCALYPTIC CONSCIOUSNESS

.. vspace:: 2

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 mediæval 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.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`APPENDIX II`:
.. _`ON MORAL AND SPIRITUAL AUTHORITY`:

.. class:: center large bold

   APPENDIX II


.. class:: center medium bold

   ON MORAL AND SPIRITUAL AUTHORITY

.. vspace:: 2

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 Manichæism
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 Mediæval
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.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`APPENDIX III`:
.. _`ON JUSTICE AND EDUCATION`:

.. class:: center large bold

   APPENDIX III


.. class:: center medium bold

   ON JUSTICE AND EDUCATION

.. vspace:: 2

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.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`APPENDIX IV`:
.. _`ON ORDERS AND CATHOLICITY`:

.. class:: center large bold

   APPENDIX IV


.. class:: center medium bold

   ON ORDERS AND CATHOLICITY

.. vspace:: 2

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:

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent small

[#] "The Reorganisation of Worship," by W. H. Frere, D.D.,
Superior of the Community of the Resurrection, Mirfield
(*Church Quarterly Review*, October, 1912).

.. vspace:: 2

"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.[#]

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent small

[#] *The Prayer Book Dictionary* (Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons,
Ltd., 1912), p. 42.

.. vspace:: 2

"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.

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent small

[#] See, for example, Van Espen, i. 16, 1.  Council of Trent,
Sessio xxiii., Cap. iv.

.. vspace:: 2

"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."

.. vspace:: 2

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.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`APPENDIX V`:
.. _`ON PROVIDENCE IN HISTORY`:

.. class:: center large bold

   APPENDIX V


.. class:: center medium bold

   ON PROVIDENCE IN HISTORY

.. vspace:: 2

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.

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   PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
   RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED,
   BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E.
   AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.

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   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

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   *By the Rev. WILLIAM TEMPLE.*

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THE FAITH AND MODERN THOUGHT.  SIX LECTURES.
With an Introduction by Professor Michael Sadler.

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THE KINGDOM OF GOD.  A COURSE OF FOUR LECTURES.

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THE NATURE OF PERSONALITY.  A COURSE OF LECTURES.

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STUDIES IN THE SPIRIT AND TRUTH OF CHRISTIANITY.
BEING UNIVERSITY AND SCHOOL SERMONS.

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REPTON SCHOOL SERMONS.
STUDIES IN THE RELIGION OF THE INCARNATION.

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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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   LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.

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