Church and Nation: The Bishop Paddock Lectures for 1914-15 — John Shaqi
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
"He that loveth his brother"—says St. John—"walketh in the light." He
is the man who knows where he is going, because he is the man who
understands people and sees into their hearts. They will reveal to him
secrets of their nature, which they will hide from the contemptuous and
indifferent; and even if at first he is from time to time disappointed
and betrayed, in the end his method will succeed, because love and trust
create what they believe in.
The justice then, which we find at work in the State, is always a
provisional thing pointing us to something more, something which the
State itself by its very constitution is unable to provide, but which
God provides in Christ, and will enable us in our measure to provide, if
we are faithful, at least in the circle of our immediate activities, so
far, that is, as the range of our sympathy will carry us.
II.—The value of the justice which the State is able to secure actually
resides for the most part in the liberty which it makes possible.
Justice, as the State interprets it, is of itself, as far as I can see,
almost totally valueless. I can see no kind of advantage in merely
allotting so much pain to so much evil. There is moral evil in a man
and you put physical evil into him as well. I do not see how you have
made him or anyone else the better. Only in so far as the punishment is
either deterrent or reformative, has it any moral value at all; and only
in the latter case, where it reforms the character, can the value be
called in the strict sense moral. So far as it only deters men from evil
acts which they would desire to commit, it may add to the convenience of
the other members of Society, but it is not doing any direct moral good.
Indirectly, however, it has moral results; for when we enquire in what
sense we can say that such justice as the State secures produces
liberty, the first answer is to be found in the obvious and elementary
fact that the liberty of every one of us depends upon our knowledge that
certain impulses and instincts in other people, should they arise, will
be checked and not allowed to receive full expression. Our liberty is
increased by that check put upon predatory or homicidal impulses in
other people, and their liberty depends upon the suppression of such
impulses in us.
So far it would seem that there must be in the most obvious sense of the
words a certain curtailment of everybody’s liberty in order that anybody
may have liberty at all. If we are all to be free to indulge our
passions of anger and hatred, should such arise within us, then it is
quite clear that there will be very little freedom of action in the
Society which rests on that principle. Everyone will go about in fear
of everyone else.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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