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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 74

The Church and Citizenship

page 203

The Church and Citizenship.

The question of the true relation of the Church to citizenship is one that is occupying the attention of the best and wisest of the time. To discover what that relation is, is the purport of this paper. For clearness of discussion I have to start with the question, What is the Church ? What ideas does it represent ? What principles does it embody ? To answer that question we must raise another, What truths or principles or ideals does Christ represent to us? For we shall agree that Christ is the measure of the Church. He is the standard by which the Church should be estimated. It is recognised that the Church is the body of Christ—possessed of His mind, governed and controlled by His will. But it is recognised too that the Christ varies with the growth and development of the mind and character of the Church that represents Him. So the answer to the question, What think ye of Christ ? will be at the same time a true definition of the Church. Now, let us seek to get face to face with the Christ of the Gospels. What to us is the basis on which He built His life and His work ? How did He conceive this universe ? What to Him was the fundamental principle that bound the infinite number of elements that constitute the world in one whole ? These questions are necessary, because we want our world to be as simple as possible, while at the same time we cannot afford one fact to escape us. We want to combine the two ideas of simplicity of conception with the fullness of reality. I find that Jesus Christ established the whole of His life and teaching upon certain facts of man's consciousness, certain primal realities which have ever been active in the life and history of our race. Man has page 204 ever distinguished himself from the great world in which he lives, and the history of his growth and development may be conceived as the history of his effort to harmonise himself with all the facts of his world. In other words—to discover the unity which binds him as subject to the world as object. In the days of Christ, as to a very great extent in our own times, that unity was lost. This accounts for the fact that the reality of the world and man had become so misty as to render the condition of society hopeless. The Jews, by a process of analysis, which they termed "hedging in the law," had buried the spiritual in the legal—religion and morality in a system of ceremonies that failed to touch the deepest springs of life. The Stoic by the same process had created for himself a kingdom of humanity with an abstraction for its king, and so had lost at every step what he thought he had found. Now, Jesus Christ reversed the process. Instead of analysis he employed synthesis. Instead of emptying the world of its meaning by the process of excluding all differences, he grasped in one conception all these differences and brought them under one supreme principle. Instead of turning away from the living, throbbing life of the present, with its suffering and agony, with its flippancy and cynicism, with its effort and aspiration, and such good in the golden age of the past idealised by the imagination into a golden age of the future, He peered beneath the surface of the present and found good in its very agony and despair. Hence His sane optimism, hence, too, the sunniness of His world. This old world grew, under his eyes, radiant as if clothed in the light of eternity, glorious and wonderful as the very garment of God. The fowls of the air, the lilies of the field revealed a providence that implied the blended unity of wisdom and love. Even the life history of a grain of corn contained the key to the philosophy of the universe. And yet, mark you, there were but dim anticipations of the glory, the perfection, that burst into reality in self-consciousness. In the reason that thinks, in the heart that loves, in the will that chooses and rejects, the very page 205 essence of Godhead stands revealed. Nature is but the vestibule leading to the temple and innermost shrine of the Eternal. Jesus Christ therefore removed the last link that bound God to a people or a place, and proclaimed Him the Living God and the God of the Living. Here is a thought that grips the generations of the past and holds them together as moments of His own life. Here is a principle that comprehends the multitudinous lives of the present and binds them together into one organic whole. His home henceforth, then, is not the temple on Mount Gerizim or the more august temple on Mount Zion. Not the Pantheon at Rome, or the many shrines that lined the sacred rivers of Asia, but the living heart of man made pure by lofty ideals, the living mind made reverent and receptive by the contemplation and embodiment of eternal verities, the living will made strong and heroic by strenuous effort to achieve righteousness and realise virtue. Now so to think and conceive the Father is to lift man out of his littleness and finitude and make him an object of infinite value. For, mark you, this is not a speculation as to the rationality of the world; it is not primarily a philosophic system; it is the discovery of Jesus Christ as he lived and moved in this world with his eyes fully open to the evils of his generation. It is not the effusion of a great poetic genius in his moments of clearest vision, it is the inevitable conclusion drawn from the stern realities of life, and conclusion stands verified in the experience of the highest and holiest of all eyes since His day. It is a conclusion that was first verified in life, and can be verified only as men abandon themselves to its power and inspiration. This is the basis and