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

by William Temple

God is Spirit. The Hindu knew that, and knows it still, quite as much as Israel.

God is Law. The more thoughtful at least among the ancient Romans, and particularly the great Roman Stoics, knew that with a vividness that was scarcely ever attained in Israel.

God is Beauty. Assuredly the ancient Greeks knew that as Israel never realised it at all.

But the conception of Israel that God is at work in history means that the God of Israel gives to these other gods or conceptions of God, each its own time and place of emergence and decay. The God who is revealed to us in the Old Testament is Himself the Being who appoints that the Indian or the Roman or the Greek should reach these particular convictions; and in these partial apprehensions of the Divine, before the full revelation came, the faith of Israel is determinative and regulative for all the other faiths; and moreover, it is this faith that God is at work in the actual daily history of men, which makes the faith of Israel the natural and proper introduction to the Incarnation, where God Himself took flesh and lived among men and died at a time and in a place—in Palestine and under Pontius Pilate.

This exaltation of the Holy God, actually at work within men and at their side, while it leads to a sense of awe before the Holiness of the Almighty, also leads to a sense of the dignity of this world, and of man's life in it, which is lacking, as a rule, from other great religions, and that too in proportion as those other religions are spiritual. For the Hindu, for example, this world and all that is in it is mere illusion. He is spiritual enough but he is not material enough; and we find there that contempt for the things of the body which invariably issues in a contempt for moral conduct; for our moral conduct here, while we live upon this planet, is wrought out through our bodies. But the religion of Israel, and especially its completion in the Incarnation, wherein God Himself came in the flesh, gives at once a dignity to this world of ours, to our bodies, and to all the material side of life.

When Christ stood before Pilate, the Kingdom of God was in appearance, at least, undergoing judgment at the hands of the kingdom of this world; but it is not merely a contrast of good with evil. It is a contrast of the perfect with the very imperfect, but yet not merely evil, power. Pilate is not Satan; and the Lord Himself, in the moment of His trial, recognises that the authority by which He is condemned is an authority that is derived from God—"Thou couldest have no power at all against Me, except it were given thee from above." The kingdoms of this world, which are to become the kingdoms of our God and of His Christ, are not simply something evil. The contrast of Church and World is not the contrast between good and evil; but it is the contrast between two stages in the work which God is accomplishing in history, and those two may often come into conflict.

Let us then ask what is the central principle of God's guidance of His people, so far as it may be deduced from the tiny fragment of history that we really know. In that fragment at least, we may say, I think, with little hesitation, that its method and its aim is spiritual growth, or, if you like to put it an expansion and enrichment of personality.

We are sometimes inclined to think our own personality is something that is given to us from the outset, and entirely belongs to us; but that idea will not stand examination for a moment. Individual personality is a social product. It can only be developed under social influences. A man may be born with many great talents, but if his environment does not encourage their development, these talents will remain for the most part undeveloped and unknown—either to himself or to anybody else. Indeed the greater the talent with which a man is endowed, the more difference is made to him by the kind of surroundings in which he is put. A man of very few gifts and little natural capacity will be much the same, whether he has abundant opportunity for mental and spiritual growth or little opportunity; but the man of great capacities, needing for their development the encouragement of surroundings, is an entirely different being according as those surroundings are favourable or the reverse; and so we reach the curious result that the greatest personality, while no doubt he must have brought into the world something given to him by God that was capable of development, is yet more entirely dependent upon the society in which he is living than people with a less wide range of gifts.

Again, it is only within a society which has developed some character for itself, which has indeed a personality of its own, that individual personality can reach very much development. You cannot have genius in a savage tribe. Genius is the focal expression of the personality of a whole people. It is that people coming to life, and possessed of voice; and you do not find it where there is little social development. It is only as the tribe or the nation begins to have some definite character of its own that it is itself sufficiently organised to develop from its own individual member those gifts, and elicit those activities, which are the signs of genius.

We find then, that individual personality, or spiritual life, is dependent upon the spiritual life of society; and we need to notice that this society has every mark by which we distinguish personality in the individual. It has aspirations: it has a predominant character; it has claims, and it has duties. It has in fact, in the literal sense of the word, corporate personality, and just as the many instincts and impulses which are to be found in human nature, and may be very discordant with one another, are welded together to make up the single life of a human being, so the whole gifts and instincts and ambitions and aspirations of all the individual citizens are welded together, to make up the personality of the whole society.