(THE CHURCH AND POLITICS {1} [continued(4)])[4th April 1987]

[Redbook3:109-110][19870404:1821d](THE CHURCH AND POLITICS {1} [continued(4)])[4th April 1987]

.1821

[continued]

It's no good: whenever I try to criticise* this sort of political position, constructively, I end up feeling like a heel. I think this is because I know that I am unlikely to do everything I should, in response to the direct appeal which I call upon the Church to make to me, as I do not now; so if the Church's political lobbying had been successful (which it probably isn't), and if I am typical, a change for the worse could result, in the condition of the poor.

I am not suggesting that Church members as individuals should not lobby the Government and bring about changes by legislation. I suppose the basic problem is that all Government redistributive efforts involve coercion, and it is a fundamental principle of the Circles (as I see it) that what a Man does not do of his own decision, what he is forced to do, is no help to his own inner development. (Learning to cope with the unavoidable follows a willingness to learn to cope: it is the learning to cope that helps, not the unavoidable).

I am aware that some spiritual leaders require a pledge of obedience in order that the course shall be effective; so long as the disciple retains the ability simply to walk out, I should regard his position as free: not, if he doesn't. Conversely, although I maintain that Lord Denning** was utterly wrong when he said 'Be you never so high, the Law is above you' (although he may have had a point in a narrow legal sense), because each Individual retains the ultimate decision as to whether to obey the Law or not; nevertheless, given the battery of persuasive powers available to the Law, when the Law orders that a Man should do a thing, that Man is coerced to do it, in political terms he is forced by threats to do it, his freedom in Law not to do it is taken from him.

*[See last previous entry.]

**[Master of the Rolls in England & Wales (senior judge in the Court of Appeal.]

[Denning in 1977 appears to have been quoting Thomas Fuller (1654-1734), a physician and collector of aphorisms, although the saying has been attributed directly to Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634), Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, to whose words addressing King James I directly in the case of Nicholas Fuller (1607) “Quod Rex non debet esse sub homine, sed sub Deo et Lege” (“The King ought not to be under any man, but under God and the Law”) they are taken to refer. <20170930>]

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