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

by William Temple

No doubt in a civilised country what the Church does as a rule is to ask the State to act against the man, on the ground that he has broken contract and holds his position on false pretences. This is what the Mediæval Church called "handing the offender over to the secular arm."

But let us imagine the situation in a Mission Church where a convert has, for penance, been excluded from attendance at public worship for a period. Suppose he insists upon coming; then certainly the congregation would be right forcibly to remove him. Again, supposing the use of force as discipline may be of advantage to moral development (and up to a certain stage I am sure it may), and supposing there is no civilised State to employ it, the Church will be right to do what is best for the character of those for whom it is concerned. But no doubt all this is purely preparatory to the positive spiritual work of the Church, which must always take the form of appeal and not of force.

There is, however, so much confusion on the subject of moral and spiritual authority in general, that it may not be out of place to add here some remarks upon it.

The word "authority" is derived from a Latin word which may perhaps be best translated by "weight."

When we speak of a man of weight, or an opinion that carries weight, we have something very near the original meaning of the term authority. Sometimes we are inclined to think of authority as best represented by the political ruler, or the military commander. But these are not really typical kinds of authority. They are very special cases where authority is clothed with compelling force. But in the spheres of which we are thinking there is not necessarily present any compelling force at all. When we think of authority in religion, in its connection with morals and such questions, there is no force, at any rate necessarily, present at all, and the Church's authority in the true sense is not any the less because it does not practise the methods of the Inquisition: nor was it any greater in the days when to its own proper authority it added coercive power, appealing to people in the name of what is in itself not authority strictly speaking, at all. For if I believe just because the Church is an assembly of the saints of God and its formularies are summaries of their experience, then I am believing on the ground of the Church's authority. But if I believe because an officer of the Church threatens me with the rack in the case of disbelief, I am believing not because the Church has authority, but because I dislike physical pain.

So authority always in the end means weight—what carries weight with our judgment. We can weigh one authority against another; we may weigh the authority of one theologian with that of another by considering which has shown the greater knowledge of the subject in question and the sounder judgment in dealing with it. In moral questions we do as a matter of fact perpetually come back to the man of moral weight. And what constitutes his weight is to begin with a certain uprightness in his own character, and then a certain sympathy and insight which enables him to understand how he would apply to the circumstances of other people the principles by which he lives in his own. So, for example, Aristotle in the end determines all moral questions by reference to the standard which the man of moral sense would use; everything in the last resort is determined simply by his judgment. Virtue, he says, resides in a mean between two vicious extremes, and the mean is to be determined by a principle which the man of moral sense would use. Later on, after an interlude of two or three books wisely interpolated, he comes to ask, Who is the man of moral sense? and he turns out to be the man who has the right principle enabling him to determine the mean between vicious extremes; that is to say, that his standard of judgment in the end is simply the good, sensible man, and for practical purposes that does well enough, because for practical purposes we do know whose judgment we value, we do know who it is whose approval we should care to win, whose approval would of itself assure us that our conduct was right, and whose disapproval would of itself go far at least to assure us that our conduct was wrong, or at any rate that the matter needed careful reconsideration.

There is indeed another method than this of reliance upon the authority of a wise man, and it is represented by the other great thinker of Greece, by Plato. Plato's ideal method in moral questions was to try to determine the purpose of the whole universe and then determine how in any given circumstances a man may serve that purpose. The basis of his morals, in other words, was what we should call theological; and so far as we are able to apply this, it is the only finally satisfactory method; so far as we can say that the principles of Christianity imperatively demand some particular action or attitude of mind, we shall not care how little other authority we can quote, but shall say that we can see quite clearly that our allegiance to Christ and His religion involves a certain point of view for us; and if no one else has taken that point of view, provided we can find no flaw in our reasoning, we shall say none the less, This is the point of view which we, as Christians, are bound to take.

