Church and Nation: The Bishop Paddock Lectures for 1914-15Temple, William
Religion
Church and Nation: The Bishop Paddock Lectures for 1914-15
Temple, William
Church and state
2. That the war is none the less an outcome and a revelation of the
un-Christian principles which have dominated the life of Western
Christendom and of which both the Church and the nations have need to
repent;
3. That followers of Christ, as members of the Church, are linked to one
another in a fellowship which transcends all divisions of nationality or
race;
4. That the Christian duties of love and forgiveness are as binding in
time of war as in time of peace;
5. That Christians are bound to recognise the insufficiency of mere
compulsion for overcoming evil, and to place supreme reliance upon
spiritual forces and in particular upon the power and method of the
Cross;
6. That only in proportion as Christian principles dictate the terms of
settlement will a real and lasting peace be secured;
7. That it is the duty of the Church to make an altogether new effort to
realise and apply to all the relations of life its own positive ideal of
brotherhood and fellowship;
8. That with God all things are possible.
These propositions were very carefully drafted by the Committee referred
to above and entirely represent my own beliefs; but there is something
more which I would add. The new Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria, and
Turkey is no accident; it is the combination of just those three Powers
which openly and avowedly believe in oppression—that is, in the
imposition by force of the standards accepted by one race upon people of
another race. All nations have at one time or another practised
oppression; certainly Great Britain is not free from the charge, and the
history of Russia has many dark pages in this respect. But we can all
claim that when we have been guilty of oppression it has been under the
influence of fear, whether of revolution, anarchism, or some other force
thought to be disruptive of the State. With our enemies this is not so.
We all know about Turkey; it is the essentially Mohammedan power, and
Mohammedanism is the religion of oppression; it believes in imposing its
faith by means of the sword. The Austrian Empire consists of three
divisions in each of which one race is imposing its manner of life upon
another. In Austria-proper the Germans oppress the Czechs; in Galicia
the Poles have, in some degree at least, oppressed the Ruthenes; in
Hungary the Magyars have systematically and avowedly oppressed the
Roumanians in the east, and the Croats in the south and west. Germany
has shown her political faith by her conduct in Alsace-Lorraine, and
still more in Poland. Nothing has yet appeared so illuminating with
regard to what is at stake in this war, as Prince Bülow’s chapter on
Poland in his book, _Imperial Germany_; he describes what seems to us
the most grinding oppression with obvious self-contentment and without a
question of its righteousness; and there have been abundant signs that,
at least, many people in Germany are willing to impose German Kultur by
the sword as Mohammedans impose belief in their prophet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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