inspiration of the personal life of Christ; this therefore is the cardinal truth of the Kingdom of God. Now, the Church is the Kingdom rendered visible and operative in the world. It is the eternal life of God through Christ unfolding its meaning and purpose in human society. God through man achieving righteousness, man through God realising liberty and manhood. In other words, the Church is constituted of individuals in whom the page 206 consciousness of fatherhood has blossomed into brotherhood. This fact needs to be emphasised. Every individual unit in the Church is a member of an organism; he has life and therefore meaning only as a member. Separate him from the Church and he ceases to exist as a member; he becomes barren and dead. Organic relation to God in Christ is the fundamental fact of Church membership. But organic relation to God implies organic relation to man. I say to man in the fullness of his nature, in all the comprehensiveness of his interests. Through man we realise God. Through man God blesses and inspires men. The Church, then, is the light of the world, the salt of the earth. As the body of Christ, the representative of His grace and truth, it stands as the conscience of the world, condemning its evil, guiding it to the good. Such, then, in idea is the Church. What then is the State ? The ancient city, the germ of the modern state, was the organised relation of freemen, wherein the conditions necessary to conceive and realise manhood were secured to its citizens. What it emphasised was not the visible and tangible, but the spiritual and ideal. Its constitution and laws were but visible expressions and manifestations of a common life, a common spirit and a common purpose. The State, then, may be conceived as the corporate unity of individuals bound together by the conception of a common good. Here we are plunged at once into the thick of moral and spiritual relations, since all human relations, in so far as they are raised into the sphere of reason, are infused with the nature and character of reason. We cannot affirm this too strongly. Man is a unit. Everything therefore that concerns him must be brought within the circle of his personal life, and transformed by that very act from being just raw material into a constituent element of his own life. As every nerve and fibre runs up to his brain and is there related to every other nerve and fibre in the one sensorium, so every thought, every feeling, every motive, every volition becomes co-ordinated with every other thought and motive in the consciousness of one self. Therefore every relation page 207 in which man may stand to his fellows and to the world is infused with the element of morality. This reference to a moral element in political relations finds expression and embodiment in the idea of right. But these rights would ever have remained a bare possibility, had they not been evoked and infused with life through the mutual relations of men in the State. Our modern conception of the State was first emphasised by Hegel. From the purely imaginary basis of contract, he established on the basis of self-consciousness and reason. True, Rousseau drew attention to the sovereignty of the people when he laid down the principle that all ultimate authority is resident in the common reason which is, or can be, realised in each individual as a thinking being, in the common will, which man can execute and which he is bound to execute apart from any social constraint, or organised social relations. The problem he sought to solve, and which he handed down to posterity, was "to find a form of association which shall protect with the whole common force the person and property of each associate, and in virtue of which every individual, while uniting himself to all, shall only obey himself and be as free as he was before." Hegel discovered that form in the State conceived as an organism. He maintained that man is essentially social; that social relation is essential to the individual in such a way that apart from it he has no meaning, he has no personality in the sense in which personality is the basis of right. Society is the organ of the general will, to which the individual in his particular will is subordinated, and it is only through society that the individual has a general will developed in him. The obedience of the lower to the higher nature of man is at the same time necessarily his submission to a social law in which that higher nature is in the first instance embodied. This marks the transition from the individualism of the past to the socialism of the present; from the reign of external necessity to that of a common life—a change which has revolutionised our whole outlook, and is still big with results, the magnitude of which is beyond our page 208 comprehension. We view the world with eyes other than our fathers had. We can see now more clearly than ever the meaning of the struggle and endeavour through which they achieved liberty of thought, of speech and expression; we can understand the significance of the ideal which animated their minds, inspired their hearts, gave strength to their will to dare and achieve victory. They were endeavouring to free themselves from the dominion of external forms and symbols of authority, but in the act of doing so they were discovering the true principles of human life, unity, mutual dependence, community of life and of purpose. Through the fires of common suffering they were fusing the bonds of nationality and preparing the conditions necessary to the formation of a universal brotherhood. In all their acts there was a higher and fuller purpose being realised. They were held in the hands of a mightier force, urged on by the power of a sublimer end than was present to their minds. Tennyson has well said that

