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

by William Temple

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.