Church and Nation - The Bishop Paddock Lectures for 1914-15

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Title: Church and Nation - The Bishop Paddock Lectures for 1914-15
Author: Temple, William
Language: English
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CHURCH AND
NATION

THE BISHOP PADDOCK LECTURES FOR 1914-15

DELIVERED AT THE GENERAL THEOLOGICAL
SEMINARY, NEW YORK

WILLIAM TEMPLE

HON. CHAPLAIN TO H.M. THE KING

_Rector of St. James’s, Piccadilly,
Chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury
Formerly Fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford, and
Headmaster of Repton_

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

_COPYRIGHT_

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

*PREFACE*

When I received and accepted the invitation to deliver the Paddock
Lectures for the season 1914-1915, no one imagined that these years were
destined to have the historical significance which they must now possess
for all time. I was myself one of those who had allowed concern for
social reform, and internal problems generally, to occupy my mind almost
to the exclusion of foreign questions. I was prepared to stake a good
deal upon what seemed to me the improbability of any outbreak of
European war. For all who took this view the events of recent months
have involved perhaps a greater re-shaping of fundamental notions than
was required by people who had thought probable such a catastrophe as
that in which we are now involved. I found it impossible to concentrate
my mind upon any subject wholly unconnected with the war, while at the
same time it would have been in the last degree unsuitable that in my
lectures to American Theological Students I should deliver myself of
such views as I had formed concerning the rights and wrongs of the war
itself, or the questions at stake in it.

These lectures, therefore, represent an attempt to think out afresh the
underlying problems which for a Christian are fundamental in regard not
only to this war but to war in general—the place of Nationality in the
scheme of Divine Providence and the duty of the Church in regard to the
growth of nations.

But in a preface it may be permissible to say what would be
inappropriate in the Lectures themselves, and first I would take this
opportunity of reiterating certain convictions which have formed the
basis of a series of pamphlets issued under the auspices of a Committee
drawn from various Christian bodies and political parties, of which I
have had the honour to be Editor:

1. That Great Britain was in August morally bound to declare war and is
no less bound to carry the war to a decisive issue;

2. That the war is none the less an outcome and a revelation of the
un-Christian principles which have dominated the life of Western
Christendom and of which both the Church and the nations have need to
repent;

3. That followers of Christ, as members of the Church, are linked to one
another in a fellowship which transcends all divisions of nationality or
race;

4. That the Christian duties of love and forgiveness are as binding in
time of war as in time of peace;

5. That Christians are bound to recognise the insufficiency of mere
compulsion for overcoming evil, and to place supreme reliance upon
spiritual forces and in particular upon the power and method of the
Cross;

6. That only in proportion as Christian principles dictate the terms of
settlement will a real and lasting peace be secured;

7. That it is the duty of the Church to make an altogether new effort to
realise and apply to all the relations of life its own positive ideal of
brotherhood and fellowship;

8. That with God all things are possible.

These propositions were very carefully drafted by the Committee referred
to above and entirely represent my own beliefs; but there is something
more which I would add. The new Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria, and
Turkey is no accident; it is the combination of just those three Powers
which openly and avowedly believe in oppression—that is, in the
imposition by force of the standards accepted by one race upon people of
another race. All nations have at one time or another practised
oppression; certainly Great Britain is not free from the charge, and the
history of Russia has many dark pages in this respect. But we can all
claim that when we have been guilty of oppression it has been under the
influence of fear, whether of revolution, anarchism, or some other force
thought to be disruptive of the State. With our enemies this is not so.
We all know about Turkey; it is the essentially Mohammedan power, and
Mohammedanism is the religion of oppression; it believes in imposing its
faith by means of the sword. The Austrian Empire consists of three
divisions in each of which one race is imposing its manner of life upon
another. In Austria-proper the Germans oppress the Czechs; in Galicia
the Poles have, in some degree at least, oppressed the Ruthenes; in
Hungary the Magyars have systematically and avowedly oppressed the
Roumanians in the east, and the Croats in the south and west. Germany
has shown her political faith by her conduct in Alsace-Lorraine, and
still more in Poland. Nothing has yet appeared so illuminating with
regard to what is at stake in this war, as Prince 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.

W.T.

Lecture II. in this series is almost identical with the pamphlet _Our
Need of a Catholic Church_—No. 19 of _Papers for War Time_. In Lectures
I. and III. I am under great obligation to Professor A. G. Hogg, though
my position is not at all identical with his.

*CONTENTS*

LECTURE I

THE KINGDOM OF FREEDOM

LECTURE II

CHURCH AND STATE

LECTURE III

JUSTICE AND LIBERTY IN THE STATE

LECTURE IV

HOLINESS AND CATHOLICITY IN THE CHURCH

LECTURE V

THE CITIZENSHIP OF HEAVEN

LECTURE VI

GOD IN HISTORY

APPENDIX I

ON THE APOCALYPTIC CONSCIOUSNESS

APPENDIX II

ON MORAL AND SPIRITUAL AUTHORITY

APPENDIX III

ON JUSTICE AND EDUCATION

APPENDIX IV

ON ORDERS AND CATHOLICITY

APPENDIX V

ON PROVIDENCE IN HISTORY

*CHURCH AND NATION*

*LECTURE I*

THE KINGDOM OF FREEDOM

"And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan, and was
led by the Spirit in the wilderness during forty days, being tempted of
the Devil."—S. Luke iv. 1.

Our Lord, in accepting for Himself the title of the Messiah, or the
Christ, claimed that it was His function to inaugurate upon earth the
Kingdom of God. Whatever else might at that time be believed about the
Messiah, this at least was universally held, that the Messiah, when He
came, would inaugurate upon earth the Kingdom of God. That is the task
of the Lord’s ministry; that is the task to which we, as His followers,
are pledged; and at this time when the civilisation, which for nearly
two thousand years has been under the Christian influence, has
culminated in as great a catastrophe as has ever beset any civilisation,
Christian or Pagan, it is well for us to go back and ask, What are the
fundamental principles of the Kingdom which Christ founded, what the
method by which He founded it, and what are the principles and methods
which He rejected?

There were various anticipations of the way in which the promised Christ
would do His work; but broadly speaking there were two main types of
expectation. There were those who supposed that the Messiah when He
came, would rule in the manner of an earthly ruler, establishing
righteousness by the ordinary methods of law and political authority,
and this expectation undoubtedly derived some colour from the way in
which Isaiah had envisaged the coming Christ:[#]

[#] Isaiah ix, 6, 7.

"For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given; and the
government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be
called Wonderful-Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father,
Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace
there shall be no end _upon the throne of David_, and upon his
kingdom, to establish it, and to uphold it with judgment and
with righteousness from henceforth, even for ever."

It is a king ruling upon the throne of David that is suggested; and
while it is only the most foolish literalism which will say that the
Prophet himself was committed to such a view, it was natural enough for
those who read his writings to conceive of the Messiah as acting after
that fashion.

The people went into captivity; and when they returned, it was not to
any realised Kingdom of God upon earth, but rather to difficulties
greater than had ever confronted them before, until at last Antiochus
Epiphanes initiated the great persecution whose aim was to stamp out
altogether the worship of Jehovah, setting up as he did in the very
Temple Court at Jerusalem the altar of Zeus, on which swine were
sacrificed—"the abomination of desolation standing where it ought not."
Out of the fiery furnace of that persecution comes the glowing prophecy
of Daniel. What is the answer which he conceives God as giving to the
blasphemer Antiochus? It is nothing less than the divine judgment and
the mission of the divine Deliverer:[#]

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

"I beheld till thrones were placed and one that was ancient of
days did sit: his raiment was white as snow, and the hair of his
head like pure wool; his throne was fiery flames, and the wheels
thereof burning fire. A fiery stream issued and came forth from
before him; thousand thousands ministered unto him, and ten
thousand times ten thousand stood before him; the judgment was
set, and the books were opened.... I saw in the night visions,
and, behold, there came with the clouds of heaven one like unto
a son of man, and he came even to the ancient of days, and they
brought him near before him. And there was given him dominion,
and glory, and a kingdom, that all the peoples, nations, and
languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting
dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which
shall not be destroyed."

This conception of the Messiah, coming in the clouds of Heaven,
establishing the Kingdom of God by so manifest an exhibition of the
divine authority with which He is endowed, that all doubt and hesitation
are quite impossible, is that which took the greatest hold upon the
religious imagination of Israel, and particularly of that great body of
people, the heirs of the tradition of the Maccabees, inheritors of the
heroism which had stood out against the persecution, whom we know as the
sect of the Pharisees—men who lived in the strength of a fellowship that
had behind it the greatest religious tradition in all the world, but
who, because they trusted more to their tradition than to the God who
inspired it, were unable to recognise the still further call of God when
it came to them. The literature of the period between the Old and the
New Testament shows how wide and deep was the influence of Daniel’s
vision upon their Messianic hopes.

At His baptism, the Lord is called to begin His Messianic work; the
voice which He heard from Heaven spoke words which were by all
interpreters of the time believed to refer to the Messiah:—"Thou art my
beloved son; in thee I am well pleased." The Messiah will be endowed
with Divine authority and power. How shall He use it? And immediately
the Lord goes into the wilderness to face the temptations that arose
from precisely the conviction that His Messianic work is even now to
begin.

The temptation has two sides to it—an inward and an outward. As regards
Himself, what does the temptation mean? Let us remind ourselves that
there was apparently no one with Him in this crisis; the story, as we
have it, must come from Himself. It is His own account (of course in
parable form, like so much else in His teaching) of the struggle of
those early days. What is meant by the parable concerning the turning
of stones into bread? Surely for Himself it is the temptation to use
the power, with which us the Christ of Cod He is endowed, for the
satisfaction of His own needs, and that in such a way as will do no kind
of harm to anybody else. No one will be the worse for his satisfying
His hunger in that way. It is a self-concern from which nobody can
suffer; it is perfectly innocent and perfectly rational. But no! It is
not for any selfish purpose, however harmless, that the power of God is
given; selfishness in its most innocent form is set aside.

How shall He set about His work? Shall He fulfil that expectation which
Isaiah’s vision had fostered? He looks out on the kingdoms of the earth
and the glory of them, and He knows that they can be His, if He will
fall down and worship the Prince of the power of this world. Shall He
use worldly methods to convert the world to God? No; worldliness in its
most attractive form is set aside.

Or shall He fulfil the expectation encouraged by the vision of the Son
of Man in Daniel, appearing with the clouds of Heaven, descending upon
Jerusalem up-borne by angels, giving that sign from Heaven which the
Pharisees, who particularly adopted this view of the Messiah, were
afterwards going to demand so frequently? From His answer we know that
this is a temptation not only to give them a sign, but to secure it for
Himself, for the answer is "Thou shalt not tempt,"—that is, Thou shalt
not put to the proof—"the Lord thy God." The promise of God is to be
trusted, not tested. The test comes as we obey the command and in that
sense every act of faith is an experiment, but there must be no test
cases to see whether God fulfils His promise. Infidelity in its most
insidious form is set aside.

But there is an outward aspect also to the temptations. Shall He use
His power to satisfy the bodily needs of men? Shall He exert a power
parallel with that of political rulers, which will coerce their conduct
without first winning their free allegiance? Shall He give such proof
of divine authority that any doubt, intellectual or otherwise, becomes
impossible? No; not any of these. And as He leaves the temptation
vanquished, what He has set aside is precisely every method of
controlling men’s action without winning their hearts and wills. He has
rejected coercion; He has decided to appeal to Freedom.

What is left? At first, only the commission to proclaim the Kingdom;
and He comes proclaiming it. All through the early part of the ministry
He moves from place to place preaching or proclaiming the Kingdom of
God. He does not at present announce that He is King of that Kingdom; it
is the Kingdom itself on which all attention is concentrated. He has
indeed the power to do works of mercy, and when with that power He
stands in the face of human need, He must for very love exert the power
and satisfy the need; so people come crowding around Him, attracted by
His wonder-working. But that is not what He desires. The disciples are
excited about it; but He has gone out a long while before dawn, and is
alone in prayer; and when St. Peter finds Him, and says "All men are
seeking Thee," He does not say, "Then let us go to them," but, on the
contrary, "Let us go into the villages that I may preach—that I may make
my proclamation—there also."[#] As the deadness, the indifference, and
hostility of the people gradually shows itself to be invincible, He
gathers about Him those whose hearts have been touched, and from among
them chooses twelve, "that they may be with Him."[#] They are to live
in His company, catching His Spirit, learning to understand Him. With
them He goes on two long journeys—north-west to Tyre and Sidon, and then
north-east, to Caesarea Philippi; through all those journeys they are
alone with their Master, moving through country outside the boundaries
of the Jewish religion, and therefore free from controversy.

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

[#] S. MArk iii, 14.

At Caesarea Philippi He feels that the time is ripe, and asks them, "Who
do men say that I am?" They mention the various conjectures ... Elijah;
John the Baptist; one of the Prophets. "Who say ye that I am?" And St.
Peter with a leap of inspired insight answers: "Thou art the
Messiah."[#]

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

The Lord recognises that this is the revelation of God to faith:
"Blessed art thou, Simon, Son of Jonah; flesh and blood hath not
revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven."[#]
Immediately that He has been thus spontaneously recognised, He begins to
say what He had never said before: "The Son of Man must suffer." The
Son of Man is the title of the Messiah in glory, as He was conceived in
Daniel’s vision and the Apocalyptic writings which drew their
inspiration from it. "The Son of Man must suffer;" that is the great
Messianic act; that is the way in which the Kingdom of God shall be
founded. But it was not what St. Peter meant. "Peter took Him, and
began to rebuke Him ... Be it far from Thee, Lord; this shall not be
unto Thee." And our Lord recognises the voice of the tempter in the
wilderness, who bade Him take thought for self.... "Get thee behind me,
_Satan_, for thou thinkest not God’s thoughts, but men’s thoughts."[#]

[#] S. Matthew xvi, 17.

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

Just as, when once He was spontaneously recognised, He began to set
forth the new conception of the Messiahship, "The Son of Man must
suffer;" so too He immediately starts on that last journey to Jerusalem
which culminates with the Cross. Arrived at Jerusalem, He arranges the
triumphal entry. He carefully fulfils Zechariah’s prophecy—thus
claiming the Messiahship, and challenging the religious rulers. But the
prophecy which He thus selects for deliberate fulfilment is one which
represents the Messiah as a civil, not a military authority (for this is
the meaning of the ass as distinguished from the horse), and as one who
shall speak Peace to the nations.[#] It is the conception of the
Messiah which in all the Old Testament has least suggestion of coercion
and is therefore the nearest to His own.

[#] Zechariah ix, 9, 10.

But the primary purpose of the triumphal entry is no doubt to make His
claim and issue His challenge. On the journey and after the entry
itself He declares with increasing emphasis that the Kingdom of God is
at hand; those who stood there should see it come with power; and as He
stands before Caiaphas, He answers the question "Art Thou the Christ?
with the words, I am, and from this time[#] there shall be the Son of
Man seated on the right hand of power." Daniel’s prophecy is here and
now fulfilled. In the moment that love completes its sacrifice in
death, the glory of God is fully made known and the power of His Kingdom
is come; this is the Lord’s own Apocalypse.[#]

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

[#] See Appendix I.: _The Apocalyptic Consciousness_.

So He had spoken on that last journey. "Ye know that they which are
accounted to rule over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great
ones exercise authority over them. But it is not so among you; but
whosoever would become great among you shall be your minister, and
whosoever shall be first among you shall be servant of all, for verily
the Son of Man came"—(again the title of the Messiah in Glory)—"not to
be ministered unto, but to minister; and to give His life a ransom for
many."[#]

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

So, too, St. John records His saying that in precisely this way he would
win His royalty—"I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men
unto me."[#] The Cross was foreseen by the Lord to be what, as we look
back, we know that it has been—the throne of His glory and His power;
and the capacity to realise it as such is for St. Paul the touchstone of
character, the test of election—"We preach a Messiah on a Cross—to Jews
a scandal and to Gentiles an absurdity, but to the very people who are
called, whether Jews or Greeks, a Messiah who is God’s power and God’s
wisdom."[#]

[#] S. John xii, 32.

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

Here then is the mode of God’s power, and we know that it can be no
other; for if God is truly King, He must be King of our hearts and
wills, and not only of our conduct. There is only one way to win men’s
hearts and wills, that is by showing love; and there is only one way to
show love, and that is by sacrifice, by doing or suffering what, apart
from our love, we should not choose to do or suffer. Sacrifice is the
Divine activity; Calvary is the mode of the Divine omnipotence. It is
the actual Divine method and the ideal human method.

As we come to consider how far it has become also the actual human
method, we are confronted at the outset by the sheer impossibility of
our applying this method, just because we have not in ourselves the
necessary love.

Our perfection, we are told, is to consist in just that quality which
shows the Father’s perfection, namely, that He is kind to the unthankful
and evil, and makes His sun to rise on the evil and good and sends His
rain on the just and on the unjust; and we are to be perfect in the way
that He is perfect.[#]

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

But until we reach that perfection we cannot imitate His action; for a
man’s act is not what He intends; nor is it the mere motion of his body;
but it is the whole train of circumstances that he initiates. Christ in
His perfect purity may stand before the woman taken in her sin and say,
"Neither do I condemn thee," because there is no possibility that she
will interpret His mercy as condonation of the sin; but if we said it,
people would so interpret it, and usually quite rightly so.

Our problem then is so to guide our conduct that we come as near as we
are capable of coming to the divine ideal that is set forth in Christ,
and that we come perpetually closer and closer to it.

The Lord in His temptation rejected all use of force and substituted for
it the appeal of love expressed in sacrifice, so far as the actual and
positive building of His Kingdom is concerned. For us there must always
be some use of the lower method, because we are incapable of applying
the highest. If any man, when he is confronted with evil which he can
prevent by the exercise of force, refrains from doing it, we must
immediately put to him the question, "But did you so suffer under that
act of evil that there is any hope of your suffering proving to be the
redemption of the evil-doer? If so, well and good; but, if not, then
you are idle and cowardly, not Christian." No one who is not a
Christian in spirit can perform the Christian act; and the Sermon on the
Mount is not a code of rules to be mechanically followed; it is the
description of the life which any man will spontaneously lead when once
the Spirit of Christ has taken complete possession of his heart.

And yet there is a perfectly legitimate use of force also, and a use
which our Lord Himself makes of it. We may use force in various
circumstances in spite of the fact that for the positive work of the
building His Kingdom the Lord rejected it. It is legitimate, in the
first place, when it is applied to immature characters—characters which
are, as all our characters are in early childhood, a chaos of impulses
and instincts, as yet unregulated by any governing principle. Here it
may be necessary simply to restrain the activity of one set of impulses
without converting the heart or will of the person to whom that
restraint is applied, merely in order to give the other side of nature
its chance of development. So in education it is legitimate to employ
force in this restraining way for the sake of the development which is
made possible thereby in the other parts of nature.

But our Lord’s example also shows us that the use of force is
permissible in dealing with those who are so case-hardened that the
appeal of love can never reach them until their present state of mind is
broken up. It is sometimes said that the Lord never made use of physical
force; but whether or not that is true[#]—the question is unimportant,
because for all moral purposes there is no difference whatever between
physical and non-physical force. The appeal to force always means the
appeal to pain or inconvenience, for these are the only things that
force can inflict upon one. Physical force may break a man’s bones; but
one may enforce a certain kind of conduct by the threat, for example, of
social ostracism, which might break his heart; and there is no
difference whatever between the two, except that the second is a more
refined form of cruelty. Now in our Lord’s denunciation of the
Pharisees, in those words which are thrown, burning and smashing, into
the self-complacent contentment of those upholders of tradition, there
is every moral quality of force and violence. Their aim is to batter
down a state of mind, the state of mind which cannot receive the appeal
of love, as it shows when it stands beneath the very Cross and only
jeers. But this use of force is only negative and preparatory; it is
the effort of love to make ready for the rebuilding which only love’s
own method can really accomplish. Only with characters quite immature
and liable to develop in many different directions, can force be used,
except in this wholly preparatory way; and even there its work is
preparatory, for at that stage everything that is done is still
preparatory.