That has been the method by which, as a matter of fact, most Christian reforms have been carried out. That was the way by which, in an instance to which I shall return in a moment, slavery was abolished. Slavery had been tolerated by the Christian Church for centuries. The authority of the Christian Church might therefore have been quoted as substantially in favour of it. A very large number of Christians did, in fact, favour retaining it, because, of course, the abolition of the slave trade was an interference with property, and heartrending appeals were made in the name of "the unfortunate widow with a few strong blacks," as in our day appeals are made against legislation in the name of the widow who has shares in breweries. But Wilberforce's point of view was simply this, that whatever the Church may have said through all these centuries, when you look at the Christian principle of the right way to treat human beings it condemns slavery; and if all the Christians in all the ages had denied that, it would not have altered the fact that, as we see it—so Wilberforce and his friends would have urged—as we see it, slavery is condemned; that is enough for us; we go forward in the certainty that we are carrying out the will of God. Wilberforce brought people round to his point of view; now you will hardly find a Christian to defend slavery as an institution. Some day, perhaps, it will be the same with war.

But in most moral questions the authority to which we appeal is not that of the good and wise individual, but that of the moral sense of our civilisation. We can very seldom give an adequate reason for those points on which we have the strongest moral convictions. For example, in argument I suppose we should most of us find it very difficult to produce a case for monogamy as against polygamy anything like so strong as the feeling which we have in favour of the one against the other. That feeling is implanted in us by the experience of our civilisation, a civilisation which has, in fact, emerged from one into the other, and these very strong instinctive feelings, which are common to great masses of people and for which usually any one individual in all that mass can only give a most inadequate reason, are something to which an enormous volume of human experience has contributed. Generation after generation has come to feel that certain relations of the sexes are, as a matter of fact, the only ones that can be maintained with real wholesomeness, and this belief becomes so strong in the community that it is received with the air we breathe all through the formative years of our life, and the result is an intense conviction for which, as I say, we can hardly give any argument—an intense conviction that one sort of thing is right and the other wrong; and what most of us mean by our conscience is just this body of feeling concerning right and wrong which has been implanted in us as the result of the accumulated experience of civilisation. From the point of view of the individual it is usually more an emotion than a reasoned judgment; and it is much more of the nature of prejudice than of an argumentative conclusion. When people talk about conscientious objections to obeying the law, it is always quite impossible to distinguish between their prejudice and their conscience; there is no standard by which to determine. But the fact that it is unreasoned in the individual does not mean that it is irrational, or without reason in itself. What has been built up by the steady pressure of whole centuries of experience has enormous weight of pure reason behind it, even though the individual cannot himself give the reason, and even though there may be no individual alive who can give it; it has come out of the logic of experience; it has been built up in the strictly scientific way by a whole series of facts. There is an enormous inductive background, an enormous scientific basis for the moral convictions of the better, more self-controlled members of any civilised society. The moral verdict of society, and the conscience of the individual, which is his own echo, for the most part, of that moral verdict, is a thing of quite enormous authority.

But, it will be urged, the authorities clash. The verdict of European civilisation is for monogamy; the verdict of certain other civilisations is quite as emphatically against it. Does this mean that the whole distinction of right and wrong is a mere matter of convention? No, it does not. But even if it did, the thing would not be as bad as people often imagine, because convention is not something artificial in the sense of contrary to nature or fictitious; a convention is simply the expression of human nature working on a large scale. Man is a being whose nature it is to set up conventions, and a convention is a product of human nature, a property and mark of human nature, just as much gravitation is a property and mark of mechanical nature; and it only becomes contrary to nature and a nuisance when it has survived the purpose for which it originally grew up. But none the less there is something more than any convention or social growth about the distinction of right and wrong; the distinction in itself is absolute and fundamental. It is the distinction between recognising oneself as member of a community and not so recognising oneself. Morality is always recognition of a claim on the part of other persons, the recognition that their point of view and their interests have to be taken into account in the determination of my conduct. As man is by nature social, as by nature he is designed to live in communities, the distinction of right and wrong, that is the recognition of the claim of the community and of the members in it, is absolute and final.