Prelate & Prophet

Many Christians are convinced that the finest Christian leader thus far produced by the 20th Century was William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury when he died in 1944. His faith, courage, wisdom, humor, leadership, humility--and holiness--made him the rare combination of a prelate who was also a prophet. Those who knew Temple will never forget him. For those who did not know him, there is now a fine full-length portrait: Dean F. A. Iremonger's official biography, William Temple (Oxford University Press; 663 pages; 25 shillings).

Temple became the leader and symbol of the surge toward church unity. At one of the meetings that paved the way for the final, formal establishment of the World Council of Churches (TIME, Sept. 13), the disagreements were so sharp that it seemed humanly impossible to reconcile the conflicting views. Temple was presiding, with his usual unruffled skill. "How will this do?" he asked, and read a few scribbled sentences. There was an awed silence, broken by two voices, one conveying the grave congratulations of a European theologian and the other from a U.S. delegate who said "Archbishop, you tickle me pink."

"Six of the Best." The Christian Century's candid, peppery Charles Clayton Morrison observed: "If he had lived, Archbishop Temple would have been undisputed head of the World Council, which now has six co-presidents. You see, it takes six of the best men to equal one Archbishop Temple."

For more than 40 years, Temple's prime concern was to shorten the distance that separates most people from the church. He was a deep theologian who never lost the common touch. He became a socialist by 1906, when socialists were rare. In World War I, to his own vast amusement, he was put on a list of dangerous people compiled by Scotland Yard. In 1942, after he had led the Malvern Conference with its sweeping social program, Cartoonist David Low (no lover of prelates) drew him as a Samaritan among the super-godly.

He rose to the top of the traditionally conservative Church of England not through compromise or worldly wisdom but because his abilities simply could not be ignored. Those who doubted his rise to Primate thought he would be Prime Minister instead. An Oxford don at 22 after a double First, he became a headmaster at 28, bishop at 39, archbishop at 47, and the sparkplug of so many social, educational and spiritual reforms that his sudden death at 63 took away a man uniquely fitted to give religious leadership in the crucial first decade after World War II.

"Never Out of Breath." Britons in all walks of life learned to trust Temple for the same reason that church leaders of many creeds and countries did: everyone could be sure that whatever he proposed was based on carefully pondered Christian principle. He worked, preached and traveled on a scale that resembled John Wesley. The steady flow of his public meetings and services, of his private counsel and consolation, never let up. "It was all very breathless," said a colleague, "but he was never out of breath."

His ungirdled appetite made him as fat as St. Thomas Aquinas. He enjoyed telling of the time he weighed himself on scales which, instead of registering the weight, announced it vocally. When the archbishop got on, the scales cried: "One at a time, please."

Temple's power sprang from the fact that he saw every part of life, and every problem put to him, as part of an integrated universe which he could grasp as a personally integrated man, dedicated daily to God. His writing and preaching were designed to make religion relevant to everything--politics, economics, art and science.

He packed his thinking on peace and war, non-violence and violence, love and law, justice and coercion, into ten provocative words: "Christianity stands for the consecration, not the elimination, of force." Another sentence shows the originality, daring, and germinal nature of his theological thinking: "Christianity is the most avowedly materialist of all the great religions."

"We Peer Into Darkness." Temple's comment on St. John 1:5--"And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not"--exemplified the man:

"Imagine yourself standing on some headland in a dark night. At the foot of the headland is a lighthouse or beacon, not casting rays on every side, but throwing one bar of light through the darkness . . . Take any moment of history and you find light piercing unillumined darkness--now with reference to one phase of the purpose of God, now another. The company of those who stand in the beam of the light by which the path of true progress for that time is discerned is always small. Remember Wilberforce and the early Abolitionists; remember the twelve Apostles and the company gathered round them . . . We peer into darkness, and none can say with certainty what course the true progress of the future should follow . . . The redemption of man is part ... of a greater thing--the redemption, or conquest, of the universe. Till that be accomplished the darkness abides, pierced but unillumined by the beam of divine light. And the one great question for everyone is whether he will 'walk in darkness' or 'walk in light.' "

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