Quotes by "RH Tawney"

What we need is not truths which will serve us, but a truth which we may serve.

The question of the religious significance of that change of emphasis, and of the validity of the intellectual processes by which Luther reached his conclusions, is one for theologians. Its effects on social theory were staggering. Since salvation is bestowed by the operation of grace in the heart and by that alone, the whole fabric of organized religion, which had mediated between the individual soul and its Maker--divinely commissioned hierarchy, systematized activities, corporate institutions--drops away, as the blasphemous trivialities of a religion of works. The medieval conception of the social order, which had regarded it as a highly articulated organism of members contributing in their different degrees to a spiritual purpose, was shattered and differences which had been distinctions within a larger unity were now set in irreconcilable antagonism to each other. Grace no longer completed nature: it was the antithesis of it. Man’s actions as a member of society were no longer the extension of his life as a child of God; they were its negation. Secular interests ceased to possess, even remotely, a religious significance; they might compete with religion, but they could not enrich it. Detailed rules of conduct-- a Christian casuistry--are needless or objectionable; the Christian has a sufficient guide in the Bible and in his own conscience. In one sense, the distinction between the secular and the religious life vanished. Monasticism was, so to speak, secularized; all men sood henceforward on the same footing towards God; and that advance, which contead the germ of all subsequent revolutions, was so enormous that all else seems insignificant. In another sense, the distinction became more profound than ever before. For, though all might be sanctified, it was their inner life alone which could partake of sanctification. The world was divided into good and evil, light and darkness, spirit and matter. The division between them was absolute; no human effort could span the chasm.

Social institutions assume a character which may almost be called sacramental, for they are the outward and imperfect expression of a supreme spiritual reality. Like the celestial order, of which it is the dim reflection, society is stable, because it is straining upwards.

Those who seek God in isolation from their fellow men, unless trebly armed for the perils of the quest, are apt to find, not God, but a devil, whose countenance bears an embarrassing resemblance to their own.

The saints do not contemplate in order to know, but to love. And they love not for the sake of loving but for the love of Him that they love. It is because they are in love with God that they aspire to that union with God which love desires, loving themselves only for his sake. Their aim is not to exult in their own intelligence or nature and so abide in themselves: it is to do the will of Another and contribute to the good of Goodness. They do not seek for their soul. They lose it, they have it no more. If in entering into the mystery of divine sonship, in becoming somewhat of God himself they gain a transcendent personality, an independence and a liberty which nothing in this world can touch it is by forgetting all this so that not they but their Beloved lives in them.