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
I do not know at all what forms your labour unrest in takes in this
continent, but I claim to have considerable opportunities of knowing
what is the root of that unrest in England, at least among the better
type of working people; for I am concerned with an organisation which is
at work among working folk all over England, having an enormous
membership, and which aims at claiming for them, and supplying them
with, further facilities for education. Those with whom I thus come in
contact are picked men, no doubt, because those who join an educational
association are thereby marked off at once as intellectually at least
more alert than those who do not join; but as I go about them, I find no
room whatever for doubting that the root of the labour unrest in England
is a sense that the whole organisation of our life constitutes a
standing insult to the personality of the poor man. Why, for example,
he feels, should it be possible for a well-to-do man to secure for
himself, or for his wife, or for his child, the medical attendance that
may be needed, while he in very many parts of our country depends upon
institutions maintained by voluntary contributions? It is quite
compatible with gratitude to those whose generosity maintains these
institutions to feel that for such service he should not be dependent
upon anybody’s charity at all—whether the solution is to be that the
State maintain such institutions or that every man who is doing his fair
share of the country’s work receive for himself the wage that will
enable him to deal with such emergencies as they arise.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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