BISHOP TEMPLE
. . . _faint, pale, embarrassed, exquisite Pater! He reminds me, in
the disturbed midnight of our actual literature, of one of those
lucent match-boxes which you place, on going to bed, near the
candle, to show you, in the darkness, where you can strike a light:
he shines in the uneasy gloom--vaguely, and has a phosphorescence,
not a flame. But I quite agree with you that he is not of the
little day--but of the longer time_.--HENRY JAMES.
The future of Bishop Temple is of more importance to the Church than to
himself. He is one of those solid and outstanding men whose decisions
affect a multitude, a man to whom many look with a confidence which he
himself, perhaps, may never experience.
He cannot, I think, be wholly unaware of this consideration in forming
his judgments, and I attribute, rather to a keen and weighty sense of
great responsibility than to any lack of vital courage, his increasing
tendency towards the Catholic position. One begins to think that he is
likely to disappoint many of those who once regarded him as the future
statesman of a Christianity somewhat less embarrassed by
institutionalism.
It is probable, one fears, that he may conclude at Lambeth a career in
theology comparable with that of Mr. Winston Churchill in politics. Born
in the ecclesiastical purple he may return to it, bringing with him only
the sheaves of an already mouldering orthodoxy.
On one ground, however, there is hope that he may yet shine in our
uneasy gloom with something more effective than the glow of
phosphorescence. He is devoted heart and soul to Labour. Events, then,
may drive him out of his present course, and urge him towards a future
of signal usefulness; for Labour is a force which waits upon
contingency, and moves as the wind moves--now softly, then harshly, now
gently, then with great violence. Those who go with Labour are not like
travellers in the Tory coach or the Liberal tram; they are like
passengers in a balloon.
I do not mean that Bishop Temple will ever be so far swept out of his
course as to find himself among the revolutionaries; he carries too much
weight for that, is, indeed, too solid a man altogether for any lunatic
flights to the moon; I mean, rather, that where the more reasonable
leaders of Labour are compelled to go by the force of political and
industrial events, William Temple is likely to find that he himself is
also expected, nay, but obliged to go, and very easily that may be a
situation from which the Lollard Tower of Lambeth Palace will appear
rather romantically if not altogether hopelessly remote.
His career, then, like Mr. Winston Churchill's in politics, is still an
open event and therefore a matter for interesting speculation. This
fair-haired, fresh-faced, and boylike Bishop of Manchester, smiling at
us behind his spectacles, the square head very upright, the broad
shoulders well back, the whole short stocky figure like a rock,
confronts us with something of the challenge of the Sphinx.
One of the chief modernists said to me the other day: "Temple is the
most dangerous man in the Church of England. He is not only a socialist,
he is also Gore's captive, bow and spear." But another, by no means an
Anglo-Catholic, corrected this judgment. "Temple," said he, "is not yet
hopelessly Catholic. He has, indeed, attracted to himself by his
Christlike attitude towards Nonconformists the inconvenient attentions
of that remarkable person the Bishop of Zanzibar. His sympathies with
Labour, which are the core of his being, are sufficient reason for
----'s mistrust of him. I do not at all regard him as dangerous. On the
contrary, I think he is one of the most interesting men in the Church,
and also, which is far more important, one of its most promising
leaders."
So many men, so many opinions. Strangely enough it is from an
Anglo-Catholic who is also a Labour enthusiast that I hear the fiercest
and most uncompromising criticism of this young Bishop of Manchester.
"All his successes have been failures. He went to Repton with a
tremendous reputation; did nothing; went to St. James's, Piccadilly, as
a man who would set the Thames on fire, failed, and went to Westminster
with a heightened reputation; left it for the Life and Liberty
Movement, which has done nothing, and then on to Manchester as the
future Archbishop of Canterbury. What has he done? What has he ever
done?
"He can't stick at anything; certainly he can't stick at his job--always
he must be doing something else. I don't regard him as a reformer. I
regard him as a talker. He has no strength. Sometimes I think he has no
heart. Intellectual, yes; but intellectual without pluck. I don't know
how his brain works. I give that up. I agree, he joined the Labour
movement before he was ordained. There I think he is sincere, perhaps
devoted. But is there any heart in his devotion? Do the poor love him?