[#] _e.g._, whether or not He employed the scourge of small cords to
drive men from the Temple Courts as He certainly did the animals; the
Greek words suggest that He did not.

It is sometimes said that society rests upon force. Of course it does
not, and it could not, because force is a dead thing which can only
operate as human wills direct it; and, however much force there may be
in the maintenance of society, that force itself must be controlled by
the consent of human wills. It is true, however, that society, as we
know it, rests simultaneously upon two contradictory principles, upon
the principle of antagonism and the principle of fellowship. So far as
it is represented by the police force, it rests upon antagonism. Men
are selfish; in their selfishness they are brought into conflict with
one another. In order that anyone may be able to enjoy, however
selfishly, any property or comfort in life, it is necessary to restrain
to some degree the selfishness of all the rest; and to secure that
restraint placed upon others, a man submits to a similar restraint upon
himself. And so we arrive at that contract of which Plato speaks: "the
contract neither to commit nor to suffer injury."[#] But, at the same
time, as Plato immediately afterwards points out, society would arise
quite equally if men were wholly altruistic, because men’s natures are
different, and they need one another for support, for protection, and
for the very instinct of fellowship.[#] Now those principles are both
present in all actual societies; and progress has consisted of the
steady development of the principle of co-operation and fellowship, at
the expense of the principle of competition and antagonism.

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

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

That has been what we have meant in the last resort by political
progress; but the conclusion inevitably follows that society makes
progress precisely in that degree in which it realises more and more a
relationship of love between its various members, and becomes the
Kingdom which Christ came on earth to found. Thus, at the very outset of
our enquiry we find that the principles of secular progress and of the
Divine revelation in Christ are identical.

I shall venture in a subsequent lecture to trace out the way in which,
as I think, further progress in accordance with this principle will lead
us.

But let me close this lecture by recalling our thoughts to that ideal
method for men, which is the actual method of God, setting this in the
words of a fable which I take from the masterpiece of the most Russian
of the Russian novelists—Dostoievsky—merely throwing it into my own
language.

In the days of the Inquisition, this fable runs, our Lord returned to
earth, and visited a city where it was at work. As He moved about, men
forgot their cares and sorrows. He healed the sick folk as of old, and
meeting with a funeral procession where a mother was mourning the loss
of her only son, He stopped the procession, and restored the dead boy to
life.

That was in the Cathedral Square, and at that moment there came out from
the Cathedral doors the Grand Inquisitor, an old man over ninety years
of age, clad now, not in the Cardinal’s robe in which only the day
before he had condemned a score of heretics to the stake, but in a
simple cassock, with only two guards in attendance. Seeing what was
done he turned to the guards and said, "Arrest Him." They moved forward
to obey; and he sent the Prisoner to a cell in the dungeon.

That night the Grand Inquisitor visited his Prisoner, and to all that he
said the Prisoner made no reply. "I know why Thou art come," said the
Inquisitor; "Thou art come to spoil our work, to repeat Thy great
mistake in the wilderness, and to give men again Thy fatal gift of
freedom. What did the great wise spirit offer Thee there? Just the
three things by which men may be controlled—bread and authority and
mystery. He bade Thee take bread as the instrument of Thy work; men
will follow one who gives them bread. But Thou wouldest not; men were
to follow Thee out of love and devotion or not at all. We have had to
correct Thy work, or there would be few to follow Thee. He bade Thee
assume authority; men will obey one who gives commands, and punishes the
disobedient. But Thou wouldest not; men were to obey out of love and
devotion or not at all. We have had to correct Thy work, or there would
be few to obey Thee. He bade Thee show some marvel that men might be
persuaded and believe. But Thou wouldest not; men were to believe from
perception of Thy grace and truth or not at all. We have had to correct
Thy work and hedge Thee about with mystery, or there would be few to
believe. And which of us has served mankind the better? Thy appeal was
to the few strong souls. We have cared for the weak. Many who would be
disorderly and miserable have been made orderly and happy. And now Thou
art come to spoil our work and repeat Thy great mistake in the
wilderness by giving to men again Thy fatal gift of freedom, through
trust in the power of love. But it shall not be; for to-morrow I shall
burn Thee."

The Grand Inquisitor ceased; and still the Prisoner made no reply; but
He rose from where He sat, and crossed the cell, and kissed the old man
on his bloodless lips. Then the Inquisitor too, rose, and opened the
door; "Go," he said. The Prisoner passed out into the night and was not
seen again.

And the old man? That kiss burns in his heart. But he has not altered
his opinion or his practice.

*LECTURE II*

*CHURCH AND STATE*

"He put all things in subjection under his feet, and gave him to be head
over all things to the Church, which is his body, the fulness of him
that, all in all, is being fulfilled."—Ephesians i, 22, 23.

If one of the great saints of the early Church had been told that in the
year 1915 the world would still be waiting for the final consummation,
and had tried to conceive the life of men and nations as it would be
after that long period of Christian influence, what would his conception
have been? Surely he would have expected that all nations would be
linked together in the Holy Communion, the Fellowship of Saints. Roman,
Spaniard, African, Syrian, those strange Germans, and the barbarous
Britons who lived in the remotest corner of the earth, might have
maintained their own varieties of culture, but each would find his joy
and pride in offering his contribution to the life of the whole family
of nations. Rooted in knowledge of the love of God, their life would
grow luxuriantly and bear fruit in love of one another and service of
the common cause. Inspiring each and knitting all together, the Holy
Catholic Church, fulfilling itself in service of the world, would gather
up all this exuberance of life and love into itself, and present it to
the God and Father of mankind in unceasing adoration.

But the world in 1915 is not in the least like that. The old man of our
selfish nature, selfish himself and therefore supposing that others must
be selfish too, so that he relies upon the methods of cajolery and
coercion, has indeed received the kiss of Christ; and while that kiss
burns in his heart, so that sometimes he is roused to an aspiration
after an order of things altogether different, his opinions and his
conduct remain fundamentally unchanged. And the contrast between what
is and what might have been is due in part, at least, to the failure of
the Church to be true to its own commission. It is also because of this
that no practical man dreams of turning to the Church to find the way
out from the intolerable situation into which the nations have drifted.

An eminent politician is reported to have defined the Church on a recent
occasion in the following terms: "The Church is, I suppose, a voluntary
organisation for the maintenance of public worship in the interest of
those who desire to join in it." And it is to be feared that many
people regard it in some such way as that. But of course the Church is
nothing of the kind; the Church is the Body of Christ.

It is not a "voluntary organisation" any more than my body is a
voluntary organisation either of limbs or of cells. No one could
"voluntarily" join the Church, if by that were meant that the act
originated in his own will. "No man can say Jesus is Lord, but in the
Holy Spirit."[#] A man cannot make himself a Christian. The Apostles
were made Christian by Christ Himself—"Ye did not choose Me, but I chose
you"[#]; others were made Christian by the Apostles, or (as they always
said) by Christ working in and through them; and so successive
generations have been made Christian by the Spirit of Christ operative
in the fellowship of His disciples—that is to say, in the Church. This
is the aspect of truth expressed and preserved in the practice of infant
baptism. We are Christians, if at all, not through any act initiated by
our own will, but through our being received into the Christian
fellowship and subjected to its influence. Just as we are born members
of our family, so by our reception into the fellowship of the disciples
we are "made members of Christ." In the one case as in the other, we
may repudiate our membership or we may disgrace it; we can never abolish
it. Let me hasten in parenthesis to add, that this is only one aspect
of the truth, and the protest of those who object to infant baptism will
be a valuable force in the Church, until we are finally secure against
the temptation to regard a sacrament as a piece of magic. For of course
it is true that, while no man can make himself a Christian by his own
will, no man can be made a Christian against or without his will. It is
precisely his will that the Spirit must lay hold of and convert, and the
will can refuse conversion.

[#] 1 Cor. xii, 3

[#] S. John xv, 16.

The Church, then, is not a "voluntary organisation," but the creation of
God in Christ. In fact it is the one immediate result of our Lord’s
earthly ministry. When His physical presence was withdrawn, there
remained in the world, as fruit of His sojourn here, no volume of
writings, no elaborated organisation with codified aims and methods, but
a group of people who were united to one another because His Spirit
lived and worked in each. And the great marvel lay in this: whereas all
men realise that fellowship is better than rivalry, and yet fail to pass
from one to the other because they are radically selfish both
individually and corporately, in Christ men found themselves to be a
real community in spite of their as yet unpurged selfishness. By the
invasion of the Divine Life in Christ, the ideal itself, the life of
fellowship, is given, and is made into the means of destroying just
those qualities which had hitherto prevented its own realisation. The
ecclesiastical organisations of to-day are not fellowships of this sort,
but if the members of the Church lose their hold on this central
principle of fellowship, as they have largely done, we are thrown back
upon the futile effort to build up fellowship on the foundation of
unredeemed selfishness.

As it is not true to say that the Church is a "voluntary" organisation,
so also it is not true to say that it exists "for the maintenance of
public worship," at least in the sense that most Englishmen would give
to the words. Certainly the Church, consisting of men and women whom
God of His sheer goodness has delivered from the power of darkness and
translated into the kingdom of His dear Son, will find its first duty,
as also its first impulse, in an abandonment of adoration. But if the
God who is worshipped is not only some Jewish Jehovah or Mohammedan
Allah, but the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, this love and
adoration of God will immediately express itself in the love and service
of men, and especially in the passionate desire to share with others the
supreme treasure of the knowledge of God. The Church, like its Master,
will be chiefly concerned to seek and to save that which is lost,
calling men everywhere to repent because the Kingdom of God is at hand.
Worship is indeed the very breath of its life, but service of the world
is the business of its life. It is the Body of Christ, that is to say,
the instrument of His will, and His will is to save the world.

The spiritual life of men is not limited to this planet, and the
fulfilment of the Church’s task can never be here alone. The Church
must call men from temporal to eternal hopes. But in this way it will do
more than is possible in any other way to purify the temporal life
itself. For most temporal goods are such that the more one person has
the less there is for others, so that absorption in them leads
inevitably to strife and war. But the eternal goods—love, joy, peace,
loyalty, beauty, knowledge—are such that the fuller fruition of them by
one leads of itself to fuller fruition by others also, and absorption in
them leads without fail to brotherhood and fellowship.

It is not of worship, the breath of the church’s life, but of service,
the business of its life, that I wish to speak. But this can only be
misleading if the other has not first been given prominence. The Church
serves because it first worships. Only because it has in itself a
foretaste of eternal life, the realised Kingdom of God, can it prepare
the way of the Lord, so that His Kingdom may come on earth as it is in
heaven.

One question which demands attention concerns the nature of the Church
which is to perform this function. Is it enough that there should be
vast numbers of Christian individuals gathering together in whatever way
is proved by experience to be the most effective for edification,
pursuing their profession as Christians, and so gradually leavening
life? Or is there need for a quite definite society, with a coherent
constitution and a known basis of membership? The former has much to
recommend it; it avoids the deadening influence of a rigid machinery; it
ensures freedom of spiritual and intellectual development; it may seem
to correspond with that loosely constituted group of disciples, which
was, as we have seen, the actual fruit of the earthly ministry of
Christ. Yet it is condemned by all analogies, and is inadequate to the
essential nature of religion.

All relevant analogy suggests that a spirit must take definite and
concrete form before it can be effective in the world, even as God
Himself must become incarnate in order to establish His Kingdom upon
earth. No doubt the form has often fettered the spirit and sometimes
even perverted it; the history of the Franciscan movement is an instance
of this; but the influence of St. Francis would never have done for
Europe what it actually accomplished if the Order had not been founded.

One of the clearest illustrations of the principle is before our eyes in
our experience to-day. When the spirit of national patriotism makes its
appeal, no one has to make any effort to understand its claim; our
nation is a definite and concrete society in which we easily realise our
membership to the full. We know that there is no escaping from it, and
that, when it appeals for our service or our lives, we must either
respond or refuse. But the Christian Church, as we know it, is
powerless to bring home its appeal in the same way. Largely because of
its divisions and endless controversy about the points, secondary though
important, which separate the various sections, it has become curiously
impotent in the face of any great occasion such as the present, and
curiously unsuccessful in persuading either its own members or the world
outside of the nature of its mission. We are not conscious, for
example, that we are permanently either responding to, or else refusing,
the appeal to "preach the Gospel to every creature." That appeal does
not hit us personally as does the appeal, "every fit man wanted." Our
membership in the Church does not in fact make us feel a personal
obligation to assist the cause of the Church. We are content to "belong
to it" without admitting that it has any power to dispose of its
"belongings"; we think that we "support" it by "going to church" and
contributing to "church expenses." But we feel no link with our
fellow-Christians in Germany at all comparable to that which binds us to
an agnostic but patriotic Englishman, or at all capable of bridging
spontaneously the gulf fixed by national antagonism. By a deliberate
effort we can realise that we and they are equally precious in the sight
of God, and that they are our fellow-members in Christ. But there is no
realised bond of corporate unity that binds us to each other, and we
rely upon the very feeble resources of our personal good-will and
personal faith for any sense of unity with them that we may attain. The
Church is less powerful than the nation as an influence in our lives,
partly at least because it is in fact less actual. The Church
universal, whether as an organisation or as spirit of life, is an ideal,
not a reality.

Such an argument, however, simply invites refutation. It is pointed out
that when the whole of one section of Christendom was organised as a
single religious community under the Pope, men did, as a mere matter of
historical fact, fight and hate even more bitterly than now. A common
membership in one Catholic Church did not prevent Edward III. and Henry
V. from making war upon their neighbours across the English Channel.
And at this moment Roman Catholic Frenchmen appear to be fighting
against Roman Catholic Bavarians with no more signs of fellowship
between the opponents than appear in other parts of the field of war. So
far as the Church is organised as a unity, this does not, in fact,
create unity of spirit in its members sufficient to mitigate national
antagonisms.

And this, it will be urged, is only to be expected. "The wind bloweth
where it listeth," and machinery cannot control the spirit. It is only
a personal faith in Christ that will lift men above natural divisions so
that they spontaneously recognise as brothers those who have similar
faith. To build up again a great ecclesiastical organisation which
shall include all Europe, or even all the world, will not of itself
create friendship between the members who compose it if otherwise they
are antagonistic. Individual conversion, not ecclesiastical
statesmanship, is the one thing needful; nothing can take its place.

No; of course nothing can take its place. And of course an
all-comprehensive lukewarm Church will share the fate of its smaller
counterpart at Laodicea. When it is said that the Universal Church is
not a reality, it is not only the absence of a world-wide organisation
that is deplored; still worse is the total absence of any typical manner
of life by which members of the Church may be known from others. Men
die for Great Britain, not because Britain is a united kingdom, but
because there is a definite British character which is ours and which we
love. But there is no specifically Christian type of character actually
distinguishing members of the Church from others which may make men
ready to die for Christendom. Christians differ from others, as Spinoza
bitterly remarked, not in faith or charity or any of the fruits of the
Spirit, but only in opinion. Assuredly individual conversion is the
primary requisite.

But half our troubles come from these absurd dilemmas. Do you believe
in faith or in organisation? Well; do I believe in my eyes or my ears?
Why not in both? Of course organisation cannot take the place of faith;
of course faith without order is better than order without faith. But
why cannot we have in the Church what we have got in the nation faith
operative through order as loyalty is operative through the State and in
service to it?

The earlier objection, however, is equally serious. Catholicism has
failed in the past and is failing now. One main ground of its failure
is to be found, I believe, in its inadequate recognition of nationality,
which has avenged itself by almost ousting Catholicism, and with it
Christianity itself, where national interests are concerned.[#]

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

This failure to give adequate recognition to nationality arises from too
exclusive emphasis on the principle which is, quite rightly, the root
idea of Catholicism—the idea of transcendence. Here in the last resort
is the fundamental distinction between naturalism and religion;
naturalism may take a form which stimulates the religious emotions and
supports a high ethical ideal; but it confines itself to the limits of
secular experience. For naturalism the history of man and of the
universe is the starting-point and the goal; this as fact is the datum,
this as understood is the solution. The Will of God, on this view, is to
be discovered from the empirical course and tendency of history. But
religion begins with God; it breaks in upon what we ordinarily call
"experience" from outside; in its monotheistic form it regards the world
as created by God for His own pleasure, and lasting only during that
pleasure; in its pantheistic form it regards the world as a phase or a
moment of His Being which is by no means limited to that phase or
moment. Its philosophy does not elaborately conceive what God must be
like in order to be the solution of our perplexities, but, starting with
the assurance of His Being and Nature, shows how this is in fact the
answer to all our needs.

It is one peculiarity and glory of Christianity that it unites both of
those. Its faith is fixed upon One who "for us men and for our
salvation _came down from heaven_," and who is yet the eternal Word
through which all things were made, the indwelling principle of all
existence. Transcendence and immanence are here perfectly combined.
But because the former is the distinctively religious element, without
which the latter would have been in danger of relapsing into naturalism,
the deliberate emphasis was all laid on transcendence. We can see, as
we look back, that when once the Incarnation has actually taken place
upon the plane of history, it makes no jot of difference in logic,
provided only that the Life of the Incarnate is taken as the
starting-point and centre of thought, whether terms of transcendence or
of immanence are used. The life of Christ is at once the irruption of
the Divine into the world—(for the previous history of the world
certainly does not explain it)—and is also the manifestation of the
indwelling power which had all along sustained the world. In other
words, the God who redeems is the same God who creates and sustains.
But it is still true that the note of transcendence, of something given
to man by God as distinct from something emerging out of man in his
search of God, is the specifically religious note.

And the Church, as the divine creation and instrument, shares and must
express this character. It must be so constituted as to keep alive this
faith. That is the meaning of hierarchies and sacraments. Whether any
given order is the most adequate that can be designed, is of course a
perfectly legitimate question. But every order that aspires to be
catholic aims, at least, at expressing the truth that religion is a gift
of God, and not a discovery of man. And certainly it is only the gift
of God that can be truly catholic or universal. Man’s discoveries are
indefinitely various; the European finds one thing, the Arab another,
the Hindu yet another, and none finds satisfaction in the other’s
discovery, though in all of them God is operative. Only in His own gift
of Himself is it reasonable to expect that all men will find what they
need; only in a Church which is the vehicle of this gift, and is known
to be this, and not a mutual benefit society organised by its own
members for their several and collective advantage—only in a Church
expressive of Divine transcendence can all nations find a home.

Yet just because of a too one-sided emphasis on this truth, the Catholic
Church in the West has, as a rule, not tried to be a home for nations at
all. "Christianity separated religion from patriotism for every nation
which became, and which remained, Christian."[#] Patriotism is
particular; religion ought to be universal. The nation is a natural
growth; the Church is a divine creation. And so the primitive Church
was organised in complete independence of national life, except in so
far as its diocesan divisions followed national or provincial
boundaries. No doubt the conditions of its existence made this almost
necessary, for the organised secular life of the Roman Empire refused to
tolerate it. But it was its own principle, true indeed but not the
whole truth, which led to this line of development. The same principle
is apparent in the Middle Ages, when there was no external pressure. The
Church, as it was conceived in the sublime ideal of Hildebrand, was to
belong to no nation, because supreme over them all, binding them
together in the obedience and love of Christ, and imposing upon them His
holy will.

[#] "War and Religion" in _The Times Literary Supplement_, Dec. 31,
1914.

The inevitable result of this was that the instinct of nationality was
never christened at all. It remained a brute instinct, without either
the sanction or the restraint of religion. But it could not be crushed,
and so the Church let it alone; with the result that, though murder was
regarded as a sin, a war of dynastic or national ambition was not by
people generally considered sinful. No doubt theologians condemned such
war in general terms; St. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, seems to regard
as fully justified only such wars as are undertaken to protect others
from oppression, and some of the greatest Popes made heroic efforts to
govern national policy according to righteousness. But in the general
judgment of the Church, international action was not subjected to
Christian standards of judgment at all. This way of regarding the
Church sometimes leads people to speak of "alternative" loyalties so
that they ask, "Ought I to be loyal to my Church or to my nation?" And
while faith and reason will combine to answer "To my Church," an
imperious instinct will lead most men in actual fact to answer "To my
nation." The attempt to exalt the Church to an unconditional supremacy
has the actual result of making men ignore it when its guidance is most
needed.

