In November 1868 a new Archbishop of Canterbury had to be appointed. Queen Victoria wanted Tait, the Bishop of London, but he was not the preferred candidate of the Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli. Disraeli, trying unsuccessfully to dissuade the Queen, wrote to her about Tait, that “there is in his idiosyncrasy a strange fund of enthusiasm, which ought never to be possessed by an Archbishop of Canterbury or a Prime Minister”. Disraeli found his political opponent, Gladstone, difficult because he was “an earnest man, severely religious and enthusiastic”. Enthusiasm was deemed to be a bad thing, denoting claims to special inspiration, to wild, emotional religion and to what today might be called religious fanaticism.

Words change their meaning, and their emotional weight “strain, crack, and sometimes break under the burden . . . slip, slide, perish, decay with imprecision, will not stay still” as T. S. Eliot put it.

Discrimination is a word which has suffered in our own day, as recent controversies make clear. We pass laws to outlaw discrimination, and this is applauded because discrimination means judging people or causes unfairly. Yet we applaud a discriminating person in art or matters of taste, contexts where it means to have a sensitive, wise and discerning judgment.

As human beings we are called to discern, choose and judge what is good and just and right, and to weigh up what is right in any particular situation. Recent controversy over gay adoption was in part setting a judgment about not acting against men and women because of their perceived sexual orientation, against a judgment that for human flourishing and wholeness it is good that a child has a mother and a father. Ethical debates about euthanasia and abortion are concerned with the right to end life, about how we die well, and the dignity of the human person, including unborn life.

The Christian tradition holds strongly to the worth and value of each human person. It knows also that as human beings we are desiring animals, and that our desires — “the natural instincts and affections implanted by God” — must be hallowed and directed aright. It speaks of our human condition as fallen or flawed. The violence, hurt and addiction that form so much of our daily reading in newspapers point to that condition which the Christian Church calls original sin, a magnetic field which distorts and warps our judgment. Nations and societies can be caught up in such distortion, as was the case in Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia and the addictive consumerism of much popular, Western culture. When St Paul cries out: “The good I would I do not, the evil I would not that I do,” and asks “Who is there to deliver me from this body of death?” he reflects a longing for salvation, for a transforming grace.

One of the great Prayer Book collects addresses God as the one “who alone can order the unruly wills and passions of sinful men”, and prays that “we may love what you command and desire what you promise”. The devices and desires of the human heart need to be set in order. Against the magnetic field of distorted desire, there must be set the greater and counterbalancing magnetic field of grace and goodness, which for Christians is the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life.

The Christian faith proclaims that we cannot pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, cannot find the way of wisdom and human flourishing without the grace and the love of God. To be loved is to know oneself valued, to know the love of God is to know the secret of eternal life, the only life that really matters. “In thy light shall we see light,” sings the psalmist. “Be you transformed by the renewing of your minds,”’ writes Paul. As Ash Wednesday comes next week, and Lent begins, we are called “to turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ”, to know our need of grace that we may have a right judgment in all things and so find in the stress and rush of life that enduring peace of God which passes all understanding.

Geoffrey Rowell is the Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe