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 believe that in the University Tutorial Classes organised by the
Workers’ Educational Association you will find upon the whole the
soundest educational principles which are at this moment operative
anywhere in England. The classes choose their own subjects, and, as a
general rule, they choose those subjects about which nobody knows the
truth. Those are always the best instruments of education; for if
anyone knows the truth, he has only to say what it is and his hearers
believe him. That may be instruction, but it is not education. Real
education is always best conducted as a joint search for truth; and in
these Tutorial Classes we have, not one teacher and thirty hearers, but
thirty-one fellow students, one of whom has commenced the study earlier
than the rest, and can therefore act as guide.
These are wide-reaching problems; and, indeed, there is no limit to the
range of the influence of education. It is the supreme regenerative
force. What is the chief obstacle of all who work for progress in any
department of life? Always the apathy of those whom we especially wish
to help. And why are they apathetic? Simply because they have had no
opportunity of finding out what is the life from which they are
excluded. But open by the merest chink the door of that treasure-house
wherein are contained the garnered stores of literature and science, of
history and art, and they will be foremost in demanding that they shall
no longer be excluded from the birthright of the sons of civilisation.
These are the good things of which no one is deprived because another
possesses them; they are the true social goods of which possession by
one redounds to the enrichment of all. It is the taste of them that can
most stimulate the zeal for progress; and as it supplies the motive
power, so it supplies also the directive wisdom. The perfecting and
expansion of our education is just what is most vital for social
progress to-day, and for the establishment of real justice in our social
life, for it alone can bring within the reach of all that knowledge
which is at once the source of power and the guarantee that the power
shall be beneficent.
*APPENDIX IV*
*ON ORDERS AND CATHOLICITY*
The position taken in the text of these lectures might be summarised as
follows: It is the living body which gives authority to its Orders; it
is not the possession of valid Orders which gives authority to the body.
In support of this view I have the kind permission of Dr. Headlam to
quote the following from his article—"Notes on Reunion: The Kikuyu
Conference," in the _Church Quarterly Review_ for January, 1914.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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