Do the Labour leaders hail him as a leader? I don't think so. Perhaps
I'm prejudiced. Whenever I go to see him, he gives me the impression
that he has got his watch in his hand or his eye on the clock. An
inhuman sort of person--no warmth, no sympathy, not one tiniest touch of
tenderness in his whole nature. No. Willie Temple is the very man the
Church of England _doesn't_ want."
Finally, one of those men in the Anglo-Catholic Party to whom Dr. Temple
looks up with reverence and devotion, said to me in the midst of
generous laudation: "His trouble is that he doesn't concentrate. He is
inclined to leave the main thing. But I hear he is really concentrating
on his work at Manchester, and therefore I have hopes that he will
justify the confidence of his friends. He is certainly a very able man,
very; there can be no question of that."
It will be best, I think, to glance first of all at this question of
ability.
Dr. Temple has a notable gift of rapid statement and pellucid
exposition. One doubts if many theologians in the whole course of
Christian history have covered more ground more trippingly than Dr.
Temple covers in two little books called _The Faith and Modern Thought_,
and _The Kingdom of God_. His wonderful powers of succinct statement may
perhaps give the impression of shallowness; but this is an entirely
false impression--no impression could indeed be wider of the mark. His
learning, though not so wide as Dean Inge's, nor so specialised as the
learning of Canon Barnes, is nevertheless true learning, and learning
which has been close woven into the fabric of his intellectual life.
There are but few men in the Church of England who have a stronger grip
on knowledge; and very few, if any at all, who can more clearly and
vividly express in simple language the profoundest truths of religion
and philosophy.
In order to show his quality I will endeavour to summarise his arguments
for the Existence of God, with as many quotations from his writings as
my space will permit.
"It is not enough to prove," he says, "that some sort of Being exists.
In the end, the only thing that matters is the character of that Being."
But how are we to set out on this quest since "Science will not allow
us a starting point at all"?
He answers that question by carrying the war into the scientific camp,
as he has a perfect right to do. "Science makes one colossal assumption
always; science assumes that the world is rational in this sense, that
when you have thought out thoroughly the implications of your
experience, the result is fact. . . . That is the basis of all science; it
is a colossal assumption, but science cannot move one step without it."
Science begins with its demand that the world should be seen as
coherent; it insists on looking at it, on investigating it, till it
is so seen. As long as there is any phenomenon left out of the
systematic coherence that you have discovered, science is
discontented and insists that either the system is wrongly or
imperfectly conceived or else the facts have not been correctly
stated.
This demand for "a coherent and comprehensive statement of the whole
field of fact" comes solely from reason. How do we get it? We have no
ground in experience for insisting that the world shall be regarded as
intelligent, as "all hanging together and making up one system." But
reason insists upon it. This gives us "a kinship between the mind of man
and the universe he lives in."
Now, when man puts his great question to the universe, and to every
phenomenon in that universe, _Why?_--Why is this what it is, what my
reason recognises it to be? is he not in truth asking, What is this
thing's purpose? What is it doing in the universe? What is its part in
the coherent system of all-things-together?
Now there is in our experience already one principle which does
answer the question "Why?" in such a way as to raise no further
questions; that is, the principle of Purpose. Let us take a very
simple illustration. Across many of the hills in Cumberland the way
from one village to another is marked by white stones placed at
short intervals. We may easily imagine a simple-minded person
asking how they came there, or what natural law could account for
their lying in that position; and the physical antecedents of the
fact--the geological history of the stones and the physiological
structure of the men who moved them--give no answer. As soon,
however, as we hear that men placed them so, to guide wayfarers in
the mist or in the night, our minds are satisfied.
Dr. Temple holds fast to that great word that infallible clue, Purpose.
He is not arguing from design. He keeps his feet firmly on scientific
ground, and asks, as a man of science asks, What is this? and Why is
this? Then he finds that this question can proceed only from faith in
coherence, and discovers that the quest of science is quest of Purpose.
To investigate Purpose is obviously to acknowledge Will.