Whatever truth there may be in the statement that the Reformation was in
part due to the growing sentiment of nationality, is evidence of the
failure of the old Catholic Church in this matter. In England at any
rate one main source of the popular Protestantism was the objection to
anything like a foreign domination. No doubt the political ambitions of
the Papacy were largely responsible for the feeling that the Catholic
Church brought with it a foreign yoke. But the whole principle of the
Church as non-national necessarily meant that the Church was regarded as
"imposing" Christian standards rather than permeating national life with
them. The Church tended to ignore the spiritual function of the State
altogether, claiming all spiritual activity for itself alone; and thus
it tended to make the State in actual fact unspiritual, and involved
itself in the necessity of attempting what only the State can do. It
thus not only tended to weaken the moral power of the State, but also
forsook its own supernatural function to exercise those of the
magistrate or judge, so that faith in the power of God was never put to
a full test. The Reformation was not only a moral and spiritual reform
of the Church, but the uprising of the nations, now growing fully
conscious of their national life, against the cosmopolitan rule of Rome.
But the Reformation did not fully realise its task. It expressed itself
indeed in national Churches, but in actual doctrine tended to
individualism; whereas Catholicism laid emphasis on religion as the gift
of God, Protestantism, at least in its later development, laid stress on
the individual’s apprehension of the gift. But not only the
individual—everything that is human, family, school, guild, trade union,
nation, needs to apprehend and appropriate the gift of God. The nation,
too, must be christened and submit to transforming grace.

The uprising of the national spirit has had the deplorable result of
contributing to the break-up of Christendom, but it is not in itself
deplorable at all. All civilisation has in fact progressed by the
development of different nationalities, each with its own type. If we
believe in a Divine Providence, if we believe that the life of Christ is
not only the irruption of the Divine into human history but is also and
therein the manifestation of the governing principle of all history, we
shall confess that the nation as well as the Church is a divine
Creation. The Church is here to witness to the ideal and to guide the
world towards it, but the world is by divine appointment a world of
nations, and it is such a world that is to become the Kingdom of God.
Moreover, if it is by God’s appointment that nations exist, their
existence must itself be an instrument of that divine purpose which the
Church also serves.

The whole course of Biblical revelation supports this view. It is quite
true that if we were to read the New Testament for the first time,
knowing nothing whatever about the Old, we should come to the conclusion
that it almost entirely ignored nationality and everything which goes
with it. But then the Church has always maintained that the New
Testament grows by an organic life out of the Old, and presupposes it;
and when we go back to that, there can be no doubt whatever about its
view of nationality. The whole of the early books of the Old Testament
are concerned with this, and almost nothing else. The task of Moses in
the wilderness, of Joshua, of the Judges and the early Kings, is
precisely to fashion Israel into a nation. So much is all attention
concentrated upon this that we find a contentment with that contraction
of the moral outlook which presents to many modern readers the chief
stumbling block about the Old Testament. Almost everything that was
serviceable to Israel is approved. Rahab is guilty of sheer treason to
her own city of Jericho, but it is serviceable to Israel, and there is
no word of condemnation. Jael is guilty of a very treacherous murder,
but it was serviceable to Israel, so "Blessed shall she be above women
in the tent."

Everything is concentrated upon this primary object of fashioning Israel
into a nation and persuading individual Israelites to put the welfare of
the whole before the interest and ambition of their own clique or
faction; and when the time came for an advance to a wider view, it came
precisely not by way of saying that national divisions do not matter and
that national life itself is unimportant, but by insisting that
nationality is equally precious in these other nations all around Israel
as it is within Israel itself.

The turning point here as in so much else in the Old Testament is the
Book of Amos, the first of the written prophecies. It is worth while to
try to imagine the effect of those opening clauses. The prophet begins
by securing a willing hearing from those to whom he writes: in other
words he begins by abusing their neighbours.

"Thus saith the Lord: For three transgressions of Damascus, yea
for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof...."

"Thus saith the Lord: For three transgressions of Gaza, yea for
four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof....

"Thus saith the Lord: For three transgressions of Tyre, yea for
four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof....

"Thus saith the Lord: For three transgressions of Edom, yea for
four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof....

"Thus saith the Lord: For three transgressions of the children
of Ammon, yea for four, I will not turn away the punishment
thereof....

"Thus saith the Lord: For three transgressions of Moab, yea for
four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof...."

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

"Thus saith the Lord: For three transgressions of Judah, yea for
four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof....

"Thus saith the Lord: For three transgressions of Israel, yea
for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof...."[#]

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

It would be impossible more emphatically to insist that all nations,
Israel and the rest, stand on an equal footing before the Judgment Seat
of God, and are to be regarded as real entities, and real moral agents;
but that is not enough for the prophet.

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

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

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

[#] Amos ix, 7.

It is the God who had guided the history of Israel who has equally
guided the history of the despised Philistine and the hated Syrian. And
this line of thought reaches its culmination where we should expect to
find it, in the works of the statesman-prophet Isaiah. His little
country of Judah was likely to be destroyed by the hostilities of
Assyria and Egypt, and in the middle of that peril, when these nations
were at each other’s throats, he looks forward and says:—

"In that day there shall be a highway out of Egypt to Assyria
and the Assyrian shall come into Egypt, and the Egyptian to
Assyria; and the Egyptians shall worship with the Assyrians."

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

"In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and with
Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth, for that the Lord
of hosts hath blessed them, saying, ’Blessed be Egypt my people,
and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine
inheritance?’"[#]

[#] Isaiah xix, 23-25.

Just picture the pallid frenzy of the orthodox Jew at the words—"Egypt
my people."

The teaching of the Bible is plain enough; and as we come to the New
Testament, with all this in our minds, knowing the emphasis that has
already been laid upon nationality, we find that there, too, is the note
of patriotism.

No man has ever loved his nation more than the Lord loved Israel, and in
the bitterness of disappointment in the lament over Jerusalem we have
the measure of His patriotic love for the holy places of His people.

St. Paul, the author of those great ejaculations—"That there can be
neither Jew nor Gentile, Greek nor Scythian, bond nor free, but one man
in Christ Jesus"[#]—is also the author of the most ardent expression of
patriotism in all literature.

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

"I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience bearing
witness with me in the Holy Ghost, that I have great sorrow and
unceasing pain in my heart. For I could wish that myself were
accursed from Christ for my brethren’s sake, my kinsmen
according to the flesh; who are Israelites, whose is the
adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of
the law, and the service of God, and the promises; whose are the
patriarchs, and of whom is Christ as concerning the flesh."[#]

[#] Rom. ix, 1-5.

One can almost hear him panting as he dictates the words.

The Bible, then, strongly insists upon the nation as existing by divine
appointment, and it looks forward, not to the abolition of national
distinctions, but to the inclusion of all nations in the family of
nations. So it was well that nationality should insist upon itself
within the sphere of religion in the movement that we call the
Reformation. But it left us with a broken Christendom, and with what
are called national Churches. The old Church endeavoured to tyrannise
over the State; under the influence of the Reformation the State tended
to tyrannise over the Church. Then comes a movement towards a free
Church in a free State; but we shall only find satisfaction when we have
a free State in a free Church.

The nation is a natural growth with a spiritual significance. It
emerges as a product of various elementary needs of man; but having
emerged it is found to possess a value far beyond the satisfaction of
these needs. The Church is a spiritual creation working through a
natural medium. Its informing principle is the Holy Spirit of God in
Christ, but its members are men and women who are partly animal in
nature as well as children of God. The nation as organised for action
is the State; and the State, being "natural," appeals to men on that
side of their nature which is lower but is not in itself bad. Justice
is its highest aim and force its typical instrument, though force is
progressively less employed as the moral sense of the community
develops: mercy can find an entrance only on strict conditions. The
Church, on the other hand, is primarily spiritual; holiness is its
primary quality; mercy will be the chief characteristic of its
judgments, but it may fall back on justice and even, in the last resort,
on force.[#] Both State and Church are instruments of God for
establishing His Kingdom; both have the same goal; but they have
different functions in relation to that goal.

[#] See Appendix II.: _On Moral Authority_.

The State’s action for the most part takes the form of restraint; the
Church’s mainly that of appeal. The State is concerned to maintain the
highest standard of life that can be generally realised by its citizens;
the Church is concerned with upholding an ideal to which not even the
best will fully attain. When a man reaches a certain pitch of
development, he scarcely realises the pressure of the State, though he
is still unconsciously upheld by the moral judgment of society; but he
can never outgrow the demand of the Church. On the other hand, if a man
is below a certain standard, the appeal of the Church will not hold him
and he needs the support of the State’s coercion.

Neither State nor Church is itself the Kingdom of God, though the
specific life of the Church is the very spirit and power of that
Kingdom. Each plays its part in building the Kingdom, in which, when it
comes, force will have disappeared, while justice and mercy will
coalesce in the perfect love which will treat every individual according
to his need.

The Church which, officially at least, ignored nationality has failed.
The Church which allowed itself to become little more than the organ of
national religion has failed. The hope of the future lies in a truly
international Church, which shall fully respect the rights of nations
and recognise the spiritual function of the State, thereby obtaining the
right to direct the national States along the path which leads to the
Kingdom of God. We are all clear by now that the Christian Church
cannot be made the servant of one nation; we must become equally clear
that it cannot be regarded as standing apart from them, so that in
becoming a Churchman a man is withdrawn in some degree from national
loyalty. We must get rid of the idea of "alternative" loyalties. The
Church is indeed the herald and the earnest of that Kingdom of God which
includes all mankind; but unless all history is a mere aberration, that
Kingdom will have nations for its provinces, and nations like
individuals will realise their destiny by becoming members of it.

We shall, then, conceive the relation of the nation to the Church on the
analogy of that between the family and the nation. There is in principle
no conflict of interest or loyalty here. The family is a part of the
nation, owing allegiance to it; but the nation consists of families and
can reach its welfare only through theirs. So the nation (in proportion
as it is Christian) must learn to regard itself as a member of the
family of nations in the Catholic Church. No doubt in this imperfect
world there is often a conflict of supposed interests, and sometimes
even of real interests. Moreover, there is often room for doubt as to
where the true interest lies. But the family finds its own true welfare
in the service of the nation, and the nation finds its own welfare in
the service of the Kingdom of God.

The Catholic Church, which is itself not yet a society of just men made
perfect, while upholding the ideal of brotherhood and the love which
kills hate by suffering at its hands, and while calling both men and
nations to penitence and renewed aspiration in so far as they fail to
reach that ideal, will none the less recognise the divinity of the
nation in spite of all its failures. It will not call upon men to come
out from their nation or separate themselves from its action, unless it
believes that then and there the nation itself is capable of something
better, or unless the nation requires of them a repudiation of the very
spirit of Christ, or an action intrinsically immoral. If it is doing
the best that at the moment it is capable of doing, the Church will bid
its citizens support it in that act, lest the nation be weakened in its
defence of the right or its control handed over to those who have no
care for the right.

The Church then must recognise the nation having a certain function in
the divine providence with reference to man’s spiritual life. It must
not try to usurp the State’s functions, for if it does it will perform
them badly, and it will also—which is far more serious—be deserting the
work for which it alone is competent; and the State must, in its turn,
recognise the Church as the Society of Nations, of which it with all
others is a member.

Nothing but such a spiritual society can secure fellowship among
nations. Schemes of arbitration, conciliation, international police and
the like, presuppose, if they are to be effective, an admitted community
of interest between the nations. But this must be not only admitted but
believed in sufficiently to prompt a nation which has no interest in a
particular dispute to make sacrifices for the general good, by spending
blood and treasure in upholding the authority of the international court
or council. What will secure this, except the realisation of common
membership in the Kingdom of God, and in the Christian Church, its
herald and earnest?

And yet the Church we know is not only divided but at war within itself.
This, the Creation of God in Christ, is not more free from strife and
faction than the nations, which are natural growths. If grace fails,
how can nature succeed? Why should we expect the nations of the world
to be at peace, when the sections of the Church are at war?

Because the Church is so far from what we hope it may become, we can
only sketch that future Church in outline. Its building will be the
work of years, perhaps of centuries. And probably enough our attempt
will fail as Hildebrand’s failed; probably enough there will be scores
of failures; but each time we must begin again in order that for Christ
and His Spirit a Body may be prepared, through which His purpose may in
the end of the ages find its accomplishment, and the nations of the
earth bring their glory—each its own—into His Holy City.

There is the goal; dimly enough seen; but the method is perfectly plain.
"Thomas saith unto Him, Lord, we know not whither Thou goest; how know
we the way? Jesus saith unto him, I am the way." And when that way led
to the Cross, beside the innocent Sufferer there were two others. One
cried to Him, "Save Thyself and us"; the other recognised His royalty in
that utmost humiliation and prayed, "Jesus, remember me when Thou comest
in Thy Kingdom." He, and he alone in the four Gospels, is recorded to
have addressed the Lord by His personal name. Penitence creates
intimacy, whether it be offered to God or to man.

We have been made very conscious of the burden of the world’s pain and
sin, though perhaps that burden, as God bears it, is no heavier now than
in our selfish and worldly peace. Will the Church pray to Him, "Save
Thyself and us"? or will it willingly suffer with Him, united with Him
in the intimacy of penitence, seeing His royalty in His crown of thorns?
Will it, while bidding men bravely do their duty as they see it, still
say that the real treasures are not of this world though they may in
part be possessed here, suffering whatever may be the penalty for this
unpopular testimony? For the kingdoms of this world will become the
Kingdom of our God and of His Christ only when the citizens of those
kingdoms lay up their treasure in heaven and not upon the earth, only
when, being risen with Christ, they set their affection on things
above—love, joy, peace, loyalty, beauty, knowledge—only when they
realise their fellowship in His Body so that their fellowship also in
His Holy Spirit may purge their selfishness away.

Here is field enough for heroism and the moral equivalent of war. The
Church is to be transformed and become a band of people united in their
indifference to personal success or national expansion, and caring only
that the individual is pure in heart and the nation honourable. In her
zeal for that purity and honour, and in her contempt for all else, she
may have to suffer crucifixion. It is a big risk that the Church must
run; for if she does not save the world she will have ruined it, besides
sacrificing herself. If there is no God nor Holy City of God, the
Church will have just spoilt life for all her faithful members, and in
some degree for every one else as well. But if her vision is true, then
everything is worth while—rather the greatness of the sacrifice is an
addition to the joy when the prize is so unimaginably great. Can we
bring this spirit into the Church? On our answer depends the course of
history in the next century, and a new stage in the Coming of the Lord.

_The Spirit and the Bride say, Come._
_And he that heareth, let him say, Come._
_Yea: I come quickly._
_Amen: come, Lord Jesus._

*LECTURE III*

*JUSTICE AND LIBERTY IN THE STATE*

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

I.—In the last lecture I said that justice would seem to be the typical
virtue of the State, as holiness of the Church. Let us, then, first
consider this virtue of justice in the light of our Lord’s teaching
concerning one of the most familiar aspects of justice—its penal aspect.

Those sayings that have of late given rise to so many searchings of
heart among Christians—the sayings about turning the other cheek and the
rest—are given by our Lord as explanations of the saying that He came
"not to destroy the law but to fulfil it." The words "to fulfil" of
course mean not only to obey and carry out, but to complete.

In what sense is this teaching of our Lord the completion of the law?
For the law of Moses, like every other law, was concerned with
regulating the relations of men to one another, as well as their duties
towards God; and it enforced what it enjoined by penalties.

At first sight no doubt it looks as if He were directly contradicting
what had been said to them of old time—

"Ye have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth
for a tooth: but I say unto you, That ye resist not him that is
evil; but whosoever smites thee on thy right cheek, turn to him
the other also, and if any man will sue thee at the law, and
take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also."

How is this the fulfilment or completion of the Mosaic or any other law?
At this distance of time, it is hard to remember what was the original
significance of the law of retaliation. We are inclined to think that
the words "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" are intended to
give a licence to that degree of vindictiveness; but on the contrary, in
the primitive stage in which that enactment was given, it was not a
licence given to man’s instinct for vengeance, but a limitation set upon
that primitive and animal instinct, whose natural tendency, if
unchecked, is to take two eyes for an eye and a set of teeth for a
tooth. The _lex talionis_ said—Only an eye for an eye, and only a tooth
for a tooth.

Our Lord carries the same principle further; not even that degree of
vindictiveness is allowed. The first necessity was to put bounds upon
man’s natural and almost insatiable lust for vengeance. The next was to
tell him that the whole method of vengeance could never succeed in what
is its only really justifiable aim. For what is the true function of
the law, whether that of Moses or any other? It is always two-fold; it
must always aim not merely at checking the evil act, but at converting,
if possible, the evil will.

There has never, I suppose, been any legal system which was not
justified by its upholders on this ground. No one is really content, to
think that the punishment which he inflicts, or may imagine himself as
inflicting through the agency of the State, or in any other way, is
purely deterrent; he always thinks it will also be reformative. But,
how are you as a matter of fact to attack the evil will? The mere
infliction of penalty will not of any necessity achieve this goal at
all. We know that it is very seriously debated whether our whole system
of punishment in the civilised States of to-day has any really moral
effect, at least upon those who fall under its most severe penalties.
Probably most convicts leave prison worse men than when they entered.
For if a man is below a certain level in moral attainment, pain, far
from purifying, only brutalises and coarsens. It is only those who are
already far in the path of spiritual growth who are purified by
suffering, even as the Captain of our Salvation was thus made perfect.
But it is still true that the aim of all penal law is twofold; to check
the evil act and, if possible, to convert the evil will.

Now, as I suggested previously, mere restraint may have indirectly a
positive moral value; as for example in the case of a child, who is
potentially of very diverse characters. He has the capacity to grow in
many different directions, and it will depend very much upon his
surroundings, and the influences which play upon his character, whether
this set of instincts or that receives development; and here merely to
keep forcibly within bounds the development of certain impulses, which
tend to grow out of proportion to the proper harmony and economy of
nature, may indirectly have the effect of preserving that harmony and
thus develop genuine virtue in the soul. And again, with those whose
characters are relatively formed, the direct restraint, for example, of
State action may have positive moral value, inasmuch as it is the
expression of the moral judgment of Society. What most of us would
shrink from, if we were in danger of imprisonment, would not be the
physical inconvenience, which is not very great, but the fact that we
should have brought ourselves under the censure of Society, and acted in
such a way as to put ourselves below the level which Society generally
considers itself justified in enforcing. And so the purely restraining
influence of the State, even operating through force, may have a
positive moral value, because it represents, and is the only way at
present devised of representing, the judgment of Society, and to shrink
from the judgment of Society is, so far as it goes, a really moral fear.
It is not indeed the highest ground for the avoidance of evil, but it is
a moral ground, for it arises from our recognition of our
fellow-membership in Society with those whose censure we fear.

But the State in all its actions is of necessity mechanical, and cannot
take account of the individual, and all that makes him what he is. The
State officer cannot know the prisoner in such a way as really to
determine the treatment allotted to him in the light of what is best for
his spiritual welfare; and therefore he has to fall back upon rough and
ready rules which will never be perhaps very far from the right
treatment, though they may fail to allot the ideal treatment in any
single case. And here, in parenthesis, let me just mention that this is
the chief reason why metaphors and comparisons drawn from the law-courts
are so sadly misleading when used to illustrate the relation between the
human soul and God; our only fear of the judge is concerned with what he
will do to us; but what we fear with our father, on earth or in Heaven,
is not so much what he will do to us, as the pain we have caused—"There
is mercy with Thee; therefore shalt Thou be feared."

