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

by William Temple

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.