Church and Nation Quotes

“No one who is not a Christian in spirit can perform the Christian act; and the Sermon on the Mount is not a code of rules to be mechanically followed; it is the description of the life which any man will spontaneously lead when once the Spirit of Christ has taken complete possession of his heart.”
― William Temple, Church and Nation : The Bishop Paddock Lectures for 1914-15

“Pharisees—men who lived in the strength of a fellowship that had behind it the greatest religious tradition in all the world, but who, because they trusted more to their tradition than to the God who inspired it, were unable to recognise the still further call of God when it came to them.”
― William Temple, Church and Nation : The Bishop Paddock Lectures for 1914-15

“to lift a man by education from one social stratum to another is to expose him to a terrible temptation—the temptation to despise his own people.”
― William Temple, Church and Nation : The Bishop Paddock Lectures for 1914-15

“The first requirement of personality is always freedom—”
― William Temple, Church and Nation : The Bishop Paddock Lectures for 1914-15

“I am quite sure that the Communion is just the place where we need to be divided until our unity is real.”
― William Temple, Church and Nation : The Bishop Paddock Lectures for 1914-15

“In our worship we find for the most part what we expect to find.”
― William Temple, Church and Nation : The Bishop Paddock Lectures for 1914-15

“The first task of the Church is to inspire the State, which after all very largely consists of the same persons as itself, with the desire to combat the evil; and the second is to counteract the one great difficulty which the State experiences. When the State takes up such work as this, there is one thing which we all fear: "Officialism." What is "Officialism"? Simply lack of love; nothing else in the world. It consists in treating people as "cases," according to rules and red tape, instead of treating them as individuals;”
― William Temple, Church and Nation : The Bishop Paddock Lectures for 1914-15

“Liberty, in so far as it is of any value, always means self-control in both the senses of that term: in the sense that we are only controlled by ourselves, and also in the sense that by ourselves we are controlled, and that every part of our nature is subservient to the purpose to which our whole nature is given.”
― William Temple, Church and Nation : The Bishop Paddock Lectures for 1914-15