Our Lord’s method is the only one that aims straight at the evil will;
it is the only method which has in it any real hope of converting the
individual. It may fail time and again; but it is the only one that has
a chance of real and absolute success.

Let us look for a moment at the instances which He chooses to illustrate
the principle, and we shall see at once that they are carefully chosen.
All the acts chosen are such as are particularly vexatious to the
ordinary natural and selfish man—being struck in the face; having a
vexatious suit brought against one; being pestered by a beggar; being
compelled to do something for the public service when we are busy.
Those are just the things which the natural man resents and which the
real Christian will not mind at all. For, after all, there is no real
injury in being struck in the face, or having one’s coat taken away.
What one minds is the insult to one’s precious dignity; and the
Christian who, by definition, has forgotten all about himself will not
mind such injuries at all. Therefore if the acts commanded are
spontaneously done and not done with a laborious conscientiousness—that
is to say if they are done in the spirit of Christianity, and not in the
spirit of Pharisaism—they will express a complete conversion in the will
of him who does them; they will express absolute conquest of self, and a
concern solely for the welfare of him with whom we are dealing; and
there is no heart yet made that can resist the appeal of love which is
constant in spite of every betrayal, the appeal of trust which is
renewed in spite of endless disappointments.

"He that loveth his brother"—says St. John—"walketh in the light." He
is the man who knows where he is going, because he is the man who
understands people and sees into their hearts. They will reveal to him
secrets of their nature, which they will hide from the contemptuous and
indifferent; and even if at first he is from time to time disappointed
and betrayed, in the end his method will succeed, because love and trust
create what they believe in.

The justice then, which we find at work in the State, is always a
provisional thing pointing us to something more, something which the
State itself by its very constitution is unable to provide, but which
God provides in Christ, and will enable us in our measure to provide, if
we are faithful, at least in the circle of our immediate activities, so
far, that is, as the range of our sympathy will carry us.

II.—The value of the justice which the State is able to secure actually
resides for the most part in the liberty which it makes possible.
Justice, as the State interprets it, is of itself, as far as I can see,
almost totally valueless. I can see no kind of advantage in merely
allotting so much pain to so much evil. There is moral evil in a man
and you put physical evil into him as well. I do not see how you have
made him or anyone else the better. Only in so far as the punishment is
either deterrent or reformative, has it any moral value at all; and only
in the latter case, where it reforms the character, can the value be
called in the strict sense moral. So far as it only deters men from evil
acts which they would desire to commit, it may add to the convenience of
the other members of Society, but it is not doing any direct moral good.

Indirectly, however, it has moral results; for when we enquire in what
sense we can say that such justice as the State secures produces
liberty, the first answer is to be found in the obvious and elementary
fact that the liberty of every one of us depends upon our knowledge that
certain impulses and instincts in other people, should they arise, will
be checked and not allowed to receive full expression. Our liberty is
increased by that check put upon predatory or homicidal impulses in
other people, and their liberty depends upon the suppression of such
impulses in us.

So far it would seem that there must be in the most obvious sense of the
words a certain curtailment of everybody’s liberty in order that anybody
may have liberty at all. If we are all to be free to indulge our
passions of anger and hatred, should such arise within us, then it is
quite clear that there will be very little freedom of action in the
Society which rests on that principle. Everyone will go about in fear
of everyone else.

But that is a very small part of the business. The chief contribution of
such justice to human liberty is that it supplies the necessary
conditions of discipline without which there can be no liberty. We
think of liberty as meaning freedom from external constraint. We think
that an act of ours is free when we can say, "I did it, and no one made
me do it"; but very little reflection is sufficient to convince us that
a man whose life is actually governed by one or several over-developed
passions which he will, as a matter of fact, always gratify when
opportunity offers, in spite of the damage that is done to his whole
life and to his permanent and deliberate purpose, is not really a free
man. To be tied and bound with the chain of our sins is just as much
slavery as to be in the ownership of another man; and we can acquire the
real liberty which is worth having, the liberty, that is, to shape our
lives, to live according to our own purpose, following out our own
ideal, only in so far as our natures have been welded by discipline into
unity, so that we are no longer a chaos of impulses and instincts, any
of which may be set in motion by the appropriate environment, but are
self-governing persons controlling our own lives.

Liberty, in so far as it is of any value, always means self-control in
both the senses of that term: in the sense that we are only controlled
by ourselves, and also in the sense that by ourselves we are controlled,
and that every part of our nature is subservient to the purpose to which
our whole nature is given. Legislation is really an instrument of
self-discipline. The people who write books about political philosophy
are mainly members of the respectable classes. They naturally find it
rather difficult to envisage themselves as liable to commit murder and
the like; and they are therefore very liable to represent the criminal
law of the State as being enacted against a few undisciplined or
recalcitrant members. But when we look at the thing more closely, we
see that what a community does, especially a democratic community, when
it passes a law, is to invoke, every member upon his own head, the
penalties enacted by that law, if he should do the act which the law
forbids.

Let us consider, for example, an international convention. What is the
use of nations agreeing with one another not to do something, for
instance not to poison wells, unless there is some chance that in a
moment of strong temptation they may desire to do it? They therefore
strengthen their deliberate purpose to avoid such acts by entering into
an agreement with one another always to avoid them. There would be no
object in doing this unless they needed help, or thought that they might
at some time need help, in living up to their own purposes.

And we have to remember that in this way the law of the State is, as a
matter of fact, perpetually operating upon every one of us. We are
often liable to suppose that it is only active in relation to those
people against whom it is definitely set in motion; but it does operate
in the life of every one of the citizens of a community; because the
fact that certain actions would involve us in State-penalty most
undoubtedly does keep all of us from indulging in those actions at
certain times, even though at calm moments we recognise that it would be
wrong to do so. Trivial instances are nearly always the clearest. Most
of us, I suppose, are sufficiently honest to desire in general terms to
pay for what we buy; and we should perhaps usually pay for our places in
the train, even if there were no ticket-inspector; still, the existence
of the inspector just clinches the matter.[#] The possibility of the
penalty as a matter of fact helps to maintain our general, permanent,
and deliberate purpose of honesty against a momentary temptation to be
dishonest; and so far it is helping us to live up to our purpose, or, in
other words, is increasing our real freedom. In fact, one main test of
good legislation is precisely whether it does or does not in this way
develop real freedom by increasing people’s power to live by their own
deliberate purpose.

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

Now so far we have been considering Society as consisting of relatively
free persons (though the freedom exists in varying degrees, both as
regards the external constraint and capacity for self-control), these
persons having various claims which have to be regulated by the justice
which the State upholds; in other words, in this stage, we are regarding
justice in the way in which I suppose it is most usually regarded,
namely, as rendering to a man what is due to him. That is the
definition with which Plato in _The Republic_ starts his enquiry, and he
naturally found very soon that it would not work.[#] It will not work
because the moral values of people are not determinable. You cannot, as
a matter of fact, ever say what is the relative weight of the various
claims that may be made on behalf of this or that man. Most
particularly there is the perpetual conflict between the actual and the
potential worth of any men.

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

Suppose that we decide that we will give to all men in Society that
which is their due. How are we going to determine what is due? Is it to
be determined by their economic value, for example by the amount they
are contributing to the economic or general welfare of Society? Well
then, there are a large number of people at both ends of what we call
the social scale who ought to receive nothing at all, because they are
contributing nothing economically, or, indeed, in any other way, to the
public welfare. And yet that is not their fault; they have been brought
up, it may be in squalor, it may be in luxury, but in either case in
circumstances which have made them almost incapable of anything like
good citizenship. Are we to kill such persons, or leave them to starve,
in the interest of the public welfare? All human instincts will protest
that this is unjust, and that they can claim more than they can possibly
be represented as contributing, simply because they have had, as we say,
bad luck, and it is not their fault.[#]

[#] See Appendix III, _On Justice and Education_.

Let us try what happens if after Plato’s example we turn the matter
upside down, and instead of saying that justice will be found when there
is rendered to each man what is due to him, we say that justice is found
when each man contributes what is due from him.

Now logically, of course, these two are the same, because duties and
rights are absolutely correlative. My rights constitute other people’s
duties towards me, and their rights constitute my duties towards them.
The only difference is that it is far more easy in any given case to
determine what is due from somebody—what can be claimed from him—than to
determine what is due to him.

In this imperfect stage of the world, where we are passing through the
transition from something like barbarism to Christian civilisation, as
we hope, it is possible that of two correlative processes, one will
actually carry us further than the other even though it is logically
inseparable from it. And in fact we find at once, that if we put it
this way, and say that the principle of justice is not that each man
should obtain what is due to him, but that each should contribute what
is due from him, we are coming to the central principle of God’s
administration of His world, which is that we should render to every man
not according to his desert, but according to his need. Indeed for
practical purposes, if we are wishing to bring justice into our own
dealings, and into the dealings of any public body with which we may
have influence, this principle will carry us further than any
other—"Render to every man according to his need."

Let us suppose that we meet on one day with two beggars. One of them is
a man who has borne a good character throughout his life, and has lost
his work through no fault of his own; the works on which he was employed
were closed, and he is now tramping in search of more work. All of us
of course will say—"He deserves help and we will help him." Yes; and it
is quite easy to help him. We have only to set him up again, and all
will be well. It is not his own fault and we can rely upon him to make
use of another opportunity. The other beggar is a man who has lost this
place, as he has lost many before, through indulgence in some vice, such
as drink. There are very many people who will say, "Well, it is his own
fault, and now he must suffer for it." If God had taken that line with
us, where would our redemption be?—"It is his own fault, now he must
suffer for it." To say that is to repudiate the Gospel in its entirety.
It is to call the Cross absurd and scandalous. "God commendeth His love
toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died."

No; the Christian will say, "This man needs help more than the other."
It will not be the same kind of help. It is no use merely to give him
money. That may merely help him to go wrong quicker than he would
otherwise. He needs something that will cost us, probably, more than
money; he needs our time—time to make friends; time to remove his
suspicions; time to enter into real sympathy with him, and to detect
what elements of strength there are in his character, that we may build
them up again. But he needs help more than the other, and the Christian
will be bound to give it, and he will say—"It was his own fault; he
cannot help himself; it depends entirely on us; we will render to him
according to his need."

And all of this would lead to another formula for describing the justice
which we shall desire to practise in the State, and in all our secular
life of which the State is the highest organisation—The recognition of
personality.

I do not know at all what forms your labour unrest in takes in this
continent, but I claim to have considerable opportunities of knowing
what is the root of that unrest in England, at least among the better
type of working people; for I am concerned with an organisation which is
at work among working folk all over England, having an enormous
membership, and which aims at claiming for them, and supplying them
with, further facilities for education. Those with whom I thus come in
contact are picked men, no doubt, because those who join an educational
association are thereby marked off at once as intellectually at least
more alert than those who do not join; but as I go about them, I find no
room whatever for doubting that the root of the labour unrest in England
is a sense that the whole organisation of our life constitutes a
standing insult to the personality of the poor man. Why, for example,
he feels, should it be possible for a well-to-do man to secure for
himself, or for his wife, or for his child, the medical attendance that
may be needed, while he in very many parts of our country depends upon
institutions maintained by voluntary contributions? It is quite
compatible with gratitude to those whose generosity maintains these
institutions to feel that for such service he should not be dependent
upon anybody’s charity at all—whether the solution is to be that the
State maintain such institutions or that every man who is doing his fair
share of the country’s work receive for himself the wage that will
enable him to deal with such emergencies as they arise.

Above all, men feel the denial of their personality in the organisation
of industry itself. Men have fought and died for political liberty,
which means the right to have a voice in making the laws by which you
are to be governed. But the laws of the State do not for the most part
invade a man’s home, whereas the regulations of an industrial firm do.
They determine when he shall get up in the morning and when he shall go
to bed; they determine whether he shall have any leisure for the pursuit
of any interest of his own. In the making of those regulations he has,
as a rule, no voice whatever, and no opportunity of making his views
understood except by threat, the threat of a strike. The men feel that
they are what they are sometimes called, "hands" not persons. They are
the tools of other men. You must apply all this to your own country, if
and so far as it does apply. But one might easily imagine a village in
Lancashire, or any other industrial district where all the inhabitants
are dependent upon one industry; there are many such; and the control of
that industry may be in the hands of a Board of Directors, settled
perhaps in London; it may only meet a few times a year for the
transaction of business, and otherwise not exist at all. They never see
the people whose lives and destinies they thus control. The shareholders
who want their dividends make no enquiries as a rule about the
conditions in which the work is done. If that Board of Directors
mismanages its business the village in Lancashire goes hungry. If that
Board of Directors, when they have already got a full supply of work,
takes on another large contract, that village in Lancashire works
overtime; and the people have no say in the matter. Whatever else that
is, it is not liberty, and in the judgment of the people themselves it
is not justice. And indeed it is not either justice or liberty as we
have learned in other spheres to understand those terms. The economic
organisation of life comes far closer to the individual citizen than the
political organisation, and the development of justice remains
incomplete until it has secured liberty of an economic as well as a
political kind.

If it is true that the method of Christ is to appeal to the free
personality of the man, so that he obeys out of love and devotion and
not from fear of penalty nor hope of reward, other than the reward of
realising the love of the Master, then surely it is in the true line of
development towards the perfected Christian civilisation if we demand
that these opportunities for the development of free personality shall
be afforded. No doubt it must be done with wisdom. Rough and ready
methods, however well-meant, might do far more harm than good, and leave
us in a situation even worse than that which we know. But the Church
has paid scarcely any attention to those things in England. It is very
difficult to persuade Church-people that, because they are followers of
Christ, and therefore might be assumed to recognise that they are
"members one of another" with all these others, they are therefore bound
(for example) in investing their money to find out the conditions under
which their dividends are going to be earned. In almost every
department of life we have left such things alone. Under the stress of
war, we have suddenly become acutely conscious of the drink evil. It
was there before; and we have been content that the great majority of
our fellow citizens should have no opportunity for gratifying those
instincts of social life and merriment, which are the birthright of all
God’s children, except in places where the influence of alcohol was
supreme. We have been content with that. We have not thought it was our
duty to find a means of supplying them with other places of recreation
and amusement; we have saved our money. And then we have the
impertinent audacity to claim our own redemption by the blood of Christ.

One can go on with one evil after another in the same way. This is what
makes the Church weak. It is no sort of use for us to say that Christ
is the Redeemer of the world, and the Revealer of the way of life, if
with regard to just those evils which press most heavily on men we have
to say that for them He has unfortunately not supplied a remedy.

No doubt if these evils are to be dealt with on a large scale, the work
must be done by the State, for nothing else is adequate; and the Church
here has two main tasks. It is no part of the Church’s task to advocate
general principles or particular maxims of economic science, though its
members, in their capacity of citizenship ought to be active in these
ways. The first task of the Church is to inspire the State, which after
all very largely consists of the same persons as itself, with the desire
to combat the evil; and the second is to counteract the one great
difficulty which the State experiences. When the State takes up such
work as this, there is one thing which we all fear: "Officialism." What
is "Officialism"? Simply lack of love; nothing else in the world. It
consists in treating people as "cases," according to rules and red tape,
instead of treating them as individuals; and the Church which must
inspire the State to want to deal with these things, must then supply
the agents through whom it may deal with them effectively, inspiring
them with the love of men which is the fruit and test of a true love of
God.

But beyond all this, the Church must be making demands far greater than
it has ever made upon man’s spiritual nature and spiritual capacity, and
must then point to the organisation of our social life and say—"That
organisation, because and in so far as it deprives men of the full
growth of their spiritual nature, because and in so far as it prevents
them from taking the share which belongs to God’s children in His
worship and the enjoyment of his gifts of nature and Grace, is proved to
be of the devil."

In our worship we find for the most part what we expect to find. There
may be gifts offered us, gifts from God, that we never receive because
we have not looked for them. It is in our intercourse with Christ that
we shall find the means of solving the horror of our social problem, if
we are expecting to find it; but we have not expected it. We have not
really believed that He is the Redeemer of the World; we have not looked
to Him for the redemption of Society. The State by itself, until the
Church comes to its help, can do something indeed, but something which
by itself is almost worthless.[#] It supplies the indispensable
foundation without which a spiritual structure cannot be built up; but,
if that building never comes, the foundation by itself is little more
than useless. To those whom the social order favours it offers real
liberty and life, but no inspiration; a perfect social order would offer
liberty to all, but still no inspiration. The State alone can never be
the house of many mansions wherein every soul is truly at home.

[#] It is to be observed that the State is by its very nature largely
limited to the regulation of those human relationships where men oppose
each other with rival claims; as soon as men rise to the reciprocity of
friendship the method of the State is inappropriate. People do not go
to law to determine whether either loves the other adequately.

*LECTURE IV*

*HOLINESS AND CATHOLICITY IN THE CHURCH*

"This is the law of the house: upon the top of the mountain the whole
limit thereof round about shall be most holy. Behold, this is the law of
the house."—Ezekiel xliii, 12.

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

The Bible gives us two elaborately conceived pictures of the perfected
life of man. The first is that which occupies the closing chapters of
Ezekiel’s prophecy; its leading feature is the immense separation which
is insisted upon between the Temple and the secular City. The Hill of
Zion has become a very high mountain; upon the top of it the Temple is
set, and there is a wide space, at least two miles, between it and the
City of Jerusalem, which has been moved away by that distance to the
south.

Indeed, if we take the description as intended to be complete, the City
seems to exist chiefly to provide a congregation for the Temple’s
services, and the Prince only to offer representative worship on behalf
of His people. All attention is concentrated upon the place of the
worship of God, and the holiness which is to be characteristic of that
place. By thus keeping the Temple holy, through separating it from the
body of the City and its secular life, the Prophet attains no doubt the
end he has in view, but he also, of necessity, though probably
unintentionally, leaves the suggestion that the secular life itself
cannot be wholly consecrated.

In sharp contrast with this is St. John’s picture in the Book of
Revelation; here there is no specific place of worship at all, for the
whole City is the Temple of God; more than that, the whole City is the
very Holy of Holies, for it is described as being a perfect cube, and
the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s Temple was a perfect cube.

"And the city lieth four square, and the length thereof is as
great as the breadth: and he measured the city with the reed,
twelve thousand furlongs; the length and the breadth and the
height thereof are equal. And he measured the wall thereof, and
it was one hundred and forty and four cubits."[#]

[#] Rev. xxi, 16, 17.

The City thus corresponds in symbolic form with the Holy of Holies. It
is become the dwelling place of God. No special shrine is needed, no
place to which men draw apart, because their whole life is an act of
worship, and God dwells among them in their daily activities.

There is one feature about this Heavenly City, which is obscured through
the use of the old terms of measurement, for this cube is described as
being 1,500 _miles_ high, 1,500 _miles_ broad, and 1,500 _miles_ long;
but the wall which stands for defence against foes without and for the
containment and order of the life within, and indeed represents in
general the principle of organisation—the wall is only 216 _feet_ high;
so small a thing is order in comparison with the life which it
safeguards.

It is between those two poles, which are set for us as the extreme terms
in a process, that the Church must live its life. There is truth in
both of them.

We were considering in the last lecture justice and liberty, which are
the supreme achievements of the National State. Let us to-day consider
the Holiness and Catholicity, which are the supreme treasures of the
Church.

Holiness must come first, Holiness which means absolute conformity to
the will of God. Whatever obstacles there may be to overcome, whatever
seductions to avoid, the Church is to remain absolutely devoted to the
Divine Will. Only so can it be catholic or universal. It might for a
moment achieve an all-embracing unity by giving up everything that is
offensive to men, and gathering all within it under the glow of a
comfortable sentiment; but then its life would be gone, and after a
little while the men who had all become members of it would be just as
though they had not. Only a Church which is perfectly loyal to the Will
of God, can possibly be the home for all mankind.

