CANTERBURY'S PART
By R. A. EDWARDS
IT seems to be the case that never in modem times have the thoughts of so many people turned towards Canterbury as they
are doing today. To be sure, part of the reason is the new appoint- ment ; the death of Dr. Temple was a very great national loss ; he was a man who towered above most of his contemporaries not only within but outside the Anglican Church. But we should be making a mistake were we to suppose that his death and the appointment of a successor is the sole cause of the anxiety ; eyes were very eagerly turned towards Canterbury before Dr. Temple occupied the chair of St. Augustine, and it is not simply his death that has increased the concern. Partly through the sheer course of modern history, the fact that Englishmen are all over the world, that English ideals of political and social life are everywhere reflected in con- temporary thinking, and that England has come, largely through the courage of 1940, to be thought of as the embodiment of man- kind's noblest hopes, but also at least partly because in simple fact the English Church too is almost everywhere, eyes look towards Canterbury hoping to see there the clearest expression not simply of England and its ideals, but of the fundamental faith that has inspired them.
It is, no doubt, true that the phrase " Christian England " has often been very much too lightly used ; it is notorious that com- paratively few of our people are in any real sense practising Christians, true that much of our social and industrial life could not withstand the challenge of Christian principles, and true also that much of our public policy falls short of what can be sincerely described as Christian ; but it is nevertheless also true that no other people in the modern world has been so deeply affected by Christian ideas and institutions as have the English, and at the centre of that far-reaching influence stands Canterbury. There are many historical reasons for this. Not even Rome can claim a line of more notable bishops who, by the force of their faith, their courage and their personal eminence, have impressed the world of their time, and it was a holder of the Roman see who in some annoyance in the Middle Ages described his brother of Canterbury as " the Pope of the West." When the history of our own age comes to be written it will probably be found that it was the patient wisdom of Randall Davidson which did most in recent years to place Canterbury once more in that position of immense responsibility and opportunity. Men say care- lessly that it was Temple who "placed Christianity again on the map" but Temple was the inheritor of a very great tradition ; he was undoubtedly bidding fair to take his place among the great archbishops ; but the line was there ; the place was waiting for him ; and if there had been no Temple, the eyes of the world would still at this crisis in human affairs have been looking towards Canter- bury. But for what are they looking?
When the first Christian missionaries made their way into Europe they found a world very ready for their message. The great Law, the more than competent civil administration, the fighting qualities of the legions, had combined to produce an imperial organisation that concealed widespread spiritual decay. Everywhere men had lost what sense they once had of the significance of life ; the old- Olympian deities were moribund or dead, and in their place there were the mystery cults which offered their devotees a fleeting experience of the immortal world, but had nothing worth while to say of how man must live out his life here and now ; the philosophers had little to add, for the Stoics had small influence upon the common run of men, and the Gnostics, who were rapidly acquiring influence, were intellectual theosophists, speculators about eternity and its mysteries, with no vital message for ordinary men. Christianity spoke directly to that widespread despair. It did very much more than offer Immortality through forgiveness and resurrection. It spoke emphati- :ally of how life should be lived ; its message was of a Way, which as in fact its first name ; it gave a fresh meaning to human life, !feting hope and happiness in place of the anodyne of lust which Paul described so accurately and so terribly in his letter to the Church in Rome. Gibbon's famous five causes of the growth of Christianity are very wide of the mark. The supreme cause was that its teachers spoke with divine authority to the direct need of their time, by restoring a meaning to human life and by teaching how man must live now if he would be in harmony with himself, with his neighbour and with God.
In the interval the Church has tended too often to deliver another message. It has concentrated upon right opinion, upon intellectual problems, upon creating and defending a coherent theology ; it has directed attention away from the world where men must work and love and suffer, to a withdrawn, tenuous realm of mystical experience and other-worldly aspiration ; it has concentrated upon itself, its officers, its services, even its possessions, and, broken into parts, each part has tended to forget the world of unhappy men and women while it champions itself against its rivals. We may agree that in each of these directions the Church has a proper function ; right opinion matters, but what is important is not that the heretic should die, but that the ordinary man should learn how the true theology may direct his life ; the contact with the other world is indeed an indispensable part of any true presentation of the Christian Faith, but if the contact is that of a Father Joseph the ordinary man may be forgiven if he fails to see its bearing upon his life ; Christianity must have its institutions, but what matters is that those institutions should make the Christian Way plain and available in the world's life. It was because people thought that in Temple there was an archbishop whose mind was fastened closely upon the Way, and who saw theology, the cultivation of the spirit and the institutions of the Church as various means towards the good life now, that they looked eagerly towards him, hoping to hear from him with increasing clarity the living voice of the Church declaring how men should live.
From the point of view of the Church the contemporary situation is not incomparable with that which confropted the first missionaries. For many years past the world's life has been moving at an ever- increasing pace towards social, political, economic and international disaster ; it was becoming plainer every day not only that the prosperous expansion of the past was over, but that it had concealed decay ; scientific materialism had come within measurable distance of extinguishing hope, and many of our self-appointed prophets spoke in accents of despair. It was an age of astounding mechanical achievement, but an age in which men had forgotten how or why to live. The war seems to have concentrated thought upon the urgency of the human problem, and therefore there is presented to Canterbury an unparalleled opportunity to recall the Church's prophetic function, and to speak plainly to the world not of a with- drawn pietism, or of a sectional ecclesiastical interest, but in down- right speech of how God meant men to live now with each other, speech of Christian justice and Christian mercy and the love of God. It was more than the personal stature of Temple that attracted attention towards him ; he was a man who had seen that the modern crisis demanded that the Church should again speak clearly of the Way, and therefore men looked to him for Christian leadership, but it was to Canterbury, and not simply to Dr. Temple, that they looked. The opportunity was not of Dr. Temple's creating, and it is there for Dr. Fisher to take.
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