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
With these words of Dr. Headlam I am in profound agreement. But there
is another quite different matter to which I would allude. If the Church
is indeed to be the vehicle of the power of Christ in its plenitude, it
must be Catholic not only in principle and right, but in actual fact.
Deeper than all divisions of "Catholic" and "Protestant" is the division
of the great human family—European, Indian, Chinese, and so forth.
These great civilisations must each bring its own gift, consecrated by
the Spirit of Christ, to the life of the whole Body before that Body
reveals the measure of the fulness of the stature of Christ. A merely
European Church cannot be fully Catholic, nor can it ever do, even for
Europe, what the Catholic Church is called by God to do for the nations
which become its provinces.
*APPENDIX V*
*ON PROVIDENCE IN HISTORY*
The most outstanding facts in the history known to us, which plainly
reveal the providential guidance of its course, are the careers of
Alexander the Great and Napoleon. There had developed in Greece the
whole spirit of civilisation in reference to the small problems of the
city-state; the whole principle of civilisation which had been thus
worked out was now established; Greek civilisation was so perfectly
developed that it had even a perfect theory of itself in Plato and
Aristotle. Just at this moment there appears upon the scene the
absolutely amazing figure—Alexander of Macedon, himself the pupil of the
man in whom the Greek spirit reached its final formulation. He carries
that spirit in his astounding triumphs through Asia Minor and Syria to
the Western Provinces of India. As a military achievement the mere
leading of his troops to the banks of the Indus is one of the supreme
wonders of the world. No doubt he was conscious of a mission to spread
the gifts which Greece held in trust for humanity; but also no doubt he
was very much concerned with the political fabric which his conquests
set up. The moment his work is finished, he himself dies. Politically
his Empire was not established and it immediately fell to pieces.
Spiritually it remained. It supplied the inspiration of Chandra gupta,
and the career of Asoka is unintelligible apart from Alexander. The
arrival of the Greeks in India is, I am assured, the beginning of all
that we now understand by Indian art. Far more important to the history
of the world was the bringing of Greek culture into Palestine; this
culture in itself was no doubt decadent, and the Chasidim and Pharisees
were right enough to resist it: yet the leaven of this humanising
influence is an essential part of the preparation for the Incarnation in
the soil of Judaism. It is to be noticed that Galilee was a region
particularly affected by the Greek influence and the settlement of
Decapolis was still mainly Greek in the Gospel period. Asoka and St.
Paul are not at all the kind of successors that Alexander would have
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