But Holiness has always had two meanings—an outward and an inward, a
ceremonial and a moral. We shall agree, I suppose, in saying that the
outward and ceremonial is in itself of no consequence, and exists only
in order to preserve and make possible the inward and spiritual
conformity to God’s Will; but for that purpose, as all human experience
has always shown, it is quite indispensable. We are made of bodies as
well as souls, and if our whole being is to be permeated, there must be
bodily expression of that which our souls enjoy or need. We must
worship with our bodies as well as with our souls. So St. Paul, after
all his emphasis upon the spirit as against dead works, begins his
practical exhortation with the words, "I beseech you, therefore,
brethren, by the mercies of God to present your bodies a living
sacrifice."[#] The physical and bodily expression is always necessary,
in this human life of ours, to the full efficacy and to the survival
through the ages of the spiritual, though this no doubt is alone of
ultimate consequence.

[#] Rom. xii, 1.

If the Church is to maintain its Holiness, it must of necessity be to
some extent separated from the world; it cannot mix as a Church in all
worldly activities. It cannot simply set itself out to permeate the
general life of men, maintaining nothing that is separate and apart for
itself. If it does that, it will simply be lost in the general life of
the world.

In the last resort our characters depend almost entirely upon the
influences that play upon them in our environment; the one place where
we have effective choice is in determining the influences to which we
will submit ourselves. If there is no place in our society, or in the
world, where men may count upon finding the power of God in purity, then
men will inevitably fail to rise above that sort of character, which
their worldly environment happens to be forming in them.

The Church then, precisely in order to do this work in the world, must
keep itself in some sense separate from the world; but the vast majority
of its members are people in the daily life of the world, pursuing their
avocations there; and it would plainly be wholly disastrous to require
that all Christian people, in virtue of their Christianity, should
withdraw themselves from the ordinary concerns of men.

There is, therefore, no means by which this separateness of the Church
can be achieved unless there are certain persons set apart to be
representatives of the Church, and of the Church only; and who, because
they are official representatives of the Church are thereby deprived of
the right to take part in many worldly activities, though these in
themselves are right enough.

It is not because they are more truly members of the Church than others,
nor because there is a different moral standard for clergy and laity,
but because in the whole life of the Church there are certain functions
which are incompatible with others, just as in the State a man cannot be
at the same time an advocate and a judge, or commander-in-chief and
ambassador.

Thus, for example, as it seems to me, one who is called to be a priest
of the Church, inevitably forfeits the right to take part in the
hurly-burly of party politics; partly because, in a world which consists
of many parties, he is responsible for bringing before men the claim of
God to which all the parties ought to bow; partly also because a man’s
activities inevitably affect the quality of his own mind, and if we are
to be as it were repositories of the Eternal truths, if we are to have
ready for dispensation all the treasures which God commits to His
Church, we need a type of mind which cannot, at least by most men, be
maintained, if we are engaged in heated controversy and frequent debate.

Another example may be found in the question whether a priest should
serve as a combatant in his country’s army. He is called to represent
the Church; and the Church is essentially, not accidentally,
international; it is not international merely as a scientific society
may be, in that it is not concerned with political frontiers and men of
all nations are welcome within it; but it is international in the sense
that it exists to bind the nations of the earth in one. The officer of
such a society may be as patriotic in his feeling as anyone else, but,
just because he is an official, for him to take positive action on one
side of the other weakens the Church’s international position, and is,
therefore, a more serious act than it is in the case of the layman. Here
again there are not two standards, but there are diverse circumstances.
If the Church called on all its members to refuse to serve, the result
would be to interfere with the freedom of the State to act in its own
sphere; if it allows everyone to serve, it is deprived of its Catholic
witness just when that is most vitally needed. The only way of doing
justice to the legitimate claims of both nationalism and Catholicity, is
to differentiate between persons; and there is no practicable or even
sensible way of doing this except to make the Church’s officers
responsible for the Catholic witness and its lay, or unofficial, members
for the national.

But does this not involve the danger of a priestly caste? Yes, no doubt
it does; but there are two ways in which we may avoid falling into that
danger. The first is perpetually to remember that men are called by God
to the different kinds of work which He has for them to do; and we shall
avoid unctuousness, which is no doubt what men most dread about a
priestly caste, if we keep it perpetually in our mind that we are not
personally holy because our calling is. We are entrusted with this
great charge. We have to fulfil it. It is our work for Him. But there
are those whom He calls to serve Him as politicians and as soldiers; if
they do their work as in His sight, and to His glory, they are serving
Him every bit as much as we are. All the work of all the kinds of men
is needed in the world, and it is only if we suppose that we are made
more holy because our calling is concerned with the specifically holy
things that we shall fall before that danger.

And the other safeguard, paradoxical as it may sound, is a very complete
specialised training. One of the reasons, I am quite sure, why lay
people often find us rather stilted and uncongenial is because we have
not secured a sufficient grasp upon what is our own special subject to
feel full liberty in conversation and to speak naturally. We are
perpetually wondering at what point we shall be suddenly compromising
that for which we are responsible. We tend to utter (and even to hold)
merely conventional opinions and to express ourselves only in the
stereotyped phrases, because we have not sufficient grasp of spiritual
and moral truth to trust ourselves in forming individual opinions, or in
finding our own language for expressing the opinions which we form.
Precisely in the degree in which we know our own work and have full
possession of what is entrusted to us, shall we obtain liberty and ease
of manner, and be in general behaviour just like other people, which is
what we ought most to desire.

Still it is in the person of its priests that the Church must maintain
that outward holiness, that separation from the world, which alone makes
possible a concentration upon things divine; and without this
concentration it can never become a catholic or universal body.
"Universal," here does not, of course, mean all-inclusive. There are
those who definitely and deliberately reject the claim of Christ, and
those have never been submitted in any way to His influence. The
unbaptized heathen are not members of the Catholic Church; and if they
refuse the Gospel when it comes, they remain outside. Moreover, as we
have seen, there is possible a vicious as well as a holy catholicity.
There is nothing so seductive as the temptation to suppose that doctrine
which evokes a response is on that account true, or particularly to be
emphasised. Sometimes people dislike the truth. There are people who
are alienated by it; and the attractiveness of our gospel to people,
irrespective of their frame of mind, is no evidence of its divinity.
There is a picture in the Old Testament where Moses the Prophet is apart
upon the mountain top, communing with God, while at the foot of the
mountain, Aaron, the official priest, is ministering to the people the
kind of religion they like. He was encouraging them, as the Psalmist
satirically says, to worship: "the similitude of the calf that eateth
hay." There was nothing very dignified about it. But it was what the
people liked; and the response to his ministrations was immediate and
immense. Our task is to lay hold, so far as we may in our infinite
feebleness, of the truth that was given to the world in Christ in all
its sternness as well as its love—or rather in that sternness which is
an essential part of its love; and this is what we must present to men.

Again, it is not in proportion to their virtue in the ordinary moral
sense that men are drawn to the Church; it is in proportion to their
conscious need of God. It is perhaps worth while just now especially to
emphasise the peril of a faithless virtue, and the depth of error
involved in any attempt to take for the basis of a Church "the religion
of all good men." What will happen to a man who sets his effort upon
the building up of his whole character according to an ethical ideal?
One of two things. Either he may in part succeed, perhaps as much as he
himself desires to succeed, and then he may become self-satisfied and a
Pharisee; or else he will find himself either failing altogether, or,
having succeeded in part, incapable of carrying the success to its full
completion, and not knowing where to find the power that will take him
further; and so he ends in despair.

No, the appeal of the Church, as universal, is simply that it has within
it that which answers the real and deepest need of every human being.
There everyone will find his home, when once he has found his need of
God, if indeed the Church is holy.

And this is also its distinction from the sects; for it endeavours to
uphold the entire body of the truth, every particle of it that may be of
service to anyone. I suppose there are very few of us to whom the whole
of the Creed is a living reality. We may believe it all, but what we
live by is usually a small part of it, and it is a different part with
different persons. The essence of sectarianism, as I understand it, is
the gathering together of those people who live by the same part of the
Creed, in order that, like mingling with like, they may develop a great
intensity and fervour of devotion. For a moment, indeed, they may be
far more effective than the great body of the Church, and yet they
cannot become universal. There is something lacking from what they
uphold, which someone needs.[#] The aim of the Church is to be
universal here also, and to uphold the entire body of the truth,
presenting it in its entirety, even though the priest who is called upon
to fulfil that office of presenting it to the people may himself be
actually living by the slenderest portion of it. No doubt we shall
present most forcibly that part of the whole truth which is most real to
ourselves; and for that reason, if no other, we ought to try our utmost
to gain a personal apprehension of the whole. But men’s spiritual
diseases are of many kinds, and all the healing truths must be offered
by the Church in which all men are to find life.

[#] This is a description of Sectarianism, not of any particular
Denomination. We are all infected with the sectarian spirit. In many
respects Rome is far more sectarian than the great Presbyterian bodies
in Scotland. With all its faults I sincerely believe that the Anglican
Communion is, in spirit, more of a Church and less of a sect than any
other body. But then it contains several sects within itself, both
"High," "Broad," and "Low."

The truth which it thus presents, the Church believes to be the gift of
God. This above all is the idea which it tries to safeguard by the
outward signs of regular orders and sacraments.

Our belief about the communion service is that there Christ comes to us
just as once the eternal Word, which was present with all His creation,
none the less came in full manifestation under the limitations of time
and space at a particular moment and in a particular country. So in the
communion the Divine presence which fills the whole world ("Heaven and
earth are full of His glory," as we say in the service itself) is
offered to us, and draws near to us; and that not because of any virtue
in us; it was while we were yet sinners that Christ came and died; it is
while we are yet sinners that Christ offers Himself to us; and it is as
guarding against any conception that we can determine how He shall come,
or when and where, and that we can, as it were, manufacture His presence
in our own way, that the Church maintains with the utmost emphasis the
order that is necessary for that service.

It is to preserve the conception of spiritual life as a gift of God, and
of the Church as the society which recognises and receives it as such a
gift, in distinction from a mutual benefit society organised for the
edification of its own members, that the Church insists upon the due
order of its administration; and it is through concentration upon this
idea of holiness, and all that it ought to mean in our personal lives,
that we can make our greatest contribution towards bringing into
existence again a real Catholic Church, a Church which shall genuinely
include all the persons who believe in Christ in one order and
fellowship. The first and indispensable condition of re-union is fuller
dedication to the will of God in Christ. We shall be united to one
another when we are all truly united to Him.

But, if that work is to be accomplished, we shall also need wisdom, in
order rightly to counteract the effects alike of folly and of sin in the
past history of the Church; and here every man must be willing to make
what suggestions he can, merely submitting them for acceptance or
rejection by the whole body of the Church; because unless people are
prepared to speak of the problem as they see it, leaving the final
judgment to be formed by the body of which they are members, there is no
hope of our making any progress at all.

I will therefore, venture to suggest to you six principles, upon which,
as my vision is at present, I think we might come near to agreement
among ourselves; and if we should agree upon them, then we could offer
these or whatever modifications of these the Church thinks fit, to those
bodies which are at present in separation from us.

I.—First, what do we mean by the Church? Ideally and in its eternal
reality it is the Body and Bride of Christ, the instrument of His will
and the object of His love, worthy as both. But in the process of time
and upon the stage of this world, what are we going to mean by it, and
who are we going to account its members? When people begin to think of
this question, they always start with various enthusiastic schemes. The
members of the Church are the people who have faith, or the people who
are conscious of the need of pardon, and the like; but all of this
breaks down because you can never tell who these people are. We must
have some perfectly plain outward sign if the Church is to be an
operative agency in this world; and you will find, I think, that there
is none which you can reach except that it is the fellowship of the
baptized. Baptism is the Lord’s own appointed way by which men should
be received in the fellowship of His disciples. We must take that as our
basis.

It is no business of ours to pronounce judgment upon the spiritual state
of other persons. We shall thank God for every sign of the Christian
virtues and graces shown in other persons who have not been brought to
baptism; we may believe that they are members of the Church in heaven;
but still, I would submit, we must say for all purposes of practical
working, that the Church on earth is the fellowship of the baptized.

II.—That fellowship exists in fragments and sections. What is the
peculiar mark of our fragment? This is authoritatively defined for us
in the Lambeth Quadrilateral,[#] but our special character may be
expressed briefly by saying that we are trustees for the Catholic order,
who yet reject what seem to us the accretions which the Church of Rome
upholds.

[#] (_a_) The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. as
"containing all things necessary to Salvation," and as being the rule
and ultimate standard of faith.

(_b_) The Apostles’ Creed, as the Baptismal Symbol; and the Nicene
Creed, as the sufficient statement of the Christian faith.

(_c_) The two Sacraments ordained by Christ Himself—Baptism and the
Supper of the Lord—ministered with unfailing use of Christ’s words of
institution, and of the elements ordained by Him.

(_d_) The Historic Episcopate, locally adapted in the methods of its
administration to the varying needs of the nations and peoples called of
God into the Unity of His Church.

Now some such order as that which we maintain, is necessary, as it seems
to me, to the fulfilment of the duty of charity. I hope I am not unfair
to those who are separated from us, and are influenced by the ideals of
Puritanism; but it has seemed to me that their discipline is not always
charitable. Indeed, a Church must either excommunicate freely or else
possess a recognised order if it is to avoid becoming indistinguishable
from "the world" about it; if it is to be both holy and a friend of
sinners it must have an order. The order which we maintain is simply
that which has come down to us as the actual order of historic
Christendom.

III.—Thirdly, I would submit that the Body with its orders is a living
whole, and that it is illegitimate to discuss such a question as the
"validity" of Orders out of all relation to the historic life of the
Church. The question of Orders must be considered in relation to the
whole life of the Body of which they are an organic part.[#]

[#] See Appendix IV. _On Orders and Catholicity_.

Thus, if we take the famous Quadrilateral as our starting point, a body
which stands by the Canonical Scriptures, the Creeds and the two great
Sacraments, though not upholding the episcopal succession, is closer to
the ideal than one which is indifferent to any of these three as well as
to the succession; it has maintained many of the (ex hypothesi)
essential features of a true Church; it approximates to the complete
requirement. Moreover, within the field of the problem of Orders, there
are degrees of approximation; it is generally considered that an
agreement between the Anglican and Presbyterian communions could be far
more easily reached than between the Anglican and some other Protestant
bodies. We must, therefore, avoid two kindred errors. One is to set up
the abrupt dilemma—"Either a true Church or not," and the other is to
regard the possession of "valid" Orders as being the one and only
condition of the Catholicity of the body possessing them.

The Church Visible cannot be identical with the Church Invisible; it is
its sacrament. And the question resolves itself into one concerning the
degree of adequacy with which it expresses, _and thereby maintains
through the ages_, the fulness of the truth.

Our actual divisions in the West date from the Reformation. No one
disputes that the Church just before that time was corrupt to a horrible
degree. It is possible to hold that the corruption could have been
purged away without schism if the reformers had been wholly free from
pride and impatience; I see no means of reaching a sound judgment on
such a point; but at least it would seem that the guilt for the great
division was as much in Catholics as in Protestants. In so far as there
really was necessity of choosing between moral purity with schism on the
one hand, and organic unity with sales of indulgences and the like on
the other, there can be no doubt which the whole teaching of Christ
required His followers to choose. "I will have mercy and not
sacrifice"; "the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath"; yet
the Sabbath and the sacrifice were of Divine appointment.

If then a fragment of the Church, confronted as it believes, with such a
choice, breaks off and organises itself afresh, intending to maintain in
purity all the Church’s life and means of grace, I cannot assert that it
is for all its generations deprived of Christ’s sacramental presence.
But assuredly the loss of the continuous order which so impressively
symbolises the Divine origin of the Church and of its Sacraments tends
to undermine the intention to preserve the whole truth and to obscure
belief in it. For Orders, as we understand them, are the pledge of the
unity of the Church across all space and through all time, so that the
priest who celebrates, does so as the organ and instrument of the
universal Church, and the congregation at every Eucharist is not the few
persons gathered together in that building, but Angels and Archangels
and all the company of Heaven, with whom we join in prayer and worship.

IV.—Consonantly with this I would come to my fourth principle—that the
whole question of Orders and Sacraments must be considered in reference
to the Church’s life through the ages, and not with direct reference to
the gift received by any individual at any given service.

How are we to secure (this is our problem) that from generation to
generation men shall continue to feel that in the service of the Holy
Communion Christ comes to them as by His own appointment, and they have
only to be ready to meet with Him; and that in meeting with Him they are
united with the whole Church in the Holy Communion, the Communion of
Saints? I believe that the continued recitation of the Creeds in our
own and other branches of the Church is the main safeguard, not only for
ourselves but also for those who do not say the Creeds, against that
combination of Pelagianism and Unitarianism to which men always tend to
drift; similarly I can conceive that, just because we uphold the full
conception of sacramental worship, others are enabled to receive
sacramental grace at their communions. It may be so; I know not. Of
course it cannot be received if it is not there; but even if it is
there, its full benefit will not be enjoyed except by those who believe
in its full power. Two men may stand opposite the same picture; both
see the same lines and colours, the accidents; but it may be that only
one sees the artistic reality or substance—the Beauty—while the other is
blind to it. But the man who finds it does not put it there; the artist
put it there; and if he had not done so no one could find it there; so
too the reality of the Sacrament is the work of God. But our fruition
of it depends on our faith, and even on the exact content of our faith.
Now I do not for a moment believe that that faith in the full doctrine
of sacramental grace can survive through the centuries, if it is once
separated from the whole order which expresses it. Therefore, while I am
not entitled to deny, as I am equally not concerned to assert, that the
members of other denominations at their communion service receive the
same gift that we do; still I say that as trustees for the Catholic
order, and considering the matter in the light of the centuries, we have
no right to sacrifice any of those means by which this full doctrine has
been given to us, and by which perhaps it has been also preserved for
them.

V.—Fifthly, I would suggest that in any scheme for practical reunion no
man must be required to repudiate his own spiritual ancestry.

After all, if the Church is the fellowship of the baptized, then our
brethren of the separation, as we sometimes call them, are members of
the Church; but they are not members of our branch of the Church; and
their faith is corporate and active in their membership of their own
bodies; consequently we are bound to hold that they and their bodies are
parts of the Catholic Church in this time of the division—the division
which is due to sin.

If it is true that it was largely, and perhaps mainly, the fault of the
medieval Church that the split became a necessity; if it is true that it
was partly, and perhaps mainly, the fault of the Church of England that
the Wesleyan movement (for example) ever broke off, because we refused
to make room for what was in its early stages most undoubtedly a
movement of the Spirit of God in the world, then we have no right to
condemn those who by reason of our sin, at least as much as their own,
are outside our fellowship; and we must recognise that, just as in St.
Paul’s argument about the true Israel, blindness in part happened to
Israel, and so God used the Gentiles to provoke them to jealousy—so
blindness in part happened to Catholicism, and God is using the
Protestant bodies to provoke us to jealousy.

We must, I believe, maintain that our order is for us the only possible
order for the reunited Church. But order is not everything. The wall
of the Holy City is minute. When the time for reunion comes, we must
insist upon our own part of the truth in such a way as to avoid all
condemnation of other bodies for having been separated during this
time—at least, all condemnation which we do not pronounce quite equally
upon ourselves. What has happened in the divisions of the Church is a
severance from one another of elements which are every one of them
necessary to the healthy life of the Body. If one set of people could
only get dry food and no drink, and another set could only get drink and
no food, neither would be healthy. They would have to combine their
stores before health was possible. Catholics have preserved perhaps a
fuller sense of worship and of the gifts of God; Protestants have
perhaps a truer zeal for righteousness and a more intimate access to God
in prayer. Let us not judge the past; God will judge. But let us
recognise our need of one another and accept from each other the
positive truth and life which God has given to either.