Science requires, therefore, that there should be a real Purpose in
the world. . . . It appears from the investigation of science, from
investigation of the method of scientific procedure itself, that
there must be a Will in which the whole world is rooted and
grounded; and that we and all other things proceed therefrom;
because only so is there even a hope of attaining the intellectual
satisfaction for which science is a quest.
Reason is obliged to confess the hypothesis of a Creative Will, although
it does not admit that man has in any way perceived it. But is this
hypothesis, which is essential to science, to be left in the position of
Mahomet's coffin? Is it not to be investigated? For if atheism is
irrational, agnosticism is not scientific--"it is precisely a refusal to
apply the scientific method itself beyond a certain point, and that a
point at which there is no reason in heaven or earth to stop."
To speak about an immanent purpose is very good sense; but to speak
about a purpose behind which there is no Will is nonsense.
People, he says, become so much occupied with the consideration of what
they know that they entirely forget "the perfectly astounding fact that
they know it." Also they overlook or slur the tremendous fact of
spiritual individuality; "because I am I, I am not anybody else." But
let the individual address to himself the question he puts to the
universe, let him investigate his own pressing sense of spiritual
individuality, just as he investigates any other natural phenomenon, and
he will find himself applying that principle of Purpose, and thinking of
himself in relation to the Creator's Will.
If there is Purpose in the universe there is Will; you cannot have
Purpose or intelligent direction, without Will. But, as we have seen,
"to speak about an immanent will is nonsense":
It is the purpose, the meaning and thought of God, that is immanent
not God Himself. He is not limited to the world that He has made;
He is beyond it, the source and ground of it all, but not it. Just
as you may say that in Shakespeare's work his thoughts and feelings
are immanent; you find them there in the book, but you don't find
Shakespeare, the living, thinking, acting man, in the book. You
have to infer the kind of being that he was from what he wrote; he
himself is not there; his thoughts are there.
He pronounces "the most real of all problems," the problem of evil, to
be soluble. _Why is there no problem of good?_ Note well, that "the
problem of evil is always a problem in terms of purpose." How evil came
does not matter: the question is, Why is it here? What is it doing?
"While we are sitting at our ease it generally seems to us that the
world would be very much better if all evil were abolished. . . . But would
it?"
Surely we know that one of the best of the good things in life is
victory, and particularly moral victory. But to demand victory
without an antagonist is to demand something with no meaning.
If you take all the evil out of the world you will remove the
possibility of the best thing in life. That does not mean that evil
is good. What one means by calling a thing good is that the spirit
rests permanently content with it for its own sake. Evil is
precisely that with which no spirit can rest content; and yet it is
the condition, not the accidental but the essential condition, of
what is in and for itself the best thing in life, namely moral
victory.
His definition of Sin helps us to understand his politics:
Sin is the self-assertion either of a part of a man's nature
against the whole, or of a single member of the human family
against the welfare of that family and the will of its Father.
But if it is self-will, he asks, how is it to be overcome?
Not by any kind of force; for force cannot bend the will. Not by
any kind of external transaction; that may remit the penalty, but
will not of itself change the will. It must be by the revelation of
a love so intense that no heart which beats can remain indifferent
to it.
All this seems to me admirably said. It does at least show that there
are clear, logical, and practical reasons for the religious hypothesis.
The mind of man, seeking to penetrate the physical mysteries of the
universe, encounters Mind. Mind meets Mind. Reason recognises, if it
does not always salute, Reason. And in this rational and evolving
universe the will of man has a struggle with itself, a struggle on which
man clearly sees the fortunes of his progress, both intellectual and
spiritual, depend. Will recognises Will. And surveying the history of
his race he comes to a standstill of love and admiration before only one
life--
a life whose historic occurrence is amply demonstrated, whose moral
and spiritual pre-eminence consists in the completeness of
self-sacrifice, and whose inspiration for those who try to imitate
it is without parallel in human experience.
Love recognises Love. "I am the Light of the World."
I will give a few brief quotations from Dr. Temple's pages showing how
he regards the revelation of the Creative Will made by Christ, Who "in
His teaching and in His Life is the climax of human ethics."
Love, and the capacity to grow in love, is the whole secret.
