Archives: Book Chapters

Some of the physical "evils" in the world are plainly inimical to human life and constitute a continual challenge to man’s vigilance and ingenuity. Man had made enormous strides in discovering the causes of disease, and is still fighting a long-drawn-out battle against such things as the incredibly minute viruses, and the apparently arbitrary cell-degeneration known as cancer. Of equal importance with these discoveries is the increasing knowledge of the influence of the mind upon the health or disease of the body. A vast amount of further experiment and correlation of experience is needed in this field. Before long more emphasis will be placed upon curing a disease by working from the inside out, so to speak, that is, by paying far more attention to the condition of the center which controls the functioning of that organic whole which we call the body. But again, though we may hope for many significant answers to our hows, we have no answer at all to our whys. Why, for example, should the virus of poliomyelitis exist at all? Or why indeed should there be disease, not merely in human beings but throughout the whole animal creation? Some of our forefathers were apparently satisfied to believe that the whole army of bacteria, germs and viruses which lie in wait to injure or destroy human life were the direct consequence of the sin of Adam. Of course it is possible to concede that the breaking of natural laws, as for instance those of health and hygiene, can incur natural penalties, but surely it surpasses even the most vivid imagination to suppose that one man’s disobedience to, and defiance of, his Creator, could actually create deadly organisms and viruses! Moreover, when it is known from the malformation of bone structure of animals which existed a very long time before man appeared on the earth that they also suffered from disease, the argument falls flat on its face. We still have no clue whatever as to why what we call "disease" should exist at all.

To connect human disease with human sin is an easy and obvious, but to my mind, misleading thing to do. It is altogether too facile an explanation and is contradicted by the evidence every day. We can probably all think of people who live good and unselfish lives yet suffer from disease. And we can also think of people who are thoroughly self-centered who are full of energy and have not had a day’s illness in their lives! Indeed it would appear that there is a monstrous unfairness about the incidence of physical disease I am well aware that certain kinds of functional disorder and even actual disease are being more and more frequently alleviated and cured by increasing the health of the human spirit, and I regard this as a most hopeful approach to the whole question of healing. But that does not alter the fact that, as one looks upon life dispassionately, those in robust health are for the most part extroverts who feel no particular concern for the world around them, while those who suffer from poor health and an assortment of diseases are often sensitive, conscientious people who are doing what they can to lessen the world’s sorrows.

Although we are quite in the dark about the why of human disease and suffering, ordinary observation can show us that the result of their occurrence is by no means necessarily evil. It is not in the sentimental novel only that the self-centered husband has been shocked back into responsibility, and even into a renewal of true love by the sickness of his wife. Similarly the illness of a child can and does renew and deepen the love between a husband and wife. And I can recall quite a number of occasions when visiting men in hospital who had never previously been ill in their lives, being told that such a forcible withdrawal from life came to be regarded far more as a friend than as an enemy. "It gives you a chance to think." "It makes me think about myself and what I’m in this life for." "It’s made me think about God and pray to him for the first time since I was a kid." "It’s opened my eyes to a new world -- I just didn’t realize that this sort of thing [that is, suffering and nursing care], was going on all the time." "I didn’t know what human kindness was till I came here [that is, into the hospital]." These are only a few typical remarks made to me in recent years, and they far outnumber those of the self-pitying or embittered. What is even more impressive and moving is the almost superhuman courage, hope and faith shown by the human spirit when the body is attacked by pain and disease. I am sure that disease is in itself evil, but I am left wondering how the courage, love and compassion it evokes would be produced in a world where everybody was perfectly healthy. Perhaps physical health is not of such paramount importance as our modern geocentric materialist would suppose.

This question of the physical evil in the world leads us naturally on to the question of moral evil, which poses at least as difficult a question, even though it is sometimes argued that they are but different manifestations of the same thing. It is customary nowadays to look upon evil as either the absence of good through ignorance or fear, or else as something which manifests itself through maladjustment of personality. It is not considered to have any objective reality. I believe this to be as fallacious a point of view as to look upon disease as the mere absence of health. It is certainly true that the healthy body, controlled by the healthy mind, will successfully resist all kinds of disease-producing organisms. But this does not prove that the organisms do not exist, for their objective existence can be demonstrated to anybody’s satisfaction. I believe there is a valid parallel here. The fact that moral evil is defeated by the spiritually healthy human being does not prove the non-existence of moral evil.

We have unfortunately grown accustomed to the monstrous inhumanities and cruelties of our modern world. Shocked as we have been by well attested stories of unspeakable tortures and degradation’s, by the mass exterminations of the gas chamber, and by the living death of such places as Belsen and Buchenwald, many people find it difficult to react with proper indignation to contemporary cruelties such as the Communist slave camps in Siberia, or the callous indifference of most people to the plight of millions of refugees. It is as though human sensibility has been dulled by repeated shocks, and has even come to accept the most revolting barbarity as an inescapable part of the modern human scene. At the moment of writing this book, for example, we know that the Communists hold as slave laborers in Siberia great numbers of wretched human beings who are treated with deliberate brutality. We know this; it has been reliably attested by several witnesses who have had the courage and good fortune to escape. But it has come to mean no more to us than, say, the fact that there are penguins in the Antarctic. In time of war we may perhaps say that men revert to the impulses of primitive savagery, and this may well be true. But no savage, however primitive, can show the cold, calculated ruthlessness of, for example, a Communist government. This is not a question of going back to the fight for survival, to "nature red in tooth and claw," but the appearance of something infinitely more radical and sinister. This is not "the growing pains of civilization," but the premeditated use of terror, degradation and vicious brutality.

How are we to begin to explain the existence of such evil? It is not the case of a few maladjusted personalities exhibiting antisocial tendencies; it is like some frightening moral infection which can basically affect thousands, if not millions, of people. But where does it come from? Admittedly I have drawn attention to large-scale suffering, but the question is just as difficult to answer when we come to the hatred, lust, malice, greed, pride and selfishness which mar the national, social and family life of our own country. It seems to me quite inadequate to regard the qualities which spoil relationships as mere absence of good, and for myself I am driven to the conclusion that there is such a thing as evil which can infect and distort human personality just as certainly as there are germs and viruses which attack and damage the physical body.

It is clear, at least to me, that people who worship and love the true God, and open their spirits to the active Spirit of Love, show to a greater or less degree the presence of good within them. It does not seem to me therefore unreasonable to suppose that those who worship and love the wrong things create conditions whereby they are actuated, and to some extent possessed, by "evil." In fact, although it may sound old-fashioned, I do not believe that we take the question of "evil" seriously enough in modern days, so that we are continually being disappointed, shocked or horrified by its manifestations. Although I am very far from subscribing to the doctrine of the total depravity of man, it does seem to me to have been proved within my own lifetime that the problem of human evil is not much affected by better education, better housing, higher wages, holidays with pay, and the National Health Service -- desirable as all these things may be for other good reasons. We need a much more realistic approach to the problem of human evil, and I am perfectly certain that no really effective way of dealing with it will be found apart from the rediscovery of true religion.

When we come to examine the life and teaching of Jesus Christ we may at first be surprised to find how little explanation he gives of the human situation. He does not argue about the existence of suffering or evil, still less does he seek "to justify God’s ways to man." He does not appear to waste time in arguing about the desirability or otherwise of the human situation. He accepts it and he concentrates upon the center to which everything else, however important or impressive, is merely peripheral. That center is, of course, the human heart, or perhaps we might be more particular and say that inner center of human personality, where the very springs of action are conceived. As we study the admittedly incomplete records of that unique life, we shall see that his particular genius lies in concentration upon what is really essential. The deep fundamental problems of human life are really neither intellectual nor technical; they are always in the last resort problems of human relationship. It would seem that Jesus (regarding him for the moment purely as a man of poetic insight) could quite easily disregard the non-essentials, the mere trappings and scenery of human life. His concern was with the quality of human living, and in his eyes aspects of our human life, which appear to us of pressing importance, were of little significance. It might indeed be fair to epitomize his whole attitude in his own famous words "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?"

Now this refusal to be influenced by non-essentials never meant in Christ’s life an indifferent pietism. For although it is plain from his life and teaching that he looked upon this life as a prelude to something infinitely more important, yet, where ever it was possible, he restored health of mind and body. He was deeply moved by the strains and distresses of men, by their hunger and thirst and weariness, and he was roused to passionate indignation by the exploitation of the weak. Indeed, he alone of all religious leaders of all time was bold enough to state, as we saw above (see Matthew 25, verses 31 to the end), that love of God must be expressed by love of man, even in his earthly and sordid distresses. For although Christianity is an incurably otherworldly religion and speaks unhesitatingly of sharing the timeless Life of God, it is also devastatingly practical and down to earth. It holds out the highest ideals and promises, and yet faces life with a downright and almost frightening realism. If we regard Christ seriously as God-become-man we shall find his reaction to the life around him extraordinarily illuminating. Yet he offers no explanation of the origin of evil or of human sin and suffering. No doubt he used the language of his own day it would be difficult to know what else he could have done -- but surely there can be no doubt that behind such expressions as "Satan," "the Evil One," "the Prince of this world," "Beelzebub" and "the Devil" there is recognition of the power of evil. His concern was not to explain how such a power came into existence, but to defeat it. It seems probable that we shall have to share this attitude and spend our energies not in discussing the origins of evil, but in defeating it, both in ourselves and in the world around us.