"Life is not an idle ore.
But iron dug from central gloom,
And heated hot with burning fears,
And dipt in baths of hissing tears,
And battered with the shocks of doom
To shape and use."

Through the institutions thus fashioned, which are after all but the embodiment and articulation of ideals, the power not ourselves was moulding men with a view to their ultimate perfection as members of one society. Morality and political subjection have thus a common basis. Both find their meaning and justification in the nature of man as possessing reason and will; both have one and the same purpose, the perfection of man. This moral destiny of the State is a truth which has not received the attention it deserves at our hands, and the reason for this is not far to seek. We have been accustomed to view it from its outer side. We have thought of it as a pure machine for the purpose of preserving a kind of rough standard of justice to regulate the conduct of its page 209 individual members. Then we take into consideration the personal history and character of the men through which its powers are expressed, its laws framed and administered. Men with whom we could not think of associating as friends and companions, and so we say if such be the State, then the further I can remove myself from its control the better. I recognise its external sanction not as the expression of a beneficent force that makes for righteousness, but a necessary evil which must be endured. But notwithstanding the imperfection and corruption and selfishness of the agents of State life, we still assert the ethical basis and character of the State. We still affirm its ideal end and moral function. No modern State has realised the ideal, no modern State fufils the functions which it ought to fulfil. In the same way it may be said that no individual, however high and pure and unselfish his character, has achieved his ideal, has realised his ultimate good; but that is no argument against the existence and operation of a moral principle within him. Nay, his very imperfection and the feelings of failure which it occasions, indicate the presence of a force which he cannot and would not expel. So the consciousness of the imperfection of the State as a means to the development of the moral life proves that there is an ideal state operative in the mind, constituting the standard by which the actual is measured and judged. It is by cultivating this ideal, by seeking a high conception of the nature and destiny of the State, that loyal subjects are created and moulded. As they think of it in its moral character will they grow to love and revere it, and thus devote to its service the ripest powers of their minds, the holiest ardour of their hearts. It has been reserved for the democracy to scale those heights of devotion and patriotism; for the realisation of the true idea of the State is impossible save to those who have a direct voice in the framing of the laws by which they are governed. To such only can the "without" and the "within" be harmonised; can legislation express and articulate the law of conscience and reason. We have not achieved true Democracy as page 210 yet. We are a democracy only in name. Democracy is not triennial Parliaments, universal suffrage, and what not. All this is but machinery necessary to the exercise of the powers, the application of the principles which constitute its essence and life. What Mazzini so passionately said of one's country is profoundly true and will remain true to all time: "The true country is a community of free men and equals, bound together in fraternal concord to labour towards a common aim. Where the activity of a portion of the powers and faculties of the individual is either cancelled or dormant, where there is not a common principle recognised, accepted and developed by all, there is no true nation, no people; but only a fortuitous agglomeration of men whom circumstances have called together, and whom circumstances may again divide. Be your country your temple, God at the summit, a people of equals at the base. Accept no other formula, no other moral law, if you would not dishonour alike your country and yourselves. Let all secondary laws be but the gradual regulation of your existence by the progressive application of this supreme law. And in order that they may be such, it is necessary that all of you should aid in framing them. Laws framed only by a single fraction can never, in the very nature of things, be other than the mere expression of the thought, desires and aspirations of that fraction; the representation not of the country, but of a clan or zone of the country. The laws should be expressions of the universal aspiration and promote the universal good. They should be the pulsation of the heart of the nation. The entire nation should either directly or indirectly legislate. The true country is the idea to which it gives birth. It is the thought of love, the sense of communion which invites in one all the sons of that country."

The State then is the organised social relations of men with a view of realising the moral ideal. Put these two side by side. The Church the embodiment and articulation of religion as unfolded and realised in the person of Christ. The State the page 211 sphere wherein the conditions necessary to the realisation of morality are secured to all.

The true ideal relation of the Church to the State is the relation that exists between religion and morality. In the one the cardinal idea is God, in the other it is law. In the one life is moulded and directed by love, in the other by external restraints. The one is the sphere of freedom, the other is the sphere of authority. The function of the Church is to transform the lower by means of its loyalty to God through man into the higher, to make the law of the State the expression and articulation of the spirit and principle of religion.

W. A. Evans.

Say not the struggle nought availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in you smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in the main.

And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
But westward, look, the land is bright.

Arthur Hugh Clough.

Labour is the life of life. Ease is the way to disease. The highest life of an organ lies in the fullest discharge of its functions.

Sir Andrew Clark.