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.