VI.—Meanwhile, in the time of the division, different bodies have
developed different types of religious life. There is a wealth of
spiritual activity in the world now such as it is difficult to imagine
under a rigidly united Church; but we can easily preserve that if we are
ready that there should be within the United Catholic Church different
Orders—an Order of St. George Fox for example, testifying to the great
ideal which Christ brought into the world, not as I think, and as I have
already explained, the right ideal to be followed by all men in all
sorts of circumstances, but undoubtedly the one method by which in the
end the work of God can be finally accomplished, and for testimony to
which I believe some men, and indeed the whole Society of Friends, are
even now called by God. Also there may well be an Order of St. John
Wesley, insisting more especially upon the need of individual
conversion, which the Church, as a vast organisation concerned with
world movements, is perpetually tempted to leave too much on one side.
These Orders can quite well govern themselves to a very large extent,
and order their worship in very many ways, just as is the case in the
Orders familiar in the medieval Church, and in the Church of Rome at
this time.

These are the principles which I would venture to submit. Probably not
one of them will win universal assent even in our own communion. But
amid all our amiable sentiments it is time for somebody to say something
definite, or as definite as the complexity of the problem allows. In
criticising and rejecting individual utterances we may at last reach a
corporate mind.

But let me add one particular warning about the way we go: for in my own
mind I am quite sure that the Communion is just the place where we need
to be divided until our unity is real. People say "How terrible to be
separated there." Yes, terrible indeed! It is the measure of the sin
of schism. But we must not try to escape the consequences of the sin
until we have got rid of the sin itself. I say nothing of the problem
of the mission field or of the possibility of exceptional occasions.[#]
But I am quite sure that in normal Church life, where all people have
access to their own services, intercommunion can only be disastrous, as
tending to obscure the need for real unity, and the difference between
the various excellences whose combination is to be desired.

[#] It must of course be recognised that the problem of intercommunion
in the mission field is of urgent practical importance. On the present
situation, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s statement, _Kikuyu_.

But let us come back to what after all is the only true guarantee and
the only condition of reunion—the achievement of holiness; that holiness
needs, as we have seen, to be safeguarded, and the safeguarding of it is
peculiarly entrusted to us, the ministers of the Church. What need then
for personal dedication! For upon the degree in which we are wholly
given to our work depends in large measure the time when God will
reunite His Church.

We keep separate even from many right activities, but only in order to
keep pure that spirit by which we are to permeate the whole life of the
world, bringing it to bear, so far as we are able in our detachment,
upon every sort of problem, private or public—industrial, commercial,
political, international—till at last the whole world is governed by
that spirit, and there is no need for separation any more nor for any
special place of worship nor special order of religious ministers; for
then the world and the Church will be indistinguishable in the Holy City
of God, wherein is no temple, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb
are the temple of it.

*LECTURE V*

*THE CITIZENSHIP OF HEAVEN*

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

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

We have considered in outline the functions of the State and of the
Church, the two great instruments of God for the furthering of His
kingdom. Let us now turn to consider, still in mere outline, for
nothing more is possible, the nature of that Kingdom itself.

There are very many ways in which the subject might be approached, but I
think that it will be most consonant with the general line of our
thought in these meditations that we should consider it as the home of
man’s spirit, the fulfilment of his spiritual being. And to that end,
inasmuch as the Kingdom can only be known by living according to the
principles of its citizenship, and our present effort is by its very
nature intellectual only, we must try to reach it in thought as the goal
towards which the whole spiritual life of man is tending.

No life can be set forth in scientific terms. The moment it is analysed,
the vitalising power is gone. And even the poet, who has far more
chance than the logician of making us realise what the life signifies
for those who live it, is still speaking of it from outside. It is only
by life itself that we can truly know the Kingdom of God.

We find, all through the New Testament, a contrast drawn between earth
and heaven. And it is worth while to consider the logical principle of
that contrast, even though the result is somewhat dry and barren. The
place of careful analysis here is analogous to that which criticism
holds in relation to art. The critical analysis of a work of art will
never of itself enable us to appreciate it, if we are without the
cultivated artistic faculty; but it may enrich our appreciation. We may
thereby find more than we should otherwise have found of the elements
that are combined together to make up the total effect. And then in the
unity of the renewed experience we receive more enjoyment than we had
done before. So, too, the Kingdom of God, which for us is something
that we still hope to reach, and of which the foretaste that we have as
yet received is a very slight earnest of the glory that shall be
revealed, may be a goal more potent in its attraction to our wills, when
we have seen it as the fulfilment of the principles of our whole
spiritual life as these are discoverable in other departments and
activities.

The goods of this world, as we have already noticed, are such that the
more one has the less there is for others. The goods of heaven are of
such a kind that the more one has the more there is on that account for
others. So it is with the true virtues of the spiritual life, with love
and joy and peace, the fruits of the spirit. So it is too with other
excellences which belong to man as a spiritual being, and which are out
of the reach of our animal nature: loyalty, beauty and knowledge.

Now the principle of this whole spiritual life is precisely the
principle of unity, not as distinct from variety but as distinct either
from antagonism or transitoriness. The two things that distress the
soul of man are enmities, and the passing away of that which he loves.
It is by rising above these evils, which beset us in this earthly state,
that the satisfaction of the soul is found.

There are four main departments of the spiritual life which aspire in
this way to rise above the evils which beset our mortal state. They are
Science and Art and Morality and Religion. As we know them in our
experience, they are all of them due on the human side to a
dissatisfaction with our experience as we find it. The scientific man
is disturbed by the apparent chaos in his experience, and he sets out to
give order to it, and he is satisfied in so far as he discovers that all
the while it was not chaotic, as it seemed, but orderly. The artist is
craving for a beauty which, in his ordinary experience, he does not
find. He selects, he concentrates attention on certain aspects, to reach
a satisfaction which the world otherwise seems not to give. The man of
moral aspiration is dissatisfied with the world as he sees it, and he
sets himself therefore to alter both himself and it, that it may be
modelled more in accordance with the heart’s desire. And the religious
man finds all of these sources of dissatisfaction working together
within his soul; he seeks, and in faith finds, that which gives him both
peace and power.

Let us then begin with what is in itself the least rich of these forms
of human activity, and consider how it is that Science reaches its
unity. Let us first recall that there are two forms of multiplicity or
division which we are seeking to overcome: that which arises from the
clash of various ideals or desires, the antagonism of man with man; and
that which arises from the changeableness of the world as we see it.
With regard to the latter, science does indeed reach real unities; but
they are unities which leave Time out of sight. Sometimes, no doubt, the
subject matter which is handled is itself non-temporal, but not in the
sense of being eternal. So, for example, geometry is entirely without
relation to time. There is no temporal sequence between the equality of
the sides and the equality of the angles in the isosceles triangle. But
where the subject studied is something that changes in Time, it remains
true that the aim of science is to reach an unchanging principle. So,
for example, the student of biology may be trying to discover the
unchanging principle which governs the successive variations of species.
But when he has found it he has not really mastered the transitoriness;
he has not in any way gathered up the past and dead into his present
experience; he has merely found the principle which applies to every
stage as that stage comes. He reaches some superiority to the
transitoriness of things, only by abstracting from Time altogether.

And, similarly, the unity between men which is produced by a common
absorption in such pursuits does not strike very deep. For a man’s
temperament has nothing in the world to do with his scientific
conclusions, or at least ought not to have. In the ideal pursuit of
knowledge, all of the things that set men at variance count for nothing
whatever. Consequently the differences, just because they are ignored,
are not overcome, with the result that, as at the beginning of this war,
we may find professors of the various nations, who had been linked
together, as one might think, closely enough in the pursuit of
knowledge, hurling manifestoes at one another across their national
frontiers.

When we pass to the second of the great departments, a real progress may
be noted in just these points. For in the experience of the artist Time
is genuinely mastered. We get some illustration of this from the
absorption which marks the aesthetic contemplation of a picture or a
statue. For the time that we are really held by it, we forget about
time altogether. But the case is clearer with regard to those arts
which handle temporal processes—music and poetry. For it is the whole
point, let us say, of a drama, that it shall follow a certain
succession; it is vital to its significance that the scenes shall be in
that order and no other. If you have two plays, each in three acts, in
one of which the first act is cheerful in tone, and the second is
neutral, and the third depressing, while in the other the first act is
depressing, the second neutral, and the third cheerful, the total effect
of the two plays is not the average of the three acts in each case,
which would be neutral for both, but is in the one particularly
depressing, and in the other particularly cheering. For the play is
grasped as a whole. It makes a single impression, if it is a good play.
We know what it means—not indeed because we can state it in other words,
for it is the only expression of its own meaning; but it has a definite
significance for us. And the name of the play comes to stand for that
significance. This is especially noticeable in tragedy, where the
Greeks, with their sure instinct, chose a story whose plot is known to
the spectator in advance, so that we have throughout the play both the
impression of the entire story and the particular impression of each
scene as it comes and passes. It is significant that the Greeks did so
choose for tragedy stories whose plot was known, while their comedians
invented their own plots. And most will agree that we enjoy a great
play better when we have read it in advance, or when we have already
seen it on the stage before; because then we do reach something that may
serve perhaps as the nearest image that we can get for eternity—a grasp
of the whole stretch of time, realised in its successiveness and in the
meaning which that successiveness gives to it, and having the sense of
the whole throughout and seeing each moment, as it comes, in the light
not only of the past but of the future too.

On this side, then, art is able, for the moment at least, and with
regard to a period definitely limited by our capacities of
comprehension, to master Time and give us a unity which includes its
successiveness within it; so that the past, and even the future, are
gathered up into the real experience of the present, and we are not only
conscious of what is before our eyes, but are conscious of it as a part
of the whole to which it belongs.

In a similar way we notice that while different temperaments are needed
for the production of different types of art, yet in appreciation all
are united. For example, it would be quite impossible for the great
Russian novels to be produced in any other country than Russia; it would
have been quite impossible for the great German philosophy to have been
produced in any other nation than Germany; it would have been quite
impossible for the great English poetry to have been produced in any
other nation than England. These literatures belong to the soil out of
which they spring. But the people of all the other nations can
appreciate them, and all are glad because they are different. And so
far as the artistic side of our nature governs our whole being, it is
capable of linking us together in a real fellowship, which includes and
is based upon our differences and the appreciation of them, and is
therefore firmly rooted, because what might have been the source of
antagonism is become itself the bond of unity.

But we must notice that each of these only reaches a very provisional
attainment. If science likes to mark off a certain department of
reality for its investigation, it can reach something like finality
concerning just that department. I suppose that mechanics is something
like a complete system of truth, so far as the mechanical aspect of
things can be isolated from all other aspects. But then, nothing in the
world is mechanical and only mechanical. Nothing in the world is
chemical and only chemical. There are always other qualities there,
from which abstraction has been made. Science therefore inevitably sets
before itself as its goal the understanding of the universe, and it
could not reach any absolute certainty concerning any real fact except
so far as it had obtained omniscience. In mathematics it reaches
certainty, because in mathematics the object is what it is defined to
be, and nothing else. But no given material thing is just a triangle.
It may even be disputed whether any given thing can be, according to the
definition, a triangle at all.

Science then is marked by a restlessness until it reaches this
omniscience. It began when the first man said "Why?" The moment that
question is asked, Science is launched upon its course. But the answer
to that question merely prompts anyone of scientific instincts to say
"Why?" to the answer. Why is there a war? Historical science will
point to the diplomatic documents, and from them to the course of
history moulding national aspiration. Then if we say, "Why was the
cause of war such? And, why were there such national aspirations?" we
shall find ourselves soon investigating the literature of the countries
and then their climates; from this we are shortly involved in astronomy
and geology and all the other sciences. You can have nothing that is
final until you reach omniscience. And so Science moves, perpetually
saying "Why?" to every statement that is made. Far in the distance, in
the infinite distance, is its goal of a complete satisfaction gained
through understanding the universe in its entirety.

Art can similarly only achieve a provisional attainment of its goal; but
the attainment while it lasts is more substantial. Its method, as
distinct from that of science, is mental rest. The aim of the artist is
to concentrate attention upon the object, holding it there by various
devices. That is why pictures are put into frames. Something abruptly
irrelevant, although not discordant, is put round the object to help us
fix our minds upon it. That is why poetry is written in metre. The
mind is abruptly brought back by the recurrence of the rhythm or the
recurrence of the sound in rhyme, and held within the total composition.
We notice that it is precisely where the subject matter of the poem is
slight that the rhythm needs to be strongly marked or the system of
rhyme complicated; where the subject matter itself has a strong appeal,
any rhyming seems to be out of place and tiresome. The aim is simply to
grip the attention and hold it upon the object and make us see it as it
is; not after the fashion of science, connecting it with other things,
but understanding it by getting to know it in and for itself as
thoroughly as may be.[#] Now in thus concentrating attention upon some
one object and claiming complete absorption in that object, art is
implicitly claiming to give a perfect mental satisfaction and an
absolute peace. But it can never succeed in that unless the object upon
which it is concentrating our attention is an adequate symbol for the
whole truth of things in which the whole of our nature will find such
satisfaction.

[#] This is why no great work of art over becomes out of date, whereas
the work of a great scientist is always liable to do so, because his
successors revise it in the light of ever widening knowledge.

Moreover, these activities of the mind or spirit fail to govern our
lives as a whole precisely because they are contemplative and not
active. We stand before the world gazing at it, setting our minds
indeed to work upon it in certain ways, yet not fundamentally changing
it. But we are active beings, with wills as well as contemplative
minds, and our volitional action lies very largely outside the range
which these activities and interests can control. And therefore it is
that so little real unity is reached by means of them.

In Morality the practical instincts and impulses are for the first time
included. Morality is the science or the art, or both, of living in
society; of living, that is to say, as fellow members with other beings,
who also have aspirations and ideals as legitimate as our own, so that
our own claim to pursue our own ideals must be won by recognition of
their equal claim to pursue theirs. And the man who, with full mastery
of himself, if such a man exists, is following out a great purpose that
is adequate to satisfy his whole nature, is a man who has achieved the
conquest of Time in the completest way. It is essential to the pursuit
of a purpose that we move from stage to stage, as we adapt means to our
end, and yet all of it is one thing, thought and experienced as one.
Indeed a test that we always instinctively apply to a biography is
whether it enables us to see the different stages of a man’s life as
constituting one spiritual whole. That is just what we desire the
biographer to set forth before us.

At the same time Morality conquers antagonism because it is the life of
fellowship. It begins with the recognition that other men have as much
right to live as we have, and we buy our rights precisely by conceding
theirs. Its root principle is the recognition of this brotherhood or
fellow-membership. And yet it, too, never reaches its goal; it fails in
two ways; every man in this world, however perfectly he may achieve
mastery of his own nature—and it may be doubted if any man has ever done
even that by his own strength—is so conditioned by circumstances that he
is never able to make his life a perfect masterpiece of art; and as
regards the whole fellowship of which he is a member, and his own
relation to it, he can find no absolute rules except the command to
reach a state of mind which he cannot reach by his own will. There are
no moral laws that are absolute except the law to love one’s neighbour
as oneself. All the rest have exceptions somewhere. "Thou shall not
kill," was the formula of the old law. But we have altered it into,
"Thou shalt do no murder." It is always wrong to murder, because murder
is such killing as is wrong. But it is not always wrong to kill. And so
we find no principle that can be made entirely binding and universal,
except the law to love our neighbour as ourselves. But how are we to do
it? Is there any man who seriously thinks that by taking thought he can
make himself love somebody else?

All of these three then, and the last as emphatically as any, in spite
of its comprehending a greater section of human nature, fail to reach
their own achievement.

In the fourth stage, in Religion, all would find their fulfilment. For
the purpose of God, if there be a God, is the principle of unity which
the scientist is seeking. The nature of God, if there be a God, is that
perfect beauty which would be the culmination of the life of Art. The
righteousness of God, if there be a God, is the satisfaction of the
moral aspiration. But we are not left so to conjecture what life would
be like if we could carry our own spiritual faculties to their own
highest development. We are given the express image of the person of
God. "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." We shall not indeed
have perfect knowledge of the sphere of religion until we have seen how
the whole of history and every detail of our lives is, after all, the
result and work of creative Love; but while Science and Art and Morality
struggle towards their goal and only realise their need for it, God
gives Himself as the satisfaction of that need. It is His gift, not our
discovery; but we see that in this principle all Time is gathered up,
for if the life of Christ is the manifestation of the nature of God,
then it is the manifestation of the root-principle of all history.[#]

[#] I am aware that the argument here is _per saltum_, but space forbids
its full development. I hope soon to have completed a book which will
fill in the outline sketch offered in this Lecture. Meanwhile I would
refer to my essay on _The Divinity of Christ_ in _Foundations_,
specially pp. 213-223, 242-263.

Then we see, too, how all men may be united in perfect fellowship,
because all men loving God will find themselves loving those whom God so
loves. This hope or conviction remains in the region of faith, not of
knowledge; what of that? In the other departments also we have found no
knowledge. We have only found approximation towards it. We have, as it
were, converging lines which never meet; and we have also the point at
which we see they would meet if produced. Is that not enough? Here we
find is the principle that will give unity, as we work it out, to the
whole scheme of our spiritual life. Morality says, "Love all men." How
can I? Science says, "Realise the truth which explains the universe."
How can I? But I can gaze upon the manifestation of God in Jesus
Christ; I can meditate upon His Cross and Resurrection. I can see here
and there how it may be true that this is indeed the explanation of all
the sorrow, even of all the sin. For if it is true that the supreme
manifestation of the love of God was historically conditioned by the
supreme sin of humanity in the treason of Judas, then surely one begins
to see how even out of the grossest evil the glory of God wins triumph
for itself, which we too may share if we are first drawn to share the
sacrifice.

As I become absorbed in that contemplation I find in the first place a
new power to love all men, as I remember that He died for them just as
He died for me. In the degree in which I really believe that this is
the manifestation of the power of God and the governing authority of the
universe, I find this thought over-ruling other thoughts and temptations
to hostility or enmity. As I remember that those whom I am inclined to
despise or hate are those for whom He thought it worth while to die, my
contempt and my hatred are rebuked and cancelled.

And similarly, if I realise—or in the degree in which I realise—that
here is set forth the power that governs all things, that this is the
way in which God rules the world, and that Calvary is the mode of His
omnipotence, I begin to find myself indifferent, and that increasingly,
to those things which are called sorrow and pain.

But we shall only find this as we expect to find it. All through our
spiritual life we may be perpetually in contact, as it were, with the
means of receiving what is good, and never receive it because we are not
expecting it. We have not expected peace of mind from our worship, we
have not expected a sense of security against evil; that is why we have
not found it; but it is our fault. And certainly most of us have not
expected to find fellowship from worship. We have known something of
the grace of Jesus Christ, perhaps even of the love of God; but of the
fellowship of the Holy Spirit, of the sense of being linked to one
another because all dominated by that one power, most of us have found
nothing, because we have not expected it.

But if we are expecting this, all the testimony of the saints in every
generation goes to show that we shall find what we have expected.

The power that can give us security against the transitoriness of the
world and against the instincts of antagonism is there in the faith that
we place in God. "I will put my trust in God," the Psalmist says, "I
will not fear what flesh can do unto me." This is not because flesh
will not do such hurt as it can to the man who puts his trust in God—the
Jews crucified Christ—but because to the man who puts his trust in God,
anything whatever that happens becomes part of God’s purpose for his
life, and therefore he will not fear it. For "all things," sorrow as
well as joy, pain as well as pleasure, sin as well as righteousness,
"all things work together for good to them that love God."

*LECTURE VI*

*GOD IN HISTORY*

"I am the Alpha and the Omega, saith the Lord God, which is and which
was and which is to come, the Almighty."—Revelation i. 8.

We have considered the two great instruments of God by which He fashions
the spiritual life of man, and we have considered that spiritual life
itself in the outline at least of its four main departments; and now, as
we close our line of thought, we need still to consider how it is that,
in these fields and by these instruments, God carries forward His work.

The conception of God as at work in human history, guiding it,
controlling it, and judging men by its course, is the great contribution
of Israel to the religion of the world. It is linked of course with
that belief in the union of perfect righteousness with the divine, power
which we usually speak of under the somewhat cumbrous title of Ethical
Monotheism. We remember what was really at stake in that great day upon
Mount Carmel when Elijah confronted the priests of Baal; it was whether
the conception of God as righteous and demanding righteousness should
prevail, or the conception of God as a capricious Being, needing only to
be propitiated, and in connection with whose very worship licentiousness
was tolerated and even encouraged.

