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

by William Temple

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."