The one thing demanded is always the power to grow. Growth and
progress in the spiritual life is the one thing Christ is always
demanding.
He took bread and said that it was His body; and He gave thanks for
it, He broke it, and He gave it to them and said, "Do this in
remembrance of Me." . . . Do what? . . . The demand is nothing less
than this, that men should take their whole human life, and break
it, and give it for the good of others.
The growth in love, and the sacrifice which evokes that growth in
love, are, I would suggest the most precious things in life. Take
away the condition of this and you will destroy the value of the
spiritual world.
One may form, I think, a true judgment of the man from these few
extracts.
He is one who could not move an inch without a thesis, and who moves
only by inches even when he has got his thesis. His intellect, I mean,
is in charge of him from first to last. He feels deeply, not sharply. He
loves truly, not passionately. With his thesis clear in his mind, he
draws his sword, salutes the universe, kneels at the cross, and then,
with joy in his heart, or rather a deep and steady sense of well-being,
moves forward to the world, prepared to fight. Fighting is the thing.
Yes, but here is neither Don Quixote nor Falstaff. He will fight warily,
take no unnecessary risk, and strike only when he is perfectly sure of
striking home.
You must not think of him as old beyond his years (he is only a little
over forty) but rather as one who was wise from his youth up. He has
never flung himself with emotion into any movement of the human mind,
not because he lacks devotion, but because he thinks the victories of
emotion are often defeats in disguise. He wishes to be certain. He will
fight as hard as any man, but intelligently, knowing that it will be a
fight to the last day of his life. He is perhaps more careful to last
than to win--an ecclesiastical Jellicoe rather than a Beatty. Nor, I
think, must one take the view of the critic that he has never stuck to
the main point. Every step in his career, as I see it, has been towards
opportunity--the riskless opportunity of greater service and freer
movement.
I regard him as a man whose full worth will never be known till he is
overtaken by a crisis. I can see him moving smoothly and usefully in
times of comparative peace to the Primacy, holding that high office with
dignity, and leaving behind him a memory that will rapidly fade. But I
cannot see him so clearly in the midst of a storm. A great industrial
upheaval, for example, where would that land him? The very fact that one
does not ask, How would he direct it? shows perhaps the measure of
distrust one may feel in his strength--not of character--but of
personality. He would remain, one is sure, a perfectly good man, and a
man of intelligence; but would any great body of the nation feel that it
would follow him either in a fight or in a retreat? I am not sure. On
the whole I feel that his personality is not so effective as it might
have been if he had not inherited the ecclesiastical tradition, had not
been born in the episcopal purple.
By this I mean that he gives me the feeling of a man who is not great,
but who has the seeds of greatness in him. Events may prove him greater
than even his warmest admirers now imagine him to be. A crisis, either
in the Church or in the economic world, might enable him to break
through a certain atmosphere of traditional clericalism which now rather
blurs the individual outline of his soul. But, even with the dissipation
of this atmosphere, one is not quite sure that the outline of his soul
would not follow the severe lines of a High Anglican tradition. He does
not, at present, convince one of original force.
Yet, when all doubts are expressed, he remains one of the chief hopes of
the Church, and so perhaps of the nation. For from his boyhood up the
Kingdom of God has meant to him a condition here upon earth in which the
soul of man, free from all oppression, can reach gladly up towards the
heights of spiritual development.
He hates in his soul the miserable state to which a conscienceless
industrialism has brought the daily life of mankind. He lays it down
that "it is the duty of the Church to make an altogether new effort to
realise and apply to all the relations of life its own positive ideal of
brotherhood and fellowship." To this end he has brought about an
important council of masters and men who are investigating with great
thoroughness the whole economic problem, so thoroughly that the Bishop
will not receive their report, I understand, till 1923--a report which
may make history.
As a member of the Society of Spirits, he says, "I have a particular
destiny to fulfil." He is a moral being, conscious of his dependence on
other men. He traces the historic growth of the moral judgment:
The growth of morality is twofold. It is partly a growth in
content, from negative to positive. It is partly a growth in
extent, from tribal to universal. And in both of these forms of
growth it is accompanied, and as a rule, though my knowledge would
not entitle me to say always, it is also conditioned by a parallel
development in religious conviction.
