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
For a while the three new forces worked together, carrying men’s thought
and action forward; and then in the 18th century it would seem that
there was, in England at any rate, a torpor due to their exhaustion;
when revival came it was because Wesley and his friends revived the
Hebrew element in our life, because Newman and Pusey with their friends
revived the Latin element, and because F. D. Maurice and the Broad
Church movement revived the Hellenistic, and this, with its passion for
more adequate comprehension and expression, is the dominant force of our
time. We watch these three influences still at work; but as they
interact upon one another and within the persons of the new races, a new
product is gradually being produced, and in those corporate
personalities which we call nations, we see a character being born which
is something that history has not known before.
The first requirement of personality is always freedom—freedom as we
have already said in its two senses, that conduct is not dictated from
without but is governed by the whole person, and not by isolated
elements; and the corporate persons need freedom just as much as the
individual; hence the need, the vital and absolute need, for political
sovereignty in any State which is conscious of itself as a person, that
is as having a single spiritual life.
But that life and freedom are exercised only in the citizens who are
members of the State. We cannot surely assert that the corporate person
is immortal, as the individual is; and therefore, to destroy a State is
to inflict a more irreparable loss than to kill a man, which is one
reason at least, perhaps the chief reason, why a man should die for the
political freedom of his country, and even, if need be, kill for it;
but, as freedom is the first requirement of personality, fellowship is
its first duty, for it is true of corporate personalities quite as much
as of individuals that they only find themselves and fulfil themselves
in their inter-action upon one another, and the nations of the world do
in fact need one another, and need one another’s full life.
In economics we found out long ago that in order to be wealthy, a
country needs rich neighbours who may afford good markets. It is so in
every other department. We need the gifts of the other peoples. We
need that they shall be free and vigorous. Indeed the chief lesson
which the world at this time needs to learn is just this—that all the
nations of the world need one another, each needing also that the others
should be free, in order that they may bring their contributions to the
common life in which all share.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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