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

by William Temple

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.