We are all aware that early morality is mainly negative; it is the
ruling out of certain ways of arriving at the human ideal, however
that is to be defined, which have been attempted and have been
found failures. Whatever else may be the way to reach the end,
murder is not, theft is not, and so on. Thus we get the Second
Table of the Decalogue, where morality commits itself to
prohibitions--this is not the way, that is not the way; then
gradually, under the pressure of experience, there begins to emerge
the conception of the end which makes all this prohibition
necessary, and which these methods when they were attempted failed
to reach.
And so we come at last to "the Kingdom of God as proclaimed by Christ,
and the supreme law of ethics, the demonstrably final law of ethics, is
laid down--Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself."
Of course the words come from the Old Testament. Some critics used
to say: "You will find in the Rabbis almost everything, if not
quite everything, which you find in the teaching of Christ." "Yes,"
added Wellhausen, "and how much else besides." It was the singling
out of this great principle and laying the whole emphasis upon it
that made the difference.
To a man who believes that Christ came to set up the Kingdom of God,
clearly neither the Conservative nor Liberal Party can appeal with any
compelling force of divinity. How far the Labour Party may appeal must
depend, I should think on the man's knowledge of economic law. As Dean
Inge says, Christ's sole contribution to economics is "Beware of
covetousness"--an injunction which the Labour Party has not yet quite
taken to its heart. But Dr. Temple has a right to challenge his clerical
critics for Christ's sanction of the present system, which is certainly
founded on covetousness and produces strikingly hideous results.
His theological position may be gathered from the following reply which
he made, as a Canon of Westminster, to a representative of the _Daily
Telegraph_ nearly two years ago. I do not think he has greatly changed.
He was asked how far the Church could go in meeting that large body of
opinion which cannot accept some of its chief dogmas. He replied:
I can speak freely, because I happen to hold two of the dogmas
which most people quarrel about--the virgin birth and the physical
resurrection. There are other heresies floating about! One of our
deans is inclined to assert the finitude of God, and another to
deny anything in the nature of personality to God or to man's
spirit! Rather confusing! Philosophic questions of this kind,
however, do not greatly concern mankind. To believe in God the
Father is essential to the Christian religion. Other doctrines may
not be so essential, but they must not be regarded as unimportant.
Personally I wish the Church to hold her dogmas, because I would do
nothing to widen the gulf which separates us from the other great
Churches, the Roman and the Eastern. The greatest political aim of
humanity, in my opinion, is a super-state, and that can only come
through a Church universal. How we all longed for it during the
war!--one voice above the conflict, the voice of the Church, the
voice of Christ! If the Pope had only spoken out, with no reference
to the feelings of the Austrian Emperor!--what a gain that would
have been for religion. But the great authentic voice never
sounded. Instead of the successor of St. Peter we had to content
ourselves with the American Press--excellent, no doubt, but hardly
satisfying.
Let me tell you a rather striking remark by an Italian friend of
mine, an editor of an Italian review, and not a Roman Catholic. He
was saying that every Church that persisted for any time possessed
something essential to the religion of Christ. I asked him what he
saw in the Roman Church that was essential. He replied at once,
"The Papacy." I was surprised for the moment, but I saw presently
what he meant. The desire of the world is for universal peace,
universal harmony. Can that ever be achieved by a disunited
Christendom? The nations are rivals. Their rivalry persisted at the
Peace Conference, disappointing all the hopes of idealists. Must it
not always persist, must not horrible carnage, awful desolation,
ruinous destruction, and, at any rate, dangerous and provocative
rivalries, always dog the steps of humanity until Christendom is
one?
