Leadership Quote by Charles Williams

Williams slips a blade between “the Church” as an institution and the “Divine Thing” that supposedly underwrites it. That odd, half-mythic phrase does a lot of work: it refuses the cozy sentimentality of “Jesus” or “God” and instead evokes something fierce, living, and not easily domesticated. The subtext is clear: whatever founded the Church was never naive about what church officers would become once they had titles, procedures, and a stake in their own legitimacy.

The line’s sly power comes from its syntax. “Does not seem, to judge by his comments…” reads like a dry editorial aside, a wry footnote smuggled into theology. Williams is basically saying: if you actually read the source text (the Gospels), the founder’s assessment of clergy is unsparing. Christ’s clashes with the Pharisees and religious authorities weren’t a minor subplot; they’re a repeated warning about how spiritual leadership curdles into status management, gatekeeping, and moral theater.

Context matters. Williams, a British editor writing in an era when institutional Christianity was losing cultural monopoly and modern bureaucracy was swallowing every sphere of life, is diagnosing a familiar failure mode: organizations protect themselves first, then call it doctrine. He isn’t anti-Church so much as anti-complacency. The Church may claim divine foundations, but the divine, in Williams’s telling, never mistook administrators for saints. The jab lands because it sounds like reluctant evidence, not a rant: the founder himself set expectations low.