We can rely on the bishops – Anglican or Catholic – to do anything, except teach the Christian faith. The hierarchy of both churches have just had a good old go at the Government for its changes in the rules about benefits. Of course, the church has a responsibility to the poor which derives from the words of Jesus Christ Himself who, according to St Luke’s gospel, said: “Blessed are the poor.”

Jesus went even further and warned that those who do not feed the hungry, tend the sick and visit the prisoners will be in danger of hell fire. But the bishops are not keen on hell these days, seeing it as one of those silly old medieval dogmas which the super-duper, thoroughly modernised and come-of-age church has outgrown. They might be in for a nasty surprise.

But nowhere in the Gospels does Jesus say: “Behold, I give thee a new commandment: thou shalt go forth and tell the Government what to do.”

Christians are expected to do the job themselves, really do it, hands-on feeding the hungry, tending the sick and visiting the prisoners and captives. They are not commanded to sit in palaces giving orders, telling other people what they should be doing; still less turning themselves into bureaucrats and producing a relentless gusher of reports on social welfare, the inner city, housing, drug abuse and the banking industry. They are meant to put the faith into action.

That is, Christians should be Christians.

As St James wrote: “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.”

This is called charity – in New Testament Greek pronounced “agapay” and in Latin “caritas”. It is what common-or-garden, nonbureaucratic, unselfrighteous, faithful Christians have been doing since Jesus and St Paul first commanded it.

It was charity which founded hospitals, hospices, schools and universities. There is a saying, “cold as charity”. But true charity isn’t cold at all: it is one of the warmest, tenderest words in the New Testament and it is the opposite of bureaucratic state welfarism and a hell of a lot better than endlessly prattling about what the Government should be doing. For charity is not about distanced largesse, something impersonal and paid for out of taxation. It is about getting up close and personal, involved, not feeling-for but feeling with the needy person.

As Jesus put it, it is about loving your neighbour as yourself. Secular social welfarism regards the people it claims to help as cases, objects who have stuff done to them.

As first Frank Field (Labour) and then Iain Duncan Smith (Tory) told us, social welfarism demeans people and imprisons them in a cycle of deprivation.

There are families in England in which no one has worked for two, or even three, generations.

People are not helped, respected or dignified by being consigned to a world of idle dependency. Social welfarism treats its clients as invalids and invalidates them.

Charity, by contrast, gets alongside them.

Charity is not, like the bureaucrat, puffed up and self-regarding. Charity is kindness in action.

And so, acts of charity do not demean but instead are blessings alike to the giver and the receiver. Social welfarism disables, while charity enables. As St Paul wrote to the Christians at Corinth: “And now abideth faith, hope, charity; these three: but the greatest of these is charity.”