* * * * *
Personally, I think reunion with Rome is so far off that it need
not trouble us just now; there are other things to do; but I would
certainly refrain from anything which made ultimate reunion more
difficult. And so I hold fast to my Catholic doctrines. But I tell
you where I find a great difficulty. A man comes to me for adult
baptism. I have to ask him, point by point, if he verily believes
the various doctrines of the Church, doctrines which a man baptised
as an infant may not definitely accept and yet remain a faithful
member of Christ's Church. What am I to say to one who has the
passion of Christian morality in his heart, but asks me whether
these verbal statements of belief are essential? He might say to
me, "It would be immoral to assert that I believe what I have not
examined, and to examine this doctrine so thoroughly as to give an
answer not immoral would take a lifetime. Am I to remain outside
the Church till then?" Here, I think, the Church can take a step
which would widen its influence enormously. No man ought to be shut
out of Christ's Church who has the love of God and the love of
humanity in his heart. That seems to me quite clear. I don't like
to say we make too much of the creeds, but I do say that we don't
make half enough of the morality of Christ. That's where I should
like to see the real test applied.
What I should like to see would be a particular and individual
profession of the Beatitudes. I should like to see congregations
stand up, face to the East, do anything, I mean, that marks this
profession out as something essential and personal, and so recite
the Beatitudes. There might be a great sifting, but it would bring
home the reality of the Christian demand to the heart and
conscience of the world. After all, that's our ideal, isn't
it?--the City of God. If we all concentrated on this ideal,
realising that the morality of Christ is essential, I don't think
there would be much bother taken, outside professional circles,
about points of doctrine.
Then, writes the interviewer, arose the question of fervour. "Can the
City of God be established without some powerful impulse of the human
heart? Can it ever be established, for example, by the detached and self
satisfied intellectual priggishness of the subsidised sixpenny review,
or by the mere violence of the Labour extremist's oratory? Must there
not be something akin to the evangelical enthusiasm of the last century,
something of a revivalist nature? And yet have we not outgrown anything
of the kind?
"To Canon Temple the answer presents itself in this way: Rarer than
Christian charity is Christian faith. The supreme realism is yet to
come, namely, the realisation of Christ as a living Person, the
realisation that He truly meant what He said, the realisation that what
He said is of paramount importance in all the affairs of human life.
When mankind becomes consciously aware of the Christian faith as a
supreme truth, then there will be a realistic effort to establish the
City of God. The first step, then, is for the Church to make itself
something transcendently different from the materialistic world. It must
truly mean what it says when it asserts the morality of Christ. Blessed
are the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the
peacemakers. The fervour is not to be born of an individual fear of hell
or an individual anxiety for celestial safety, but of an utterly
unselfish enthusiasm for the welfare of the world."
I should give a false impression of this very interesting man, who is so
sincere and so steadfast, if I did not mention the significant fact of
his happiness. He has always struck me, in spite of his formidable
intellect and a somewhat pedagogic front and the occasional accent of an
ancient and scholarly ecclesiasticism, as one of the happiest and most
boy-like of men--a man whose centre must be cloudlessly serene, and who
finds life definitely good. His laughter indeed, is a noble witness to
the truth of a rational and moral existence. His strength is as the
strength of ten, not only because his heart is pure, but because he has
formulated an intelligent thesis of existence.
He has pointed out that the Pickwick Papers could not have been produced
in any but a Christian country. "Satire you may get to perfection in
pagan countries. But only in those countries where the morality of
Christ has penetrated deeply do you get the spirit that loves the thing
it laughs at."
PRINCIPAL W.B. SELBIE
SELBIE, Rev. WM. BOOTHBY, M.A.; Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford,
since 1909; b. Chesterfield, 24 Dec., 1862; e.s. of late Rev. R.W.
Selbie, B.A. of Salford; m. Mildred Mary, 2d d. of late Joseph Thompson,
J.P., LL.D., of Wilmslow, Cheshire; two s. one d. Educ.: Manchester
Grammar School; Brasenose and Mansfield Colleges, Oxford; incorporated
M.A., at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, 1904; Hon. D.D. Glasgow, 1911.
Lecturer in Hebrew and Old Testament at Mansfield College, Oxford,
1889-90; Minister Highgate Congregational Church, London, 1890-1902;
Emmanuel Congregational Church, Cambridge, 1902-1909; Editor of the
_British Congregationalist_, 1899-1909; Lecture in Pastoral Theology at
Cheshunt College, Cambridge, 1907-1909; Chairman of Congregational
Union, 1914-1915; President of National Free Church Council, 1917.
[Illustration: PRINCIPAL W.B. SELBIE]