But, after all, the greatest souls, at least in every highly-developed
religion, have believed that God is righteous in Himself. What gives to
Israel its supreme significance in the spiritual history of mankind is
the conviction that this righteous God is daily and hourly at work in
the history of men; and that conviction gives to the faith of Israel a
primacy and supremacy over all the other partial faiths, even though
they may be superior in certain departments.

If we think of some of the conceptions by means of which we try to bring
before our minds the meaning of the word "God," we may find that with
regard to several of them, other nations had advanced further than
Israel before the coming of the Lord.

God is Spirit. The Hindu knew that, and knows it still, quite as much
as Israel.

God is Law. The more thoughtful at least among the ancient Romans, and
particularly the great Roman Stoics, knew that with a vividness that was
scarcely ever attained in Israel.

God is Beauty. Assuredly the ancient Greeks knew that as Israel never
realised it at all.

But the conception of Israel that God is at work in history means that
the God of Israel gives to these other gods or conceptions of God, each
its own time and place of emergence and decay. The God who is revealed
to us in the Old Testament is Himself the Being who appoints that the
Indian or the Roman or the Greek should reach these particular
convictions; and in these partial apprehensions of the Divine, before
the full revelation came, the faith of Israel is determinative and
regulative for all the other faiths; and moreover, it is this faith that
God is at work in the actual daily history of men, which makes the faith
of Israel the natural and proper introduction to the Incarnation, where
God Himself took flesh and lived among men and died at a time and in a
place—in Palestine and under Pontius Pilate.

This exaltation of the Holy God, actually at work within men and at
their side, while it leads to a sense of awe before the Holiness of the
Almighty, also leads to a sense of the dignity of this world, and of
man’s life in it, which is lacking, as a rule, from other great
religions, and that too in proportion as those other religions are
spiritual. For the Hindu, for example, this world and all that is in it
is mere illusion. He is spiritual enough but he is not material enough;
and we find there that contempt for the things of the body which
invariably issues in a contempt for moral conduct; for our moral conduct
here, while we live upon this planet, is wrought out through our bodies.
But the religion of Israel, and especially its completion in the
Incarnation, wherein God Himself came in the flesh, gives at once a
dignity to this world of ours, to our bodies, and to all the material
side of life.

When Christ stood before Pilate, the Kingdom of God was in appearance,
at least, undergoing judgment at the hands of the kingdom of this world;
but it is not merely a contrast of good with evil. It is a contrast of
the perfect with the very imperfect, but yet not merely evil, power.
Pilate is not Satan; and the Lord Himself, in the moment of His trial,
recognises that the authority by which He is condemned is an authority
that is derived from God—"Thou couldest have no power at all against Me,
except it were given thee from above." The kingdoms of this world,
which are to become the kingdoms of our God and of His Christ, are not
simply something evil. The contrast of Church and World is not the
contrast between good and evil; but it is the contrast between two
stages in the work which God is accomplishing in history, and those two
may often come into conflict.

Let us then ask what is the central principle of God’s guidance of His
people, so far as it may be deduced from the tiny fragment of history
that we really know. In that fragment at least, we may say, I think,
with little hesitation, that its method and its aim is spiritual growth,
or, if you like to put it an expansion and enrichment of personality.

We are sometimes inclined to think our own personality is something that
is given to us from the outset, and entirely belongs to us; but that
idea will not stand examination for a moment. Individual personality is
a social product. It can only be developed under social influences. A
man may be born with many great talents, but if his environment does not
encourage their development, these talents will remain for the most part
undeveloped and unknown—either to himself or to anybody else. Indeed
the greater the talent with which a man is endowed, the more difference
is made to him by the kind of surroundings in which he is put. A man of
very few gifts and little natural capacity will be much the same,
whether he has abundant opportunity for mental and spiritual growth or
little opportunity; but the man of great capacities, needing for their
development the encouragement of surroundings, is an entirely different
being according as those surroundings are favourable or the reverse; and
so we reach the curious result that the greatest personality, while no
doubt he must have brought into the world something given to him by God
that was capable of development, is yet more entirely dependent upon the
society in which he is living than people with a less wide range of
gifts.

Again, it is only within a society which has developed some character
for itself, which has indeed a personality of its own, that individual
personality can reach very much development. You cannot have genius in a
savage tribe. Genius is the focal expression of the personality of a
whole people. It is that people coming to life, and possessed of voice;
and you do not find it where there is little social development. It is
only as the tribe or the nation begins to have some definite character
of its own that it is itself sufficiently organised to develop from its
own individual member those gifts, and elicit those activities, which
are the signs of genius.

We find then, that individual personality, or spiritual life, is
dependent upon the spiritual life of society; and we need to notice that
this society has every mark by which we distinguish personality in the
individual. It has aspirations: it has a predominant character; it has
claims, and it has duties. It has in fact, in the literal sense of the
word, corporate personality, and just as the many instincts and impulses
which are to be found in human nature, and may be very discordant with
one another, are welded together to make up the single life of a human
being, so the whole gifts and instincts and ambitions and aspirations of
all the individual citizens are welded together, to make up the
personality of the whole society.

Moreover, every nation is in itself not only the combination of
individual citizens, but also of minor groups within itself, all of
which have these same marks, and all of which are in the real genuine
sense persons, spiritual individuals with a life of their own.

Now, as we look over the history of the development which thus goes on
side by side in the individual and in society, we find that its
principle in the fragment of history that we really know has been that
isolated excellences should be brought to perfection first; and after
something like perfection has been reached in the separate departments
taken singly, the combination of them is brought about, in order that
the richer and fuller life may be perfected, in which all of them find a
place.

European history derives its whole life from Palestine, Greece and Rome;
and in each of those three peoples, some one excellence was developed to
a peculiar degree. Rome perfected and has bequeathed to us the
instincts for social order, as embodied in law. The history of the Roman
people is of significance, precisely because one may there trace the
growth and working out of this instinct for social or political life.
There has never been anything to rival it in history. No modern nation
has shown the same extraordinary political sense and sanity. The Romans
were not great political philosophers. They did not think very much
about the principles on which they acted; but simply because of their
peculiar gift in this direction they welded together a social order
which lasted throughout their Empire in a wonderful way; and to this day
the law of Europe is to an enormous extent the law of ancient Rome.

To ancient Greece, it is hard to say what we do not owe. Her peculiar
characteristic is intellectual passion; a passion for reaching
perfection in just what the intellect is particularly qualified to
grasp, truth and beauty. No doubt the ancient Greeks themselves thought
a great deal about their ordinary politics and their military
activities, and the wars between the various States; but these matter
very little. The Greek people are significant for evermore not because
of the Athenian trireme or the Macedonian phalanx, but because Aeschylus
stood in astonished awe before the operation of the Divine Justice;
because Sophocles reflected the whole of human life, even its ugliest
manifestations, in the mirror of a soul so calm and pure, that as we
look at that reflection all life seems bathed in peace and beauty;
because Euripides entered into the sorrows of simple folk; because
Thucydides, with a still unrivalled zeal for the genuine truth of
history, said the wise word about nearly every political condition that
has arisen since his time; because Plato dreamed "a Vision of all time
and all existence," proclaimed that it can never be just to do harm to
any man whatever harm he may have done to us; proclaimed also that "God
is in no way unrighteous, but in all ways absolutely righteous, nor is
anything more like to God than whosoever among men shall become
perfectly righteous;" foreseeing also that if a perfectly righteous man
should come on earth he would die, scourged and crucified.[#] There is
nowhere before the New Testament anything that comes nearer to its own
highest truths, not in the Old Testament itself, than what you will find
in Plato.

[#] _Republic_ i. 335*d*; _Theaetetus_ 176*c*; _Republic_ ii. 361*e*.

This influence,—the influence of this intellectual passion—has been the
driving force in nearly all the movements since that time. It has been
said there is nothing in the world which moves that is not Greek in
origin, and it is almost true; it is from the Greeks that we have learnt
"the use of reason to modify experience" and they derived it from the
intellectual passion for truth and beauty.

To Palestine we owe the inspiring and governing faith of which I have
already spoken—the one faith that can give real significance to these
other two, faith in the Holy God at work in history.

It is noticeable that each of these countries was conspicuously weak in
those other qualities which were not especially entrusted to it.
Ancient Rome was not at all specially religious and was conspicuously
unintellectual. The people of Greece again are not conspicuously
religious, though in their cults there is a haunting beauty; and they
were not at all politically successful; the history of Athens, the
flower of Greece, is the history of a State in which almost every
generation threw up a supreme genius who proceeded to change the
constitution in accordance with his magnificent ideas; the result was
political instability of an appalling character.[#] And Palestine has
contributed very little to us as regards social organisation, and is
markedly lacking in the scientific and artistic gifts. We have only to
consider the great images that are set before us, let us say in the Book
of Ezekiel, or again in the Book of Revelation, to see that there is no
attempt in these efforts of the imagination to achieve a beautiful or
harmonious whole. The symbolic elements are added one to another
because of the value of their meaning; but there is no effort to
visualise the whole; and if we try to make it, we quickly find that such
a thing was never intended.

[#] It is of course true that the Greek genius gave us what we now mean
by civilisation, namely, the combination of political unity and personal
freedom. On this see the admirable first chapter of Mr. Edwyn Bevan’s
_The House of Seleucus_. But it remains true that the race from whose
intellectual genius this whole product sprang had not in any
considerable degree the capacity for controlling their own invention.

Each of these then reached a genuine supremacy in its own department;
and the history of Europe is to an enormous extent the history of the
inter-action of these three forces as they mingle and combine in the
polities of the barbarian invaders who wrecked the Roman Empire. We
watch the periods of domination of each successively. Christianity grew
up within the Roman Empire, and the fascination of that great Empire
cast a glamour about it in the minds even of those who destroyed it, so
that the life which emerges out of chaos in the Middle Ages is
predominantly very Latin. The Renaissance is precisely the invasion of
Greek influence, and the Reformation is very largely the rediscovery of
the Hebrew.

For a while the three new forces worked together, carrying men’s thought
and action forward; and then in the 18th century it would seem that
there was, in England at any rate, a torpor due to their exhaustion;
when revival came it was because Wesley and his friends revived the
Hebrew element in our life, because Newman and Pusey with their friends
revived the Latin element, and because F. D. Maurice and the Broad
Church movement revived the Hellenistic, and this, with its passion for
more adequate comprehension and expression, is the dominant force of our
time. We watch these three influences still at work; but as they
interact upon one another and within the persons of the new races, a new
product is gradually being produced, and in those corporate
personalities which we call nations, we see a character being born which
is something that history has not known before.

The first requirement of personality is always freedom—freedom as we
have already said in its two senses, that conduct is not dictated from
without but is governed by the whole person, and not by isolated
elements; and the corporate persons need freedom just as much as the
individual; hence the need, the vital and absolute need, for political
sovereignty in any State which is conscious of itself as a person, that
is as having a single spiritual life.

But that life and freedom are exercised only in the citizens who are
members of the State. We cannot surely assert that the corporate person
is immortal, as the individual is; and therefore, to destroy a State is
to inflict a more irreparable loss than to kill a man, which is one
reason at least, perhaps the chief reason, why a man should die for the
political freedom of his country, and even, if need be, kill for it;
but, as freedom is the first requirement of personality, fellowship is
its first duty, for it is true of corporate personalities quite as much
as of individuals that they only find themselves and fulfil themselves
in their inter-action upon one another, and the nations of the world do
in fact need one another, and need one another’s full life.

In economics we found out long ago that in order to be wealthy, a
country needs rich neighbours who may afford good markets. It is so in
every other department. We need the gifts of the other peoples. We
need that they shall be free and vigorous. Indeed the chief lesson
which the world at this time needs to learn is just this—that all the
nations of the world need one another, each needing also that the others
should be free, in order that they may bring their contributions to the
common life in which all share.

But we should, I think, be reading the signs of the times amiss if we
did not also take account of the fact that there has been growing up
lately a new type of corporate personality, not known to history before,
and exemplified by your own United States and by the British Empire; the
conception of sovereign States linked together in a single life, and
exercising therein a joint sovereignty in dealing with those who lie
outside the federation, is something of which history bears no record;
and we need to try to understand its principle, and see what it is
capable of contributing to the life of men in order that we may not fail
to use our opportunity, and bring our contribution.[#]

[#] See Appendix V. _On Providence in History_.

There is our outline sketch of the way in which the history of our own
civilisation has grown, within which the Church and Nation are at work.
We are members of both. What duty falls upon us as the result of that
dual membership? The Christian citizen is called of necessity to fulfil
one of three functions—prophet, priest and king.

The prophet is one who is called to testify to the ideal unflinchingly,
not considering consequences, not perhaps considering ways and means of
reaching the ideal, but simply insisting on its nature and calling men
and nations to penitence so far as they fail to reach it. It may
require more courage than the office of the king or statesman, and yet
in itself it is the easiest, because it is relatively simple.

In all modern nations, and more so in the degree in which they are
democratic, every citizen partakes of the duty of kingship. He has some
share in determining how his nation shall act, either in the management
of its own internal affairs or in its dealings with other people, and
one who has this responsibility and is also a Christian, is involved in
the absolute duty of trying to think, and to think with genuine effort,
how he may be actually guiding his nation toward the ideal. He must not
be content with pious platitudes leading to no action, nor content to
consider only his own country’s welfare; but as a member of the Church
of Christ which embraces all mankind, he is called to think out and,
having thought, to pursue in act the methods by which his nation may
genuinely be doing its part to build up the one great Temple of God—His
Holy City.

The priest is prophet and statesman, both at once. He, as minister of
the Word of God, must perpetually insist upon the true ideal, and bid
men to guard against all self-contentment so far as they fail to reach
it; and yet he must be ready to take his stand by the side of every
individual or group of individuals, even of the nation itself, nerving
each to do the best of which it then and there in the circumstances of
the day is capable. And meanwhile he is a wretched human being like the
rest, terribly liable to pride if he upholds an ideal higher than is
usually recognised; terribly liable to worldliness, alike in his own
soul and in his teaching, if for a single moment he forsakes the Divine
Presence; and uniquely exposed to the deadliest of all temptations; for
while we preach what neither we nor anybody else can practise, we are
sorely tempted to be content with spiritual mediocrity ourselves.

But above all, at this time the necessity, I think, is for a clear
testimony concerning the purpose of God for His people, and His kingdom
that shall surely come. We have made our precepts so tame; our efforts
for peace and fellowship have been so much less exhilarating than other
men’s efforts for war; we have been very mild; and that is not the
spirit of Christ, or of His Kingdom. The spirit of Christ is the spirit
of all heroism in all ages.

In 1848, a little republic was founded in Rome to stand for justice and
purity of government amid the corrupt States all round. It was attacked
by those States, and at last it yielded; on the day when the
capitulation was signed masses of people were gathered together in the
great Piazza outside St. Peter’s, and there rode among them the man
whose faith and heroism had sustained that siege for more weeks than the
wiseacres thought it could last days. When the cheering had subsided,
he made no acknowledgment, but simply said:

"I am going out from Rome. I offer neither quarters, nor
provisions, nor wages. I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches,
battles, death. Let him who loves his country with his heart
not with his lips only follow me."

And they streamed out after him into the hills. His name was Garibaldi;
and because of his heroism and theirs the kingdom of Italy is in the
world to-day.

But the invitation of Christ is in exactly that spirit—"I offer neither
quarters, nor provisions, nor wages. I offer hunger, thirst, forced
marches, battles, death." "If any man would come after Me, let him deny
himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me."

The cross, when our Lord spoke those words, was quite a real thing. To
take up the cross did not mean bearing life’s little inconveniences with
equanimity. It meant literally to put the rope round one’s neck, and be
ready simply for anything that might come. That is the spirit in which
we are summoned to work for Christ. Can we rise to it? The Prince of
Peace was not a "mild man." This is the vision that His disciple had of
Him:

"His head and His hair were white, as white wool, white as snow;
and His eyes were as a flame of fire; and His feet like unto
burnished brass, as if it had been refined in a furnace; and His
voice as the voice of many waters. And He had in His right hand
seven stars: and out of His mouth proceeded a sharp two-edged
sword; and His countenance was as the sun shineth in its
strength. And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as one dead."

Can we present the figure of Christ as endowed with anything like that
compelling power? If so, we are worthy ministers. It not, we are making
dull the one great adventure of the world.

There is only one way in which we can succeed. It is that we cling to
faith in God, the Author of the drama, in which we play our part; God,
Himself the Guide along the path we are to follow; God, not only the
Guide, but the very Way in which we are to walk; God, not only the Guide
and Way, but the Strengthener within our souls, enabling us to follow;
and God the Guide, the Way, the Strengthener, Himself also the Goal to
which we would come. "For in Him we move and live and have our being."

Yea thro’ life, death, thro’ sorrow and thro’ sinning
He shall suffice me, for He hath sufficed;
Christ is the end, for Christ was the beginning,
Christ the beginning, for the end is Christ.

_I am the Alpha and the Omega, saith the Lord God, which is and which
was and which is to come, the Almighty._

*APPENDIX I*

*ON THE APOCALYPTIC CONSCIOUSNESS*

It is very difficult for the modern reader to recover the frame of mind
in which Apocalypse has its origin, but we may do this more easily if we
look for parallels outside the field of religious history. It has been
well said that the 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.

*APPENDIX II*

*ON MORAL AND SPIRITUAL AUTHORITY*

It may be objected that the Church should never in any circumstances
employ force—at any rate, physical force. But I believe the objection
is due, partly to a latent 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.

*APPENDIX III*

*ON JUSTICE AND EDUCATION*

As long as there are great numbers of citizens whose faculties are
undeveloped it is impossible for society to be justly ordered. The
democracies of the world have been curiously blind to this truth, as
they have to the parallel truth that education is essential to true
liberty.

As long as there is a vast difference between a man’s actual worth to
society and his potential worth, there will be two just claims
concerning him, and no possibility of adjudicating between them. To
treat a man who is in fact useless as though he were useful, is to
injure the community by encouraging a parasite; to treat him as useless,
when only lack of opportunity has prevented his becoming useful, is to
injure him. A vast amount of the existing social order is an attempt to
compromise between these two injuries, by inflicting a little of both.
The only real solution is to be found in a complete educational system
which will raise the actual worth of every man to the level of his
potential work precisely by enabling him to realise his potentialities.

But education which is to have this effect, without producing mere
selfishness and aggressiveness and thereby defeating its own object,
must be a moralising force; and that means, if the argument of Appendix
II is sound, that its processes must be largely sub-conscious. In fact,
one root of the great sin of Germany is to be found in the effort to
control life through the highly developed conscious intellect. The
specialised training of administrators and the attempt to guide human
action by scientific method is doomed to failure. If it were possible
to collect all the relevant facts, it might be right merely to form an
inductive conclusion and act upon it. But in regard of any human
problem it is never possible to collect all the facts; they are at once
too numerous and too subtly differentiated. Consequently the English
method, though grotesquely deficient just where the German is strong, is
yet morally preferable and politically more successful. It takes a boy
and throws him into a society of boys which largely governs itself;
appalling risks are taken and disasters are not unknown; boy standards
are allowed to prevail, with the result that form-work is regarded as a
tiresome though inevitable adjunct rather than the chief business of
school life. Perhaps it is as well to mention here that the exaltation
of games over work, however disastrous in its exaggeration, is yet
morally sound; for the boy feels that in his games he plays for his
house and school, while his work is done for himself. Wise seniors will
tell him from the pulpit that he should work hard at school so as to fit
himself for the service of the community in later years; and this is
true enough; but the boy will be a terrible prig if he is continually
conscious of its truth.

