Ternoc thought for a moment. "How to explain it? A great temple is basically a city within a city, with its own internal rules, rights, privileges, traditions, customs, possibly its own liturgical language, and its own armed forces. The latter are usually little more than temple guards and orders of paladins, not nearly enough to challenge the might of a king. Or a grand prince. Anyway, since a great temple is so large, it more or less forms its own self-contained society, which has its own way of running things, apart from the culture of the city as a whole."