Now I venture to suggest at this point that we need resources outside ourselves to defeat this evil. So long as we cling to the idea that we live in a closed-world-system, the most we do is adjust and rearrange existing forces. But if it is true that spiritual energies of constructive good are really available in a dimension of which we know very little, surely we are very foolish to ignore them. We should know by now that "Satan cannot cast out Satan," and that although force may restrain evil it is powerless to transform it into good. We probably all know from experience that the only quality which has patience and strength enough to redeem either people or situations is the quality of outgoing love, the very thing of which we are all so lamentably short. If, again, we look at God-become-man we find that as a matter of course and of habit he opened his personality to God not merely to be sure that he was following the divine plan of action but to receive potent spiritual reinforcement for the overcoming of evil. If this was necessary for him we might sensibly conclude that it is even more necessary for us. And yet how few, even alas among professing Christians, deliberately and of set purpose draw upon the unseen spiritual resources of God? We are so infected by the prevailing atmosphere of thought, which assumes that nothing can enter our earthly lives from outside, that a great deal of what the New Testament takes for granted does not strike us as realistic or practical. Yet I would suggest that there are discoveries to be made here which would prove far more revolutionary in the solving of human problems than any purely physical marvels.

"If there is a God of Love," people have asked and are still asking, "how can he allow so much suffering in his creation, how can he permit natural disasters such as earthquakes, and how can we possibly reconcile the existence of evil with the idea of an all-wise, all-powerful, all-loving God?" What are commonly called the "problem of evil" and the "problem of pain" are inevitably the most serious problems which face anyone of intelligence and sensibility.

Let it be said straightaway that no one knows anything like the full explanation of, or the answer to, these problems. The most we can do is first to break the problems down into what can partially be answered and what cannot, and secondly, to suggest an attitude of mind which can be honestly held without the necessity for denying the existence of a God of Love. Anyone who writes on this, the hardest of all human problems, must write with humility. For although he may himself have experienced a little of the burden of human suffering, and although he may have observed a very great deal more in other people’s lives, he knows that there is no easy answer. If he has seen almost unbelievable courage and endurance and, what is even more moving, an unshakable conviction of the final goodness of God, he is bound to feel humble. He knows that, although he may write about the problem, there are countless thousands who could never write books but who in practice have met and solved the problem in a way that no words, however wise, could do.

Our first consideration should be to recognize that evil is inherent in the risky gift of free will. Naturally it is possible for the Creator to have made creatures who are invariably good, healthy, kind and virtuous. But if they had no chance of being anything else, if in other words, they had no free will, we can see, even with our limited intelligence, that such a creation would be no more than a race of characterless robots. It is really no good quarreling with the situation in which we find ourselves, and quite plainly that situation includes the power to choose. And it is obvious that this individual gift of being able to choose good or evil affects a far wider area of human life than that of one individual personality. The good that a man chooses to do, or the evil that a man chooses to do, have both immediate and long-term effects, and exert an influence, even spread an infection, of good or bad. Speaking generally, human life is so arranged that what we call "good" produces happiness, and what we call "evil" produces misery and suffering. Thus a good deal of human suffering can be directly traced to the evil choices of human beings. Sometimes this is perfectly obvious and direct -- a violent and cruel husband plainly causes suffering, fear and misery to his wife and children. Sometimes the evil is indirect -- the greed for money or power may make a businessman take decisions which bring great suffering to hundreds of people personally unknown to him, or the selfishness and greed of one generation may produce a bitter fruit in the next.

If we knew all the facts, and the effects, both short-term and long-term, of human selfishness and evil, a very large proportion of mankind’s miseries could be explained. But of course this in no way answers the questioner who asks, "Why doesn’t God stop evil and cruel men from causing so much suffering?" This is a very natural and understandable question, but how exactly could such intervention be arranged without interfering with the gift of personal choice? Are we to imagine the possessor of a cruel tongue to be struck dumb, the writer of irresponsible and harmful newspaper articles visited with writer’s cramp or the cruel and vindictive husband to find himself completely paralyzed? Even if we limit God’s intervention to the reinforcement of the voice of conscience, what can be done where conscience is disregarded or has been silenced through persistent suppression? The moment we begin to envisage such interventions, the whole structure of human free will is destroyed. Again, may I repeat that we may not approve of this terrifying free will being given to men at all, but it is one of those things which we are bound to accept. (It may be worth noting here that the whole point of real Christianity lies not in interference with the human power to choose but in producing a willing consent to choose good rather than evil.)

The next problem which must be squarely faced is the apparent flagrant injustice in the distribution of suffering. (I feel bound to use the word "apparent" because I do not believe in final injustice, as I hope to show later.) Put in its crudest form the question is simply, "Why should the innocent suffer and the wicked get away with it?" This is one of the oldest questions in the world, far older of course than the Old Testament book of Job, which makes some attempt to deal with it. It is we that even within the limits of this little life men do sometimes see virtue rewarded and wickedness punished. But unhappily for their sense of justice, this is by no means invariably the case. To all appearances the cruel men with hard faces have a much better time in this world than the good, the sensitive and the responsible. Now here again we come right up against the situation in which we find ourselves, and which we must to some degree accept. There can be nothing wrong with our desire for justice and there can be nothing but right in our desire to see evil restrained and exploitation cease. But if we are expecting a world, and blaming God for not supplying such a world, in which good is inevitably rewarded and evil automatically punished, we are merely crying for the moon. We are not living in such a situation, and indeed it is debatable whether adult virtue and courage could exist at all in such a kindergarten atmosphere. This life is unjust, in this life the innocent do suffer, and in this life hard conscienceless men do, to all appearances, "get away with it." These are hard facts and only to a limited degree can we alter them.

Frankly, I do not know who started the idea that if men serve God and live their lives to please him then he will protect them by special intervention from pain, suffering, misfortune and the persecution of evil men. We need look no further than the recorded life of Jesus Christ himself to see that even the most perfect human life does not secure such divine protection. It seems to me that a great deal of misunderstanding and mental suffering could be avoided if this erroneous idea were exposed and abandoned. How many people who fall sick say, either openly or to themselves, "Why should this happen to me?-- I’ve always lived a decent life." There are even people who feel that God has somehow broken his side of the bargain in allowing illness or misfortune to come upon them. But what is the bargain? If we regard the New Testament as our authority we shall find no such arrangement being offered to those who open their lives to the living Spirit of God. They are indeed guaranteed that nothing, not even the bitterest persecution, the worst misfortune or the death of the body, can do them any permanent harm or separate them from the love of God. They are promised that no circumstance of earthly life can defeat them in spirit and that the resources of God are always available for them. Further, they have the assurance that the ultimate purposes of God can never be defeated. But the idea that if a man pleases God then God will especially shield him belongs to the dim twilight of religion and not to Christianity at all.

But it helps enormously, indeed it makes a fundamental change in our thinking, if we look upon the life we lead upon this small planet as temporary, as only part of a whole, the quality and extent of which we can only very dimly perceive. For the purposes of this life the Creator has made certain conditions, but we have no reason to suppose that the same conditions apply in the stages of life men live after the death of the physical body. It is largely because modern man has lost the sense of what we might call the background of eternity that he sees everything from pleasure to pain in terms of this world only. Yet if he were seriously to accept the attitude of mind which prevails throughout the whole New Testament he might come to see that, although there are many things which appear to deny the love and justice of God in this life, he is quite literally in no position to judge the final issue. If he tries to do so, he might quite easily be as foolish as a man attempting to determine the pattern of a carpet from examination of a single thread, a picture from a tube of paint, or a book from a box of assorted type. At most he is only seeing the raw beginnings of something so enormous as to stagger the imagination.

Naturally, it is easy to pour scorn upon the conviction common to all true Christians that, as Paul put it, "the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us." It can be called "pie in the sky," the "opium of the people," and doubtless it has been used as an anodyne for much preventable human suffering and exploitation. But the true Christian does not so use this point of view; he uses it to stabilize his own thought. To my mind, and I say this most seriously, it would be impossible to believe in a God of love and justice if the horizon of man were limited to this life only. But the Christian’s faith does not rest in the here-and-now, and even at best he knows he is only seeing a little piece of the total picture. He knows, to put it crudely, that God’s love, mercy and justice must be infinitely greater than his own! Therefore, while he works on hopefully and cheerfully in this imperfect stage of existence, he never expects to find anything approaching the final working out of God’s purpose within the confines of life on this planet. He lives in the incomplete, the undeveloped, the inexplicable and the mysterious. He has enough light to live by, but he never claims to know all the answers, and throughout his life he is sustained by the conviction that he is moving toward the complete, the perfect and the ultimate reality. He is destined for light and enlightenment, for freedom from illusion, release from his present blindness to reality and from the inevitable limitations of his physical nature.

For many people natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, erupting volcanoes and all the other destructive forces of nature produce an insuperable obstacle to faith in a loving God. There is naturally no easy answer to explain such occurrences, but there are some considerations which make the problem a shade less difficult. A fertile valley in the United States of America was disastrously flooded, not for the first time, a few months before this book was written. Nevertheless, the commentator in the film showing scenes of this disaster remarked that, although the area had been flooded again and again, within a year or two of each catastrophe people would quickly forget and resettle in the same area. Similarly, people will live under the shadow of a volcano which is known to erupt violently and unpredictably from time to time. It may sound harsh to say so, but a certain proportion of human life could be saved if areas known to be dangerous for human habitation were avoided, or the proper steps to control the forces of nature were taken where this is possible. Man is mistaken if he thinks life upon this planet is automatically physically safe. But he has been given powers of body and mind and qualities of forethought and the ability to profit by experience. It would seem to be part of his job to learn to control the enormous energies of nature. We still have not the slightest idea why the situation should be as it is, but the blackness of what we call "natural disaster" is made far darker than it really is because of modern man’s obsession with physical death as the worst evil. Moreover, he will persist in viewing disaster through human eyes. It is only from the human point of view that the headline, 200 KILLED BY EARTHQUAKE -- 5000 HOMELESS, is more distressing than, FARMER KILLED BY LIGHTNING, WIDOW PROSTRATED BY GRIEF. The question, How could a God of Love allow so many to be killed and to suffer?" has really very little sense in it. We may need the impact of a large-scale piece of human suffering before we are properly impressed, but in the eyes of the sort of God whom Christians worship, the question of number and size is neither impressive nor significant, impossible as it may be for man to conceive the concern of God for the individual. To imagine that God looks upon physical death as many men do, or to think of him as impressed by numbers, violence or size, is simply to think of God as a magnified man -- a monstrously inadequate conception.

Now the man who has the attitude of mind which is rooted in eternity is neither deceived by the illusive glamours of this world nor unduly cast down by the unexplained suffering and the unsolved problems which confront him on all sides. This does not mean to say for one moment that the true Christian regards his passing through this life as a somewhat boring prelude to the glories that lie ahead. Indeed, as a follower of Christ, and as one whose life is aligned with the purpose of God, he is inevitably involved in the life of this world. He is committed to do all within his power to heal the world’s injuries by active and outgoing love, and the personal cost to himself is probably high. He is not less concerned than the materialist or the scientific humanist for the welfare of men, but more so; for he has glimpsed something of man’s value and potentiality in the eyes of God. But all the time he enjoys the enormous advantage of knowing that even the most hideous suffering exists only in this present state of affairs. He knows that death need be neither a disaster nor an enemy. He never suffers from the frustration of believing that this little world is any more than a visible beginning of some incalculably vast plan of the Creator. In short, he is much more likely to see life in proportion than the man who insists that life on this planet sets the final boundary of human experience.

It is a great help in facing life to believe that the final answers, the ultimate outcome, can never be settled in this particular phase of our existence. Of course, to the man without faith this appears to be both a piece of evasion of real issues in that it shelves difficult problems, and a piece of wishful thinking in that it believes in the ultimate goodness of God in some nebulous hereafter, even though the daily evidence of life denies such goodness and love. It is probably quite impossible to explain the Christian attitude to the thoroughgoing materialist, simply because the major premise which makes the whole position tenable and satisfactory is God, and the materialist denies such a person’s existence. But, speaking as one who did not arrive at his present convictions without a good deal of questing and questioning, I would assure the materialist that his position looks every bit as ridiculous and untenable to the man who has some small knowledge of God as the Christian position does to the materialist! The materialist appears to be speaking and arguing not only in ignorance of a whole dimension but with a colossal if unconscious arrogance. For he is really wanting to comprehend the total scheme of things with the mind of the Creator. He appears to forget that we are not yet "Old Boys" who can talk on familiar terms with the Headmaster! We are all very much still at school, and probably very junior members of the school at that. Further, although we may not be able to convince the materialist, the Christian does not adopt his supra-mundane point of view willfully, as a kind of escape from life’s hard realities. On the contrary, once he finds himself aligned with the vast and complex purpose of God the new point of view is born in him, and to go back and hold earth-limited views of the problems of pain and suffering appears as absurd as to believe that the world is flat. You cannot deny a new dimension once you have experienced it.

But while the Christian believes that God is a wholly reliable "shelf" on which unsolved problems and difficulties may for the time be safely deposited, he does not find himself in any way excused from attempting to relieve suffering and pain and to play his part in rebuilding the true order amid the chaos of earthly conditions. He is inspired by the recorded example of God-become-man who, without arguing about the "given-ness" of the human situation, set about healing men’s disorders in a most down-to-earth fashion. Yet the Christian is not relying merely on a nineteen-hundred-year-old demonstration for his day-to-day inspiration and reinforcement, but on a living contemporary Spirit. He is no longer envisaging "God" dwelling in unapproachable remoteness and making impossible demands of man whom he has placed in a difficult and perplexing condition. The living God is allied to man, is with him in the fray, not merely guiding and encouraging, but striving and suffering and triumphing with him, in him and through him. So that even though the center of gravity of the Christian’s faith is not really in this world at all, yet as far as this life is concerned God is always his contemporary.

At any given moment in history there is bound to be a large number of questions without any satisfactory answer. In the face of this, a great many people adopt an attitude of non-committal agnosticism. So long as their questions remain unanswered, they feel in no way morally bound to cooperate with such good purpose as they can discern. This is a characteristically modern attitude; for in past centuries men had to take for granted the fact that a great many of their hows and whys would certainly remain unanswered in their lifetime. Yet this did not prevent them from acting boldly and resolutely along the lines which they were convinced were right. But modern man, perhaps a little intoxicated with his success in answering the hows of life, will frequently not commit himself until his whys are answered -- in fact, until the Creator has taken him into his full confidence! Thus in dealing with the real human problems, such as the relief of suffering, the adjustment of personality, the release from fear and ignorance, the care of the physically or mentally defective or of the aged and infirm, there is nearly always a desperate shortage of living agents, and among their small number the cozily non-committed agnostic is very rarely to be found. I would suggest that since we are in a very junior position in the universe, men might do better to set their hands and hearts to tasks that cry out to be done, instead of posing everlasting whys before they are willing to work to alleviate human suffering and needs.

A further apparently legitimate criticism which is sometimes leveled against the Christian Faith is that it depends entirely upon an old-fashioned conception of God and upon the assumption that this little planet is the center of the whole universe. Modern astronomy has forced many to realize how frighteningly vast is the universe of which we have some knowledge; and that, for all we know, there may be countless other universes, at present beyond range of our means of observation. Many therefore find it inconceivable that the Mind behind this bewildering creation could reveal the essence of his character in a unique life lived on this almost negligible planet. We can sympathize with this difficulty. It is a great deal more acute today than when the psalmist meditated on the relative insignificance of man, and wrote, "When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained: what is man, that thou art mindful of him?" (Psalm 8: 3,4) -- simply because man’s scientific knowledge has been very greatly extended. But whatever mistakes the Christian Church may have made in past ages of intolerance, surely no modern Christian is concerned to maintain that the revelation of God given to this planet which we inhabit is necessarily the only revelation God has made in his whole universe! We simply do not know what creatures may exist elsewhere, and therefore we cannot begin even to guess at other kinds of revelation which the Creator may have given, or may plan to give, in other parts of his apparently limitless creation. In spite of the fragments of knowledge concerning the nature and size of the universe which science is continually gathering, we need constantly to remember that our primary concern is, whether we like it or not, with the earth on which we live. It is what God has revealed to us which is important to us, and surely our most pressing and most urgent problems are concerned with life on this planet. We are not God; the fact that we "cannot imagine" the Creator’s total purpose for the whole universe proves nothing except the limitation of our own capacity to comprehend. Further, although our minds are so made that they are necessarily impressed by almost unthinkable size, by energies at which the imagination boggles and by æons of time which we cannot in any real sense appreciate, there is no reason to suppose that outside the human mind such things are of any great significance.

A further objection which is sometimes made to the Christian Faith lies in its claim to uniqueness -- that it is in Christ alone that God has revealed his personality and character. The impartial observer knows that Christianity is only one of the world’s religions, and that for millions of people other faiths appear to suffice. Surely, it may be argued, if there is only one God the object of worship in all religions is the same, and it cannot greatly matter how that worship is given or what means are used to regulate human life in accordance with the divine purpose. Such criticism usually comes from those who know very little about either Christianity or other religions. Obviously there are certain basic goodnesses which are urged by any religious system, and equally obviously any religion which is sincerely believed in will have individual and social effects. The modern Christian, whatever follies the Church may have committed in the past, does not deny the value of all true religion. Shafts of divine light, of truths not discoverable by "scientific" means, have broken through upon the human scene through poets, philosophers and sages, as well as through the founders of various religions. This fact no intelligent modern Christian would minimize, but such fragments of revelation can, he believes, be only secondary to the planned personal focusing of God in the man Jesus Christ. Indeed the more seriously he takes his own faith, the less it seems to him that its overwhelming significance has so far been rightly appreciated. If, as the Christian believes, God has actually entered the human scene then there is an inescapable uniqueness about Christianity. If this is "the real thing" then in a sense there can be no compromise with anything less. This does not mean lack of sympathy with other religions, but it does mean a determination that all men shall know the fullest possible truth.

Another objection to the Christian Faith which is felt, if not expressed, by many intelligent people is that it appears to attract the immature and seeks to perpetuate their immaturity. By insisting that men "become like little children" and that they accept life at the hands of their "heavenly Father," Christ appears to be placing a premium upon childishness and tacitly disapproving of men’s growth toward more mature conceptions of the world. Now this objection needs careful and honest answering. It is perfectly true that there is a divine simplicity about Christ’s teaching which is more readily grasped by the uncomplicated than by those whose minds have become so "cultured," "conditioned" and "educated" that they are blind to the prime conditions of human life upon this planet. Therefore, Christ says in effect, if men are to grasp the purpose of God they must begin again to learn as children. Now it is inconceivable that the One who was God-become-man should deprecate the pursuit of truth or despise human knowledge; and it is equally unthinkable that he wished to inaugurate a movement limited to members of low intelligence! Surely the force of his remarks is that there must be a return to humility in the God-man relationship before human knowledge and the acquisition of truth have any real meaning. A moment’s reflection will show us that there is a fundamental difference in the mental attitude of the learned man whose faith is in humanity and that of the learned man whose basic faith is in God as Creator and in man as God’s creation. Jesus is concerned to establish the fact that compared with the immensely complex wisdom of God we are children, and that until we accept that fact with humility our knowledge will either be a burden to us or may lead us further and further from essential truth. It is true that some Christians are childish, and that some remain in a state of arrested development. It is even true that some Christians are finding in God a "father-substitute" and seeking to perpetuate their own dependent childhood. But that is not true of the Personality of Christ or of any mature or effective Christian from Paul onward. Nevertheless, I believe that Jesus was perfectly right in insisting that compared with God we are dependent, incomplete and liable to all the mistakes of childhood; that is one of the given facts of the human situation, and the wise man recognizes its truth.

Another stumbling block of the Christian Faith which presents itself in various forms to the modern scientific temper of mind is that the truth of such faith is not susceptible to scientific "proof." I must confess I often wonder what sort of proof the scientifically-minded are asking Christians to produce. Let us freely admit that organized Christianity has made tragic and repeated mistakes. We could go further and say that in some centuries and in some countries the Church has borne only the slightest resemblance to the life and teaching of its Founder. But if we look away from the failures and consider the effect on character and personality of a genuine Christian faith, surely we are presented with something very impressive. We have already mentioned the zeal and vigor of the early Christians and the undoubted historical fact that the direction and quality of people’s lives were dramatically changed in New Testament days. But if we skip the centuries for the moment and come to modern times, there is plenty of evidence of a similar faith producing a similar effect. Within my own experience I know scores of people to whom God has become a reality through their intelligent acceptance of the Christian Faith, and who know experimentally that the resources of God are available to sustain and invigorate human spiritual life.

Now if, as I have suggested, Jesus Christ came to inaugurate a new way of constructive living, it is obvious from what we know of human nature and of the human situation generally that there will be a very considerable pull back to easier, safer, and more comfortable ways of living. The small-scale and large-scale failures of Christians down the centuries -- and they are many and grievous -- are no indication at all as to what the Christian Faith, honestly received in heart and mind, can achieve. And it is quite unrealistic to judge the validity of the Christian Faith by assuming that such European countries as Britain, France or Germany are "Christian." For various reasons, not least I think because men and women of influence have failed to take the Christian revelation seriously, the actual number of convinced and active Christians is, even today, quite a small minority. If we are looking for "scientific proof," then, of the truth of the Christian Faith, let us look at genuine Christians and not at the actions of any nation which is only nominally Christian, nor at any Church which has again and again acted in a spirit completely contrary to that of its Founder.

But by far the most serious criticism comes from those who would sincerely like to believe the truth of Christianity but find the very nature of life itself appears to deny it. The idea of God as a loving heavenly Father, who marks the fall of every sparrow, appears to break down in the complex stresses, disasters, inhumanities and horrors of modern life. There appears to be a certain winsome simplicity about the Christian view of life which has to be reluctantly discarded when we grow up and face both life and people as they are. I believe there are many people to whom the teachings of Christ are true in the sense that a vision or an ideal is true. It is with real regret that they see the vision and ideal daily destroyed by man’s greed, inhumanity and fear. I believe that such people are wrong. If they were to return to study the gospels again, they would find no evading of the issues of human exploitation, injustice and persecution, no avoidance of life’s inequalities, injustices, evils and disasters. But I understand their unwilling discarding of the Christian Faith -- for the problem of human suffering and evil is without any doubt, for most people, the greatest barrier to belief. And while no one can hope to solve it satisfactorily and completely there are several considerations which should be carefully examined, by which I believe it is not impossible to see life fairly and squarely, and at the same time to be an honest Christian. But for such considerations, we must have at least two separate chapters.

A great many criticisms of the Christian Faith, as has already been suggested, are not valid criticisms at all. The critics have never taken the trouble to study what the Faith really stands for, and in most cases have certainly never studied the relevant documents, namely, the books of the New Testament, with their adult intelligence. For example, it is only too easy to imagine Christian living as a soft, meek-and-mild, head-in-the-clouds avoidance of reality, and therefore to pour scorn upon it. But no one could seriously read the essential message of the gospels or study the lives of the early Christians without seeing that living according to the plan of God calls for the highest courage, and makes the most strenuous demands on the human spirit. Again, it is, alas, still possible for otherwise intelligent people to jeer at Christianity as a "pie-in-the-sky" religion which has little or no contact with day-to-day life. But could anything be more devastatingly practical than the way of living outlined by Jesus, and followed since by all kinds and conditions of people? Could sane people really study the records of such men as Paul and Luke, and say that theirs was an escapist religion? Or, for that matter, could anyone read of what Christians are doing today to combat fear, ignorance and disease in the dark places of the earth, and still say that a Faith which impels them to do such things is either a drug to their sensibilities or a means of escape? It is not worth trying to answer the criticisms of those who have neither taken the trouble to find out what is involved in embarking on this way of living, nor even to observe the lives of those who have followed it faithfully.

Nevertheless, quite apart from the ill informed attacks upon something which never was the Christian Faith, there are some legitimate criticisms, made by sane and thoughtful people, which must be considered. For example, there are those who are filled with admiration for Christ’s demonstrated way of self-giving love, and of his personal non-resistance to the forces of evil. But in practice they may have serious doubts about the efficacy of such methods. Here we need to do some careful thinking, for many of the current ideas of Christ are not true to the character revealed in the gospels. In other words we have to see with clearer eyes what love in action really entails. While it is true that Jesus offered no resistance to physical attacks against himself, his love did not prevent him from using the most aggressive and blistering invective against those who thought they held a "corner" in religion. For all his loving-kindness, he did not hesitate to say that a man who led a little child astray would be better off dead. He roundly declared that such notorious evil cities as Sodom and Gomorrah would fare better in the judgment than towns which rejected the living truth when it was before their eyes. He was no verbal sentimentalist; he was not prepared to gratify King Herod’s whim to see him "perform," but bluntly called him a fox. He was moved to violent physical action by the combination of irreverence and black-marketeering which was corrupting what was meant to be the center of worship -- the Temple in Jerusalem. Thus we must not oversimplify the issue and say that in a given situation the attitude of Christian love must always be that of meek acceptance and the patient smile. The schoolmaster in charge of forty or so tough adolescents in one of our big cities cannot mediate the love of God without its sternness. It would indeed become impossible for a policeman, a detective or, shall we say, an inspector of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children to be a true Christian at all if our concept of the way of love were limited to that of passive acceptance or non-resistance of evil.

Now here we strike one of the really fundamental problems of the way of love, a problem of which not every clergyman and minister appears to be aware. It is a fine and moving thing to advocate the way of patient love from the pulpit on Sunday, but it is quite a different thing to apply that love in the complex situations which arise every day in the shop, the office, the garage, the workshop, the laboratory and the factory. For the Christian is not merely concerned about himself; indeed he may rightly feel that in following his Master’s example he may have to accept as patiently and as good-humoredly as he can anything from a personal slight to sheer injustice as far as he is concerned. But he is not only concerned with himself, and that is just where the task of interpreting the way of love becomes difficult. Is the Christian to stand wordlessly by while someone else is bullied or unjustly treated? Is the Christian to say nothing when corrupting suggestions are made? Is the Christian to give silent assent to practices which he knows are dishonest? It is here, in the very stuff of life, that men and women so frequently and so wistfully abandon their dream of being "loving," to all men. Surely much more thought and honest discussion between Christians is needed on this point, as well as a more realistic appraisal of the actual demonstrated methods of Jesus. And we have to admit that it is just here, in the painful issues of actual human relationships, that clergy and ministers have sometimes been unable to give sound advice.

As soon as we begin to study in earnest the recorded actions of Christ, we cannot help being struck by his extraordinarily varied approach in dealing with different people. It is immediately apparent that no rule of thumb is applied, but that the purpose of constructive love is very flexible in the face of human complexities of character. Thus, one person may best respond to the most uncompromising challenge, while another needs patient encouragement. One is told that his life already approximates in pattern to what God is wanting him to be; but another may be told bluntly that despite all his religious profession he is at heart a "child of evil." It is only when we detach "texts of Scripture" that there are apparent contradictions in the sayings of Christ. Once we grasp the underlying principle of love in action touching human lives in various states of awareness and development, we can begin to understand why so many different things were said to so many different people.

Now if we turn from the life of Christ to our ordinary experience of people, most of us would probably agree that there are certain types of men and women who need to be shocked or jolted out of their self-love and complacency before they can begin to see and appreciate what we and constructive love is trying to do. It is impossible, for example, for the schoolmaster to lead his pupils into the appreciation of what is good and true and beautiful, unless he has first established discipline. Those who have been most successful in rebuilding the character of juvenile delinquents know that their work would be impossible without love, but that such love must be a stem love, particularly at the beginning. If Christian love is supposed to be "doormat-like" in its meekness and gentleness, in many existing human situations it does not have a chance to get started at all. Now these words are far from being an argument for what was once called "muscular Christianity," but they are a plea for an honest examination of real situations. The need to use physical force, the need to bring people slap up against the consequence of their own wrong-doing, and sometimes the need to deflate them drastically are undoubtedly called for by certain human situations, but as methods they are only part of a much bigger whole. Such means may make it possible for true concern to be shown and for reformation to begin. But the actual constructive work of changing a situation or reforming a character can only be achieved by understanding and love.

With such considerations in mind we begin to see that the scathing denunciations of religious leaders, which are quite a prominent part of Jesus’ recorded sayings, belong only to the first part of the process of love. Christ needed to use violent methods to crack the armor of complacency. (And it is not always remembered that such attacks did not invariably result in increased hostility. Some at least must have had their spirits stabbed broad awake by such aggression, for we read in Acts 6:7 that "a great company of the priests were obedient to the faith.") If therefore as Christians we feel obliged to use the reprimand, the argumentum ad hominem, or even physical restraint, we must realize all the time that such things are only a means to an end; by themselves they are both incomplete and ineffectual. They can do no more than provide the proper conditions for the constructive patient work of love. The schoolmaster’s work of establishing discipline is only a prelude to the positive self-giving task of real teaching. The policeman’s arrest of the wrong-doer is only the prelude to the patient reformation of character. Christ’s apparently merciless attacks upon complacency were no more than the initial stage of the work of God’s Spirit upon the personalities of the men behind the façade.

Now if we regard all real religions as attempts to get at a special kind of truth to provide some answer to man’s intuitions about his own nature, we shall, I believe, find that what we know as "Christianity" comprehends, develops and fulfills all that at heart we hold to be true. In a way that we should not have guessed, or indeed planned, God has visited this planet, and we can do no thinking or philosophizing, nor can we deal with any human problem unless we take this fact into our serious calculation. It is perfectly true that the most convinced believer in God’s focusing of himself in Christ does not "know all the answers." But at least he has enough true light by which to live, and he has powerful and indeed exciting clues to the meaning and purpose of life and to man’s ultimate destiny. In order to make this clear I will mention some of the unique truths with which Christianity presents us.

1. With the coming of Christ a completely new God-man relationship came into being, which is not found in any other religion. Man enjoys a new value, a new dignity and new potentialities, because God became a human being. At the same time, man’s conception of God is revolutionized by the thought that the Spirit of Wisdom, Love and Power behind all that we know, and all that we do not know, reduced himself to the stature of a man.

2. It is not always realized how closely the life and teaching of Jesus links the life of man with the life of God. Two examples from the recorded sayings of Jesus will perhaps serve to illustrate this:

(a) A fundamental problem of all religions is the problem of "forgiveness." Man sins and fails, despairs and loses faith, and yet he must somehow be reconciled morally and spiritually with the absolute perfection of God. Only God can resolve this sin-guilt-suffering-death complex, and Christians believe, however their interpretations may vary, that "God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself" But quite apart from this act of reconciliation it is most important to realize that Jesus declared categorically that reconciliation with God is an impossibility without reconciliation with man. He taught, "if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses" (Matthew 6:15). We can hardly overestimate the significance of this statement, or of the general tenor of Jesus’ teaching, which would not allow any divorce between love of God and love of man. We may perhaps wish the situation to be otherwise, but as far as we are concerned this is one of the conditions, definite and inexorable, by which we have to live.

(b) As far as the records show, Jesus gave only one parable of the final judgment which all men face after the probation of this life. The criterion is neither religion, nor orthodoxy, nor respectability, but the way in which man has treated man. (See Matthew 25, verses 31 to the end.) In this altogether revolutionary way of looking at things, which is unique to Christianity, Jesus deliberately and precisely identifies man’s treatment of himself with man’s treatment of man.

Here surely is the true humanism. Because God has become man, all men are at least potentially sons of God. It automatically becomes a serious offense to injure or exploit other people, not because of some vague humanist values but because God has done man the unspeakable honor of identifying himself with the human race.

3. Now although Christianity leads human thoughts and aspirations far beyond the limitations of this present stage of existence, and is thus in a sense an other-worldly religion, it is also incurably earthly. Men may have their visions, but they are required to work them out in the everyday stuff of human situations. There is no room for mystical escapism; we find God-become-man himself involved in the messes and miseries of the human situation and requiring his followers to do the same. A man whose life is united with the timeless life of God through sincere and intelligent faith in Christ becomes strongly aware of his eternal destiny, and all kinds of inexpressible hopes for the distant future begin to stir in his mind. But he has to learn and to act in this present world, accepting good-humoredly his physical limitations and a fair degree of spiritual blindness. He has to express what is spiritually true in the context of ordinary human relationships and ordinary human problems.

4. As might be expected from a religion which is not the product of any particular human way of thinking but the result of a planned revelation, Christianity is of universal application. It cuts across barriers of class, color and sex, and has a message of equal importance to the wise and to the foolish. It is perfectly possible for men or women of any race, color or culture to be wholehearted Christians. And while Christianity’s highest and deepest implications may tax the brains and moral courage of the most fully developed personalities, they can also be accepted by the relatively simple and ungifted.

One of the reasons why it is imperative for us moderns to get back to essential Christianity is that we may realize afresh the revolutionary character of its message. We have forgotten its devastating disregard, or even reversal, of current worldly values, and have allowed what we call "Western civilization" or "the American way of life" to become more or less God-fearing substitutes for the real thing. For when God made his strange invasion of the life of this planet, the little section of humanity into which he came was obsessed as much as we are today with the importance of such things as power, privilege, success and wealth. By revealing reality, by declaring the Kingdom of God, God-become-man undermined or exposed these false values. He taught, and his teaching is as difficult to follow now as it was then, that what is apparently happening may bear little or no relation to what is really happening. The reality, according to him, is the establishment and growth of a Kingdom of inner loyalty which transcends all human barriers. Therefore, the realization of the existence of this Kingdom, working for its expansion, living according to its principles, and, if necessary, dying for it, is the real significance of man s temporary existence upon the earth. Jesus taught, and demonstrated in person, that the very things which the world values most highly are irrelevant and ineffectual in the dimension of permanent reality. He neither denied the existing world nor despaired of its inhabitants, but by setting up an entirely different standard he showed the way of constructive human living. He showed men how they need not be overinvolved with this world, how they need be neither deluded by its glamours, nor confined by its limitations.

It is particularly interesting to notice that he who was born a Jew cut fearlessly across the fierce Jewish prejudices of his day. It is, for example, well worth while studying his treatment of women and of the underprivileged. Quite as remarkable is his habit of being unimpressed by what was, and is still in some quarters, regarded as a sign of God’s favor and the peak of human achievement -- the possession of property and riches. It is because the teaching of Christ (which I believe to be the truth breaking through into a world of false values) is at once so realistic, so disturbing and so revolutionary, that we need to go back to it with adult minds and hearts.

The moment the truth dawns upon us that the purpose of God’s visit to this planet was not to establish another religion but to reveal the reality behind the appearance of things, we see what I believe to be another unique feature of the Christian Faith -- its utter inescapability. Its principles and laws do not merely apply to religion and the religious way of life, they apply to life itself, wherever and whenever it is lived. For Christianity, although it is a religion in the sense that it links the life of man with the Life of God, is far more than one of the world’s great faiths: it is the revelation of the way of true living. Since, unless we live as hermits, we are all to a greater or less extent bound up with each other, we cannot escape behaving toward people or treating people in one way or another. And because Christ has plainly declared that the way in which we treat people is a mirror-image of the way in which we treat God, the most ardent atheist or thoroughgoing agnostic can no more escape from Christianity than he can escape from life itself. You cannot contract out of life, and since God has personally visited the planet, you cannot contract out of the reality which underlies the business of human living. To me at least this is not a "religious" matter at all; it has not necessarily anything to do with going to church, or praying, or reading the Bible, or even with believing in God. It is a matter of the quality of our living, and God’s assessment of that no one can ultimately escape.

It is taken for granted in the recorded teaching of Jesus (and in the New Testament generally) that this life is lived against a background of what can literally be translated as "the Life of the Ages." The present business of living is merely a prelude, acted in the time-and-space setup on this planet, to life in another dimension where present limitations do not obtain. It is probably impossible to describe the next stage of existence in earthly terms, and it would be childish to take literally the picture-language of the New Testament writers who make some attempt to hint at its unimaginable splendors and possibilities. But the teaching of Christ is that the ultimate destiny of human beings, as far as we can at present comprehend it, is not extinction or absorption into the Infinite, but the full development, the bringing to maturity, of sons of God. For all we know, there lie ahead of us activities and responsibilities far beyond our present dreams, but at least it is clear that what we do in this present life is a significant factor in determining our status in the next. It is unwise to press parables too literally, but the general tenor of the parables of Jesus emphasizes man’s moral responsibility in the here-and-now, the certainty of life persisting beyond physical death, and the equal certainty of his continued cooperation with the joyful purpose of God -- or his exclusion from it. Therefore, although Jesus would be the last person to use fear as a moral weapon (except in the case of the desperately self-complacent), he did teach that life should be lived with a due sense of awe and responsibility. I believe he did this not merely because of man’s short- or long-term effect upon others, but because of his destiny in the dimension which follows what we call "death."

Now this background of "eternity" is absolutely essential to any reasonable belief in God. Without it the glaring injustices, the inexplicable tragedies and the unsolved problems of this life make nonsense of the idea of a loving God. But if we have here only the preparatory stage, the first working-over of the raw material, the significant beginnings but not the final endings of a vast purpose, we can accept life with a much better grace. We are no longer tortured by the dreadful limitations of man’s life on this planet, and while as lovers of God and lovers of man, we are bound to do all that we can to spread the invisible Kingdom here on earth, we know that both the foundation and the fulfillment of that Kingdom lie beyond the confines of our present situation. Why this should be so we simply do not know. Indeed, it is only one of the hundreds of known facts about human life which we must accept with a proper and reverent agnosticism.

The reason why I have said such things as, "Forget about the churches for the moment," is simply because I think that an entirely new, unprejudiced grasp of the God-man relation is essential for our generation. Experience has shown that such words as "Christianity" or "religion" or "church" already have certain stereotyped associations in some people’s minds. This "conditioning" is frequently quite enough to insulate them from the shock of what early Christians believed -- that God had visited this planet, that he had joined mankind permanently to himself; that he was no longer the remote and extraneous Power, but the Spirit who was their vigorous, intimate contemporary in the business of living. But it must be understood that by this insistence on a direct return to the great Act of God on which Christianity is founded, I am by no means implying that all modern churches have lost their vision or reduced the revolutionary Good News to dull orthodoxy. I am quite sure this is not so, but I am equally sure that since modern man, for various reasons, is almost completely out of touch with the life and activity of the alert contemporary Church, he must be urged to go back and consider the act of divine initiative on which all Christian conceptions finally rest, before he can fairly observe any contemporary Church.

If we allow our adult intelligence and imagination to consider such a situation as at least possible, the value and significance of the Creator’s visit to this planet become hard to exaggerate. We should have certain and reliable information about the character and personality of God, about the purpose and meaning of this life, about values and principles by which man can live usefully and happily, and about physical death and what lies beyond it. We should learn something of the underlying purpose beneath the shifting human scene, and how we could cooperate with it; we should learn how we could make the best of this limited imperfect world and how men could best prepare themselves for the next stage of their existence. In fact, the more we think about it the more valuable would be the information which we could obtain from the Creator if he focused himself in a human being.

Naturally we find ourselves wishing that such a person could be alive and accessible to our own age, prepared to answer our innumerable questions and solve our bewildering modern complexities! We might think it desirable that such an incarnation of the divine should appear in human life at least once a century, but the moment we begin to indulge in speculation like that we are falling into a line of thinking which leads nowhere. And even if we do come to accept as historic fact this planned focusing of God, it is plain that many of our eager modern questions will not receive the kind of detailed answer we might expect. A life lived for a mere thirty years in a poor occupied territory, itself of small account within the huge Roman Empire, would seem at first sight to be so narrow in outlook and hedged in by circumstance as to provide very little that is valuable for our modern perplexities. What is more, when this unique event took place, hardly anyone knew what was happening, and from the modern point of view a most maddeningly incomplete biographical record survives. Traditional piety and reverence have often made men reluctant to admit the paucity of information. In the recorded life of Jesus not a word has been preserved, for example, about his years of adolescence and early manhood. Yet these are times of painful and difficult adjustment for many human beings, and it might well be thought that a divine example would have been a help to many. Again, since Jesus was unmarried and was executed while still a young man, we are provided with no divine exemplar for the good marriage, for the successful coping with the problems of middle age, or for the gracious acceptance of the closing phases of earthly life.

But perhaps we are looking for the wrong things. Perhaps what we should look for is not so much a perfect pattern of living for every human age-group, but a revelation of truth which will illuminate the heart and center of human life and give it a new significance and purpose. Perhaps we should be looking not for detailed answers to our many questions but the authoritative statement of the principles which govern life beneath the ebb and flow of human circumstance. Perhaps the information which we so earnestly seek will be both timeless and of universal application. Perhaps we shall to some extent be taken into the Creator’s confidence, and yet handed back a great deal more of responsibility for decision than we bargained for!

I do not myself believe that anyone who studies with an open mind the records which we have of the life of God-become-man is likely to be disappointed. He may be surprised, mystified, or even taken out of his depth. The information he receives and the total impact of the personality whose life is recorded in the gospels may astonish and disturb him; it may even lead him to look at life from an entirely different point of view. It is only the man who relies on some sentimental recollection of gentle Jesus, meek and mild, who in later years discards what he thinks is the Christian Faith. In my experience I have never known a man to make an adult study of this extraordinary life and remain wholly in the dark.

When, therefore, we do examine these records with serious attention, we do well to remind ourselves that the setting is, in a sense, unimportant. To my mind it will not necessarily help us very much if we study Palestinian customs or the Jewish religious system. It is far more important that we should realize that we are seeing God living life on human terms; God, in Dorothy Sayers’s memorable phrase, "taking His own medicine." We are reading about something which had never happened before in the life of this world, and we can hardly expect the writers of the first century A.D. fully to grasp the significance of what they are describing. I have grown quite convinced of the substantial accuracy of their writing, but I cannot help sensing, beyond what was written, an actual awe-inspiring event, whose full implications we are only now beginning to understand. This may seem a strange and even arrogant statement to make, but what I am trying to say is that while the writers of the New Testament could hardly find words strong enough to express the certainty of their belief in Christ, the Son of God, yet their historic closeness to him and their very limited mental, and even geographical, horizons were bound to restrict their full appreciation of what had happened.

Within their limits of knowledge and experience there can be no doubt that the early Christians lived with sure knowledge of the living and contemporary God. And sometimes they showed the most remarkably inspired vision. Men like Paul could see the unlimited potentialities of the new situation which God had created. He could write such amazing things as these:

"Everything belongs to you! Paul, Apollos or Cephas; the world, life, death, the present or the future, everything is yours! For you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God! " (I Corinthians 3:21-23)

"All of you who were baptized ‘into’ Christ have put on the family likeness of Christ. Gone is the distinction between Jew and Greek, slave and free man, male and female -- you are all one in Christ Jesus!" (Galatians 3: 27, 28)

"For God has allowed us to know the secret of his plan, and it is this: he purposes in his sovereign will that all human history shall be consummated in Christ, that everything that exists in Heaven or earth shall find its perfection and fulfillment in him. And here is the staggering thing -- that in all which will one day belong to him we have been promised a share . . . so that we, as the first to put our confidence in Christ, may bring praise to his glory!" (Ephesians 1:9-12 )

"Now Christ is the visible expression of the invisible God. He existed before creation began, for it was through him that everything was made, whether spiritual or material, seen or unseen. . . . He is both the first principle and the upholding principle of the whole scheme of creation." (Colossians 1:15-17)

"In my opinion whatever we may have to go through now is less than nothing compared with the magnificent future God has planned for us. The whole creation is on tiptoe to see the wonderful sight of the sons of God coming into their own. The world of creation cannot as yet see reality, not because it chooses to be blind, but because in God’s purpose it has been so limited --yet it has been given hope. And the hope is that in the end the whole of created life will be rescued from the tyranny of change and decay, and have its share in that magnificent liberty which can only belong to the children of God!" (Romans 8: 18-21)

Nevertheless, despite the wonder of this prophetic vision, as we read the New Testament we may sometimes be conscious of a vast and timeless energy confined within the thought-forms and restricted knowledge of the first century A.D. Today the experience, knowledge and responsibility of every thinking man is very much greater than that of most of the men of New Testament days. But what changed and inspired those men, what gave them daring, hope, patience and self-giving love is quite timeless. There is no real reason to suppose that we cannot tap the resources of God just as effectively as they did -- no real reason except our modern insulations! If we could but see it, God is inevitably contemporary.

The Resurrection of Jesus is plainly the crux of the Christian Faith. I must therefore remind the reader of some important points in the issue.

1. Those who have taken the trouble to study the evidence closely and exhaustively have frequently reached the conclusion that the events described, somewhat disjointedly in the gospel narratives, and in I Corinthians 15, did in fact take place. One famous example of a trained mind seeking the truth behind the Resurrection stories is that of Mr. Frank Morison, whose thoroughgoing attempt to disprove the Resurrection ended in his own conviction that Jesus really rose from the dead. His well known book Who Moved the Stone? (Zondervan) is valuable and lasting evidence of the result of honest inquiry. But Mr. Morison is not the only first-class mind to come to accept the truth of the objective Resurrection of Christ. The trouble is that so many have prejudged the issue. They have already decided that the whole story may be dismissed as mass hallucination, for example, and they never give their serious adult critical attention to this, the most significant of all human events.

2. Those who would explain away the Resurrection of Jesus by saying that he never really died, but revived in the cold of the tomb, leave themselves with insuperable difficulties. The practical impossibility of removing a body from a sealed rock-tomb guarded by Roman soldiers, conveying it to a place of safety and recovery, and re-establishing the resuscitated body as the Leader who has "risen from the dead" seems to me to present far more difficulties than does belief in the recorded story. Is it really possible to believe that the young Church as it moved into action was founded upon a swindle? Can it be seriously maintained that a dispirited group of disillusioned disciples were permanently transformed into a close-knit fellowship of spiritually resilient heroes by a concocted story?

I have grown convinced that more often than not it is sheer ignorance, sheer lack of study of the actual records, which makes clever as well as foolish men say, "Well, of course, he was a great teacher, but I cannot accept the claim that he was divine." For such a remark completely fails to account for the joyful certainty, courage, confidence and tenacity exhibited by the young Church. Unless we are prepared to deny the historical evidence altogether, all these qualities spring from one unforgettable demonstration -- that after a public execution Jesus Christ rose again from the dead. To the early Church this well attested fact proved his claims to the hilt.

3. According to the records the appearances of Jesus were extraordinarily unlike the apparitions seen by disordered minds. There was no atmosphere of expectancy or even of hope, and several times his sudden appearance struck his followers not with reassurance and joy but with a very natural terror. (Who among us could bear with equanimity the experience of watching our greatest friend publicly executed on Friday and then of seeing and hearing him alive and well on the following Sunday?) On one occasion at least (Luke 24:41) Jesus insists on the disciples’ proving to themselves that he is not a ghost or an apparition. "Feel me and see," he said, "ghosts don’t have flesh and bones as you can see that I have." And when their minds still could not react properly to what had in fact happened he asked for food -- for everyone knows ghosts don’t eat! We can imagine their frantic dash to the shelf for food, and all that they can find is a piece of cooked fish and part of a honeycomb. It is not until he has begun to eat this strange meal of fish and honey before their eyes that they realize that he is unquestionably alive -- that he has conquered death as he had said that he would.

4. It is worth remembering that behind our ostensible reasons for believing or not believing a thing there are often unconscious reasons which go very deep. There are undoubtedly some who know intuitively how much depends upon the historic truth of the Resurrection. Should they once admit it to be true that this earth has been visited by the Creator, then the standards and values of the man who was also God will inevitably challenge and judge their lives. To some minds this must on no account be allowed to happen, and every ingenious argument and every literary resource must be employed to avoid the unwelcome conclusion.

5. Since most people have not studied the New Testament with their adult minds, and probably have not read it as a whole for many years, they are only too ready to accept someone else’s disparagement of the Christian position without going to the trouble of examining the relevant documents for themselves. I think I may claim to know these records pretty well after many years spent in translating them into modern English. And I will say simply that in consequence I have become a hundred times more convinced of their authenticity than when I began the work. After even a moderate familiarity with these brief and sometimes almost naïvely simple documents, it becomes impossible to dissociate Jesus the ethical teacher from Jesus who claimed to reveal the Character of God, who quite naturally forgave sins and who spoke with authority about human life, death and the world beyond death. We may, if you wish, allow that he was sometimes imperfectly reported, and it is certain that we have a very inadequate "coverage" of the most important life the world has ever seen, but the more one studies these brief and incomplete records, the more unthinkable it becomes that they should be mere human fabrications.

For the New Testament as a whole speaks with a new certainty. God is no longer the distant unknowable Mystery; his Nature and Character have been revealed through a man, Jesus Christ. It is now known for certain that God’s attitude toward mankind is one of unremitting love. The Master Plan which exists beneath the superficial activities of human beings is now becoming intelligible to them. The reconciliation between the holiness and perfection of God and the selfishness and evil of men has been unforgettably demonstrated. Death, the old dark bogey, has been exposed and resoundingly defeated. And as if this were not enough Good News for human beings to accept, they know now, by the acted parable of the Ascension of Christ, that God and man are eternally inseparable. Humanity is assured of its entry into the timeless life of God. A new dignity has been conferred upon the whole human race for God himself has become a man. New exciting possibilities appear as men begin to understand that the purpose of God’s descent to the human level is to enable them to rise and live as sons of God. And what is more, he is prepared to enter human personalities by his own Spirit to make such dreams come true. This temporary life is seen to be no more than the training school for a purpose that points to dimensions beyond the confines of time and space. The center of gravity of the new Faith is not in present earthly activity but in a person and purpose far transcending it.

If Christianity today has degenerated in some quarters into a dull and spiritless moral code, that must not blind us to the tremendous fact upon which all Christian churches are founded. What could be more exciting than to know that the very feet of God have walked this earth of ours, that his authentic voice has spoken to men like ourselves? It is on this issue that we have to make up our minds and adjust our hearts. The Good News may have to be rescued from the encrustations of tradition, the confines of caution, and the dullness of familiarity, but it is still there! The historic fact remains, and we in the twentieth century, with a conception of God infinitely greater than that of any previous generation, may have to short-circuit the centuries and let the startling truth break over us afresh -- that we live on a visited planet.

I have sometimes heard people speak of the "inherent improbability" of the Christian Faith, and I must confess that I am never quite sure what they mean. We are not in any real position to assess the "probability" of anything which happens within the framework of the laws of the universe, and we deceive ourselves if we think we possess an exhaustive knowledge of even these. Many commonplaces of today are the improbabilities of yesterday, and in any branch of science "improbabilities" occur from time to time which are apparently arbitrary exceptions to previously observed rules. The scientist does not conclude that his observation must therefore be faulty; he notes that the apparent exception is part of the total of observed phenomena. Sometimes he will later discover another law which accounts for what appear to be the exceptions, or he may have to be content for the present to register phenomena as "exceptional."

Now we are not living in a lunatic world, but in part of a law-abiding universe, and we are quite right to reject on rational grounds that which outrages reason. We may be perfectly certain, for example, that the Greek goddess Pallas Athene was not born as a fully developed, and fully armed, woman out of the head of her father Zeus! We rightly call that sort of thing myth, and it could never be considered as sober history. But we cannot so dismiss the historic accounts of the birth of Jesus. If we will admit for a moment that God did enter into the human historical process, we may reasonably expect something unusual, something analogous to the "exceptions" of science. We may have to accept the operation of a law higher than the normal law, but we are not expected to accept an irrational myth. But, of course, the critics of Christianity may mean that the "improbability" of the faith lies in another direction. We have only to consider how human planning would have arranged such an event, and compare it with what actually happened, to see this kind of improbability! If human planners had been at work no doubt the entry of the Creator into his creation would have been arranged with the maximum of publicity. The family into which he was born would have been the noblest in a nation whose culture represented the peak of human achievement. For his human adventure the Creator would have been provided with the finest clothes, the best books, and surrounded by the most influential friends. The most detailed observation of his life, of all that he said and did, would have been most meticulously kept. No stone would have been left unturned to ensure that everybody knew who this unique person really was. Compared with such a fantasy, the recorded facts are, of course, lamentably "improbable." Jesus was born into a family of humble station. His actual birth was in lowly and improvised conditions. His upbringing and education took place in an obscure village with none too good a reputation. His whole career as a preacher and teacher was very limited and sadly cut short, and it all happened in a small, rather despised country occupied by the Roman powers. Of course this appears "improbable," but may I say in passing that this is the kind of improbability to which we have to become accustomed if we are to have any dealings with the contemporary God. We have to learn to work with a wisdom which follows a pattern quite foreign to much human thinking.

But there is yet another sense in which the Christian story may be thought to be improbable, and that is because it appears to be arbitrarily and even monstrously unjust. If God chooses to reveal himself on this planet in the person of a man, why must whole nations rise and fall before he is even born? Why must millions be doomed for hundreds of years to live and die without the slightest possibility of knowing anything about him? The plain answer to this is naturally that nobody knows; we are not in on the secret. We do not know why there should be millions of years of life upon this planet before ever Homo sapiens appeared. We do not know why one man is so brilliantly endowed and another is of rather low intelligence. We do not know why some men’s skins should be darkly- pigmented, or why some men’s faces are yellow and others pink. We do not know why there should be races of men who are pygmies and races of men who are tall in stature. Life as we know it is full of inequalities and apparent injustices, and to claim that one particular piece of history is improbable because it appears to be unjust does not seem to me to be reasonable at all. It is like saying that electricity is improbable because men were obliged for so long to live without its benefits and facilities! The "timing" of events, discoveries, developments and revelations is not subject to any law of probability of which we have knowledge. If we can believe that there is a Divine Wisdom working out a total pattern extending far beyond our own short-sighted view, we shall not be quick to say that a unique event is untrue because it is "improbable."

I am not here concerned to argue about the historicity of the person of Jesus. (For those who want to study the subject I would recommend a book Did Jesus Really Live? by H. G. Wood, published by S. C. M. Press.) For even if the records were scantier than they are, it seems to me quite inconceivable that a movement as vigorous and revolutionary as early Christianity could have sprung out of a myth. No one in his right senses denies the authenticity of most of the letters, or epistles, included in the New Testament, and several of these are considerably earlier documents than the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. It is obvious from even a superficial reading of these human unself-conscious letters that people were being transformed in outlook and character, despite the general collapse of moral values in the pagan world. We may very properly ask the critic of the Christian story by what power were such transformations effected in such places as Corinth and Ephesus. Paul of Tarsus was undoubtedly a man of strong personality, but it certainly does not make sense to suggest that such radical changes in human character were made by the personal impact of one man. It is even more unthinkable that the weapons of such persuasion should be drawn from wishful thinking or a piece of calculated deceit. Can anyone seriously suggest that a man of Paul’s not inconsiderable intellectual powers should lose his "prospects" and wreck his career for the sake of something which never really happened? Is it reasonable to assume that such a man would write to the Christians at Corinth and quote as witnesses of the resurrection of Jesus several hundred people who were still living at the time? (Does that surprise you? I suggest that you read the fifteenth chapter of the first letter to Corinth in modern English, remembering that it was written in about A.D. 56.) Can anyone really account for the audacity, assurance and endurance exhibited by the young Church without admitting that these early Christians were convinced that Jesus really rose from the dead? No one could honestly read the letters of the New Testament without becoming aware that not only the writers themselves but scores of other people were looking at life and death in a way in which they had never been looked at before, and were experiencing a contact with the living God unprecedented in human history. No one could fairly deny that in the first century A.D. something unique and remarkable had happened and that the letters spontaneously record its repercussions on human personality.

I find that people frequently forget the great value of these early pieces of evidence. They will quite readily suggest that the gospels were written-up stories of a departed hero, composed some time after his death. But they forget that the letters, which are real letters written to real people, reflect a phenomenon which has somehow got to be explained. What had any of the early Christians to gain by subscribing to an acted falsehood? Yet we find them willing to endanger their livelihood and their lives, prepared to undergo hardship, humiliation, persecution, torture and agonizing death, simply because they were convinced that Jesus had really risen from the dead. Naturally all turns upon whether this "resurrection" really and objectively occurred. The claims of Jesus to represent the character of God, his claim to be the master of men and of their ultimate destiny, and his claim to be sent by God to effect the reconciliation between man and God would remain as the lunatic arrogance of a disordered mind if everything ended in the judicial murder of a field-preacher on a Roman Cross.

Although the moral standards and ethical judgments of this country have long been permeated by Christian teaching, there is a widespread ignorance both of the actual history of the Christian Faith and of its revolutionary character. Generally speaking, there is no intake of Christian information and consequently no attempt to see the relevance of basic Christian principles in modern situations. It is not, I repeat, that the thinkers, the writers and the leaders of popular thought, in whatever media, have for the most part studied Christianity and rejected it as unhistoric, impractical and outdated. It is simply that they have not studied it at all! I believe their attitude of almost total ignorance to be quite indefensible, and I find myself in agreement with a friend of mine who was to discuss on television the Christian position with four leading London journalists. He asked them simply whether any one of them had given five consecutive minutes (minutes, mark you! ) to the serious study of what Christianity had to say, and every one of them admitted that he had not. Whereupon my friend remarked kindly but firmly that if that were the case no real discussion could possibly take place. In my own experience I find it perfectly extraordinary that men and women of unusual ability in their respective spheres have rarely taken the trouble to give their adult attention to such a unique way of life as that proposed by Jesus Christ. I am happy to admit that there are exceptions, but how often has one met otherwise intelligent people who have dismissed the whole Christian Faith because, for instance, they cannot believe that the first chapter of Genesis is true to science, that Jonah was swallowed by a whale, that unbaptized babies go to hell, or that heaven is above the bright blue sky! Because the Church has been guilty of many glaring faults over the centuries, because Christians have frequently failed to be Christians through cowardice or lethargy, because an archbishop has said a foolish thing, because the methods of some evangelists are not approved, or because of some other quite trivial or irrelevant reason, some people appear to think that Christianity is finally discredited and its challenge can be honorably ignored! Such people are worse than "grandstand critics," for not only are they criticizing a game in which they are not themselves involved, but they have seldom taken the trouble to acquaint themselves with the rules!

If this ignorance is prevalent among the leaders of popular opinion, and I believe it is, we cannot be surprised that most ordinary people have no idea what Christianity is all about. Many of them have no use for the churches, regard clergy and ministers, as a class, with suspicion, but nevertheless have a certain vague respect for the personality of Jesus. The situation is not made any easier by the fact that almost their only source of knowledge of what modern Christians are thinking and doing is their daily newspaper. They therefore get an entirely negative impression; they are apt to read about only such things as a denunciation of gambling or Sunday amusement, a condemnation of modern moral standards, or, now and again, the story of some unhappy parson who has "gone wrong." They read nothing in the national Press of what Christianity is all about, and they are given negligible information about both the aims and the work of Christian churches throughout the world. It would therefore hardly be an exaggeration to say that very many people look upon Christianity largely as a repressive system, designed to spoil the pleasures of life and offering a man a rather dubious heaven in some vague world to come. I believe that if it were possible to get people to listen with fresh and unprejudiced minds to what Christianity is really saying, they might not accept it, but at least they could not dismiss it as a hangover from childhood, a beautiful but impractical dream, or as mere "religion" quite irrelevant to modern living.

Let us for the moment forget all about the churches’ reputedly narrow views, their "dressed-up bishops," their peculiar language and their apparently naïve ignorance of how life has to be lived by millions of people. Let us forget the churches’ failures over the centuries and their present disagreements -- in fact, let us for the time being forget the churches altogether and get back to the source of the Christian Faith. For Christianity begins with an historical fact, indeed its starting point is the most important event in the whole of human history. The Christian religion asserts that nearly two thousand years ago God, whose vast and complex wisdom science is daily uncovering, visited this small planet of ours in Person. Naturally the only way in which he could do this was by becoming a human being, and this is precisely what Christians believe that he did. This is the heart and center of the Christian Faith, this is the Gospel or Good News which those who had witnessed this extraordinary event went out to tell the then known world. That God so inserted himself into the stream of human history, and that we are consequently living on a visited planet, are statements audacious enough to take the breath away, and no reasonable person could be expected to accept such a belief as fact without considerable thought and careful examination of the evidence. To have had God, reduced to the stature of a human being, but indubitably God playing a part in the earthly scene, is a staggering thought. But this is where Christianity starts, this is the rock on which it is founded, and this is the point where men are compelled by the nature of the event to make up their minds as to whether it is true or false.

Let us not concern ourselves about how this startling event has been smothered in decoration, blunted by overfamiliarity, or overlaid by merely secondary considerations. Nothing must be allowed to distract us from considering with adult minds and hearts whether this is true history or a beautiful myth. The decision is so important that it must not, indeed cannot, be avoided. Yet this is the point at which so many people take evasive action. They begin to hide behind clouds of criticism of the Church or of particular Christians, or they create a diversion by arguing about the historicity of the Old Testament stories, or, for example, about the Church’s attitude toward war or divorce. I believe that each one of us must eventually face the real issue, which is quite simply: do I believe after adult examination of the evidence that Jesus Christ was what he claimed to be, or am I prepared to assert quite definitely that he was wrong in his major claims and that, though much of his teaching is beautiful, he himself was a self-deceived fanatic?

The heart of all real religions is an affirmation that human life on this planet is only part of something very much greater; that "human values" are determined by an authority higher than human beings themselves; and that man neither finds happiness nor discovers his true self until his worship, his loyalty and his love are given to Someone infinitely greater than any man or group of men. Through the great religions of the world man is trying to find some clue to the mystery of life and to find some expression of those longings within himself which transcend the confines of ordinary material existence. In short, however crude his attempts, he is trying to prove that he is more than a physical entity. It appears inevitable that with the passage of the centuries the world’s great religions are inclined to become complicated and corrupted. Even in the best cases it may be difficult for the modern observer to penetrate to the original intention of the founder of a religion, while in the worst cases the pristine spirit has been entirely suffocated. It is therefore essential for the modern man who attempts to understand religious truth to get behind the accretions, distortions and degenerations and try to see the original light.

As modern knowledge advances and hitherto insoluble problems are solved, a good deal of religion will be seen to be based on false premises, to be inadequate for modern conceptions of the universe, or to be little more than a collection of superstitious taboos. In our day whole nations who have been held in fear and ignorance by certain religious systems are being released almost overnight, as it were, by the rising tide of modern knowledge. This is happening at this very moment in the continents of Asia and Africa, for example, and insofar as men are being set free from ignorance, superstition and fear we cannot but be glad. But that is not the whole story. For if nothing is put in the place of the old religion then men are left with a greatly diminished sense of their own value. With the old taboos gone and the authority of the old gods exploded, moral standards are the first casualties. Under the old religion a man had status, significance and purpose, but with the old beliefs discredited beyond recall, he very quickly becomes lost and sinks into being a mere unit in the mass-mind. This is of course the golden opportunity for Communism. In place of the old vague, "spiritual" purpose a definite observable program is set down in concrete terms. Man’s place and worth are established, and provided he can disregard any immortal longings he can fit happily into such a comprehensive system. The State takes over the "father-figure" of God, and the State provides for his needs much more reliably than any of his old capricious gods.

The State makes laws which are plainly for the good of all, and the whole scheme is obviously making more physical and technical progress in a few years than was previously made in as many Centuries. We really cannot be surprised that as old religions are shattered Communism moves in and meets men’s apparent needs.

Before we become too pessimistic about the inevitable spread of Communism, let us remember that all religions are attempting to say something about man’s place in the universe, and are to some extent satisfying his immortal yearnings. Since Communism is essentially an earthbound and spirit-denying creed, and since man has never been able to live by bread alone, I believe it quite reasonable to hope that there will be a reaction from regimented materialism. The old gods, the old superstitions, the old wives’ tales, the fables and the legends have been destroyed, but I see no valid reason why there should not be a recovery of true religion of the kind at which I have hinted above. Moreover, we should be foolish to ignore the significance of any religion, however faulty and inadequate. Let me illustrate what I mean. As modern medicine advances throughout the world the superstitions and mumbo jumbo of magic-medicine very naturally disappear. But even in the most ignorant and primitive medicine there existed the desire to heal