The same principle determines our University ideal. The primary test
for a degree is "residence"—that is, an adequate share in a general
life. Colleges may require attendance at lectures, but the University
does not. It demands that a candidate for a degree should have some
knowledge—not very much, it is true—but it never asks where or how he
got it; it only asks if he has "kept his terms."

At the end of the process there are some failures, of course; but those
who represent the system’s success, and they are the great majority,
though they may not have any large amount of knowledge, have acquired
the instinct to act wisely in almost any emergency with which they may
be confronted. Very often they could not give any theoretical ground
for acting as they do, for their wisdom is largely sub-conscious or
instinctive; but the action is right all the same.

In England we are at the present time witnessing the collision of two
educational types, of which I have outlined the older and more
traditional. But this collision is itself of such exceeding interest
that, at the risk of some repetition, I would venture to sketch out the
two opposing types and attempt to indicate the mode of their
interaction.

The aim of education may be defined as the attempt to train men and
women to understand the world they live in, so that they may be able to
assist or resist the tendencies of their time in the light of ideals and
standards resting on the widest possible foundation of knowledge and
experience.

Now, our educational history for the last hundred years has been the
result of the interaction between two predominant educational types,
which I may call, simply for the purposes of description, the
traditional and the modern. The traditional type comes down to us (with
modifications, no doubt) by a continuous history from the Middle Ages,
and its chief representatives in England at the present time are those
large private institutions which are called public schools, and the two
older universities. The first great mark of this type of education is
that in practice—whatever its theory may have been—in practice it is
corporate. It has believed in educating people rather through influence
than through instruction, and it has believed in educating them in
direct relation to their social context and setting. Now that, in a
country of aristocratic organisation, inevitably involved an exclusive
and aristocratic type of education. If you have got a society
stratified in layers one above the other, and you are then going to
educate people in direct relation to their social context, your
educational system is bound to be similarly stratified. That is
inevitable, and consequently, through the social conditions of the time,
the education which is most strongly corporate in tone and spirit has
also tended to be aristocratic. As I have said, this method deals with
people rather through influence than through instruction. Of course, it
does not ignore instruction, but it is true that not very long ago I
heard a very distinguished lady asked whether a certain school was what
we call a public school; "Oh, yes," she replied, "it is a real public
school. I mean they don’t learn anything there." The instruments which
for the most part this education has used have been the great
literatures of all ages, and particularly the literatures of Greece and
Rome, and their civilisations. These literatures and civilisations have
a great advantage over all others as instruments of education, because,
while they are in many ways closely akin to our own, which are descended
from them, they are complete and can be studied in their entirety. The
aim of this type of education has been to bring the student’s mind into
closest possible contact with the greatest minds of the human race in
all ages, with the minds that have done or attempted most (in history),
with the minds that have thought most accurately and deeply (in science
and philosophy), with the minds that have felt most tenderly and truly
(in poetry). It may, or may not, succeed in that aim. It may attempt
it in the case of individual students who are particularly ill-suited
for it; but that is its aim, and no one is going to say that it is an
ignoble aim. In doing this, it has supplied to those who have been most
able to profit by it standards of judgment, standards of criticism.
This enables a man to stand apart from the tendencies of the moment and
to pronounce judgment on them in the light of what has been best in
human experience. Those are the strongest points, as I consider, of the
old traditional type. But it has certain faults, one of which I have
already mentioned, which is a fault in our day if it was not a fault in
the day in which this type of education became predominant. I mean that
it is liable to be exclusive, to shut up people within the limits of
their own class so that they are unable to acquire any living
acquaintance with the great movements going on in the world around them.

The other system has not these particular evils; this more modern type
of education, so far as you can draw lines across history at all, may be
said to begin with Rousseau; it is predominantly individual rather than
corporate, intellectual rather than spiritual, democratic rather than
aristocratic; it supplies people with knowledge of facts rather than
with standards of judgment. It is individual rather than corporate, for
it began to take possession of the world when the forces of progress
were almost all of them strongly individualistic; at that time the
demand of democracy was for the abolition of privileges, the breaking
down of class restrictions and the insistence that the individual must
be able to live his own life; with all of which we entirely agree,
though we think it needs a good deal of supplementing; and,
consequently, its tendency has been to suggest to people that the aim of
education is that they may get on in the world. The instrument which it
has used has been for the most part instruction, and its appeal has
been, not as in the traditional system to sympathy and imagination, but
to intelligence and memory. This, it seems to me, is precisely because
it believes in the career open to talent, and so far cuts across all
social divisions.

Its ideal is the educational ladder. Now there would be no objection to
the educational ladder if people went down it as well as up, if, that is
to say, men of small ability and character always sank in the social
scale and men of great ability and character always rose. But so long as
you have social classes maintained in their position, not by ability and
character alone, but by the mere accident of possession, so long it will
be true that to lift a man by education from one social stratum to
another is to expose him to a terrible temptation—the temptation to
despise his own people. And when once a man’s native sympathies have
been rooted up, it is hard for any more to grow. There is real danger
that the more modern type of education may serve to produce a race of
self-seekers. But this modern type has great advantages. It is alive
and in touch with the world at the moment; and the people who receive
education of this kind will probably be very vitally aware of most of
the living interests of their own time. But it fails to supply
standards of judgment.

Now, of course, no existing institution belongs purely and entirely to
either of these types; but we can all think easily of institutions in
which one or the other is the predominant characteristic. And one of
our troubles is that most parents like the faults and dislike the
virtues of both types. They like the aristocratic and exclusive tone of
the traditional type; and they like the pushfulness and
"get-on-in-the-world" tone of the modern type.

The great problem before the educational world in the next period is to
draw the two types and tendencies in education closer together, to leave
the whole strength of both unimpaired, but to unite them. It is not
easy to do. It is a very big problem, easily stated, but very hard to
solve in practice. I would suggest that one of the flaws of the modern
tendency is that it leaves people very strongly aware of what is going
on at the moment, but not always equally aware of what has been thought
by the greatest men in the history of the world. This is very liable to
lead people to suppose that whatever is modern is on that account good.
Now that is exactly as foolish as to suppose that whatever is ancient is
therefore good. The fact its antiquity or modernity has nothing to do
with its value at the present moment. Of course, it is true that any
institution which has lasted through many centuries is likely to be of
use again, though we may always have just reached the point at which it
begins to be an incubus. Of course, it is true that an idea which
arises out of the stress of life at the moment is very likely to be very
well adapted to the realities of that moment in which it arises, but,
also, it may be well adapted to assist a downward course. What we want
is that the people shall know the facts and also have the power to judge
them—to be able, as I said, to assist or resist the tendencies of their
time, in the light of the best ideals and standards. There is a very
strong inclination among many of us (I am personally very much aware of
it in myself) to think that the new thing must be good; and yet one
remembers the words of Clough:—

"’Old things need not be therefore true,’
Oh, brother men! nor yet the new."

Again, the old type which trains people through their social setting is
very largely co-operative in its methods. It merges the individual in
his school, or his college, so that he comes quite genuinely to care
more keenly for the welfare of his house and school and college than for
his own progress. Nobody who has had any intercourse at all with the
life of public schools or universities can doubt that. The modern
method, on the whole, I suppose, trusts mainly rather to competition.
It aims at assisting people to put out their best energy by pitting them
against one another. I want to raise a very serious question to which I
am not prepared to give an answer. I want all people interested in
education to consider it. Is it worth while to get the greatest effort
out of a person at the cost of teaching him that he is to make efforts
in his own interest? I am very doubtful.

I heard a little while ago a distinguished schoolmaster describe the
visit of the father of one of the boys in his house; the boy was being
very idle, and this distinguished man said, "I wish you would speak to
him as seriously as ever you can"; the father said, "I will." He saw
the boy and when he came back he said, "I spoke to him very seriously,
in fact I spoke to him quite religiously. I said ’You must be getting
along, you know, or other people will be pushing past you.’" The
religion would appeal to be of a "Darwinian" type.

Now I wish to express a purely personal conviction with regard to these
two types of teaching, and it is this: while we have got to incorporate
all, or at any rate, nearly all, that the more modern type of education
has given us, it has got to be used in such a way as to leave the great
marks of the traditional type predominant. Education, I hold, should
remain primarily corporate rather than individual, primarily spiritual
(that is, effective through influence, and through an appeal to sympathy
and imagination), rather than primarily intellectual (that is, effective
through an appeal to intelligence and memory), primarily concerned with
giving people the power to pronounce judgment on any facts with which
they may come in contact rather than supplying them simply with the
facts. It should be primarily co-operative and not primarily
competitive.

It is mainly the new democratic movements in education which have
emphasised this view. Indeed, the Workers’ Educational Association has
understood more definitely than any other body I am aware of, that what
it finds of supreme value in the great centres of education is the
spirit of the place rather than the instruction; and those of us who
have received the best, or at all events have been in a position to
receive the best, that Oxford can give, and those who have had just a
taste of her treasures at the Summer School, will agree that Oxford does
more for us than any lectures do. But while we say that, we need also
to insist on a greater energy and efficiency, a greater and more living
contact with the world of to-day in some, at least, of the centres of
the old traditional type. Yet it is the traditional type that must
control, because the traditional type on the whole stands for spirit
against machinery. I have no doubt it is true that the old schools and
universities are amateurish in method; and I have no doubt that we ought
to organise ourselves more efficiently. There is a good deal of waste
that may be saved; but I shall regret the day when we become efficient
at the cost of our spirit.

I believe that in the University Tutorial Classes organised by the
Workers’ Educational Association you will find upon the whole the
soundest educational principles which are at this moment operative
anywhere in England. The classes choose their own subjects, and, as a
general rule, they choose those subjects about which nobody knows the
truth. Those are always the best instruments of education; for if
anyone knows the truth, he has only to say what it is and his hearers
believe him. That may be instruction, but it is not education. Real
education is always best conducted as a joint search for truth; and in
these Tutorial Classes we have, not one teacher and thirty hearers, but
thirty-one fellow students, one of whom has commenced the study earlier
than the rest, and can therefore act as guide.

These are wide-reaching problems; and, indeed, there is no limit to the
range of the influence of education. It is the supreme regenerative
force. What is the chief obstacle of all who work for progress in any
department of life? Always the apathy of those whom we especially wish
to help. And why are they apathetic? Simply because they have had no
opportunity of finding out what is the life from which they are
excluded. But open by the merest chink the door of that treasure-house
wherein are contained the garnered stores of literature and science, of
history and art, and they will be foremost in demanding that they shall
no longer be excluded from the birthright of the sons of civilisation.
These are the good things of which no one is deprived because another
possesses them; they are the true social goods of which possession by
one redounds to the enrichment of all. It is the taste of them that can
most stimulate the zeal for progress; and as it supplies the motive
power, so it supplies also the directive wisdom. The perfecting and
expansion of our education is just what is most vital for social
progress to-day, and for the establishment of real justice in our social
life, for it alone can bring within the reach of all that knowledge
which is at once the source of power and the guarantee that the power
shall be beneficent.

*APPENDIX IV*

*ON ORDERS AND CATHOLICITY*

The position taken in the text of these lectures might be summarised as
follows: It is the living body which gives authority to its Orders; it
is not the possession of valid Orders which gives authority to the body.
In support of this view I have the kind permission of Dr. Headlam to
quote the following from his article—"Notes on Reunion: The Kikuyu
Conference," in the _Church Quarterly Review_ for January, 1914.

"On December 20th, 1912, the Bishop of Madras delivered an informal
speech to the members of the National Conference of Missionaries, at
Calcutta. This created in India and elsewhere a considerable amount of
sensation. As in that speech he referred to something which the present
writer had written and to an article in the _Church Quarterly Review_ by
Dr. Frere,[#] and as his speech has been very widely misunderstood, I
think I may be allowed to refer briefly to the points he raised. The
views which he propounded were those which I had put forward in the
’Prayer Book Dictionary,’ and I should like to be allowed to quote them
again:

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

"If we combine the Patristic theory of Orders with the rule of
ordination, we shall be able to put the idea of Apostolic Succession
into its right place. It is really a deduction from the right theory of
Orders, and the mistake has been to make Orders depend upon Apostolic
Succession and transmission.

"The authority to consecrate and ordain, or to perform all spiritual
offices, resides in and comes from the Church to which God gives His
Holy Spirit. From the beginning this work of the Church has been
exercised by those who have received a commission for it, and the rule
of the Church has been that that commission should always be given by
those who have received authority from others with a similar commission.
The historical fact, therefore, of Apostolic Succession has resulted
from the rule of the Church being always regularly carried out. If this
be correct, the following further deductions may be made:

"1. The idea of ’transmission’ is an additional and late conception
which, instead of expressing the idea of Succession, has, by its
exaggeration of it led to a rigid and mechanical theory of the Ministry.

"2. As the grace of Orders depends upon the authority of the Church and
not upon mechanical transmission, all objections from supposed
irregularities of ordination are beside the point, and the opinions of
churchmen and others who have maintained that in certain circumstances a
presbyter may ordain are explained. Ordination depends upon the
authority of the Church, and not the Church upon ordination.

"3. The idea of Succession, which results from the Church’s rule of
ordination, is an historical fact, and not a doctrine. It represents an
external connection with the first beginnings of Christianity of
infinite value for the Church; and nothing should be done to break such
a connection, as it acts like a link for binding together the Churches
as parts of a living whole.

"4. One part of the work of Christian reunion should be to restore and
secure the links of Succession throughout the whole Christian world; but
no rigidity or mechanical theory of Orders need compel us to deny divine
grace to those separated from us.[#]

[#] _The Prayer Book Dictionary_ (Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons, Ltd.,
1912), p. 42.

"The particular point that I wish to emphasise is that there are two
things to be separated—the one the rule of the Church, the other the
theory of that rule. I do not believe that it would be possible on any
Catholic principle to depart from the rule of the Church with regard to
Orders; I should go further and say that I believe that no real reunion
would ultimately be possible except on the basis of that rule. At the
present time, however, continuous emphasis is laid on the theory of
Orders, and that theory is often put as an extreme form of a mechanical
conception of the Apostolic Succession. Now it is quite true that from
the beginning Bishops have been looked upon as ’the successors’ of the
Apostles, but I can find no authoritative interpretation of that phrase
other than that they perform at the present day those functions of the
Apostles which were not miraculous or extraordinary.[#] Neither the
formularies of the Church of England nor, so far as I am aware, those of
any other Church, lay down any theory of ministry, and to impose,
therefore, any such theory on the Church is to depart from Catholic
tradition.

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

"An incidental result of this is that our attitude towards Sacraments of
Nonconformist bodies will not partake of that rigid character which is
so characteristic of some in the present day. We are glad to see that
Dr. Sanday takes exception to these. ’It seems to me to be a very
delicate matter, and, indeed, scarcely admissible for one Christian body
to take upon itself to pronounce upon the validity or otherwise of the
ministrations of another. I think that at least the question ought not
to be put in that bald and sweeping form.’ It is interesting to note
that Dr. Pusey would have been equally averse to such language. He of
course accepts the doctrine of Apostolic Succession in very definite
form, but he writes as follows:

"’But while maintaining that they only are commissioned to administer
the Sacraments who have received that commission from those appointed in
succession to bestow it, we have never denied that God may make His own
sacraments efficacious even when irregularly administered; we should
trust it might be so.’

"It would be of great advantage if we were to speak of non-episcopal
orders and sacraments as ’irregular,’ which we know they are, not as
’invalid,’ about which we know nothing."

With these words of Dr. Headlam I am in profound agreement. But there
is another quite different matter to which I would allude. If the Church
is indeed to be the vehicle of the power of Christ in its plenitude, it
must be Catholic not only in principle and right, but in actual fact.
Deeper than all divisions of "Catholic" and "Protestant" is the division
of the great human family—European, Indian, Chinese, and so forth.
These great civilisations must each bring its own gift, consecrated by
the Spirit of Christ, to the life of the whole Body before that Body
reveals the measure of the fulness of the stature of Christ. A merely
European Church cannot be fully Catholic, nor can it ever do, even for
Europe, what the Catholic Church is called by God to do for the nations
which become its provinces.

*APPENDIX V*

*ON PROVIDENCE IN HISTORY*

The most outstanding facts in the history known to us, which plainly
reveal the providential guidance of its course, are the careers of
Alexander the Great and Napoleon. There had developed in Greece the
whole spirit of civilisation in reference to the small problems of the
city-state; the whole principle of civilisation which had been thus
worked out was now established; Greek civilisation was so perfectly
developed that it had even a perfect theory of itself in Plato and
Aristotle. Just at this moment there appears upon the scene the
absolutely amazing figure—Alexander of Macedon, himself the pupil of the
man in whom the Greek spirit reached its final formulation. He carries
that spirit in his astounding triumphs through Asia Minor and Syria to
the Western Provinces of India. As a military achievement the mere
leading of his troops to the banks of the Indus is one of the supreme
wonders of the world. No doubt he was conscious of a mission to spread
the gifts which Greece held in trust for humanity; but also no doubt he
was very much concerned with the political fabric which his conquests
set up. The moment his work is finished, he himself dies. Politically
his Empire was not established and it immediately fell to pieces.
Spiritually it remained. It supplied the inspiration of Chandra gupta,
and the career of Asoka is unintelligible apart from Alexander. The
arrival of the Greeks in India is, I am assured, the beginning of all
that we now understand by Indian art. Far more important to the history
of the world was the bringing of Greek culture into Palestine; this
culture in itself was no doubt decadent, and the Chasidim and Pharisees
were right enough to resist it: yet the leaven of this humanising
influence is an essential part of the preparation for the Incarnation in
the soil of Judaism. It is to be noticed that Galilee was a region
particularly affected by the Greek influence and the settlement of
Decapolis was still mainly Greek in the Gospel period. Asoka and St.
Paul are not at all the kind of successors that Alexander would have
anticipated or desired, but his conscious desires were utilised by
Providence to serve an end of which he never dreamed. His early death
before his Empire could be consolidated in a political sense is as
markedly providential as his emergence at the precise moment of history
when he appears upon the scene.

The case is similar with Napoleon. Alexander at his death was 32 years
old. Napoleon was 52. He also appears at a critical moment, is active
precisely as long as he can serve what we now see to have been the cause
of progress, and is then removed. The great feature of the period is
the growth of the sentiment of nationality. This is the sense of
membership in a people united by common characteristics and a common
purpose; it is therefore always democratic in spirit though it need not
at all necessarily be democratic in machinery. The old European
constitutions, which had been valuable enough in their time, were
becoming a barrier to its further development; the flood of progress
burst the dam in France, and soon after there appears the supreme
genius, not himself a Frenchman, who was to carry the spirit of which
France had just become consciously possessed through the entire length
and breadth of Europe. Napoleon, like Alexander, was conscious of his
mission; he thought of himself as being the organ of the Revolution; he
is reported to have said that moral principles did not apply to him;
they applied only to persons, and he was a force. But there can be no
doubt that he was as much concerned with establishing a vast French
Empire as he was with merely carrying the principles of the French
Revolution into the other nations. He is allowed success so long as the
work of destruction is still needed; his activities first as general and
then as ruler began the unification alike of Italy and Germany; but as
soon as the spiritual work which he was to do is fully accomplished, the
political construction, which was as a great scaffolding surrounding it,
falls to pieces, and he is driven into exile to end his days in solitude
and impotence. Perhaps some day people will look back upon the horror
that now lies upon the world and not only believe that God was active in
it, but see the blessings which He was conferring by its means.

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

* * * * * * * *

_*By the Rev. WILLIAM TEMPLE.*_

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

THE KINGDOM OF GOD. A COURSE OF FOUR LECTURES.

THE NATURE OF PERSONALITY. A COURSE OF LECTURES.

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

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

FOUNDATIONS. A STATEMENT OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF IN TERMS OF MODERN THOUGHT.
By Seven Oxford Men: B. H. STREETER, R. BROOK, W. H. MOBERLY, R. G.
PARSONS, A. E. J. RAWLINSON, N. S. TALBOT, W. TEMPLE.

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.

*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Church and Nation - The Bishop Paddock Lectures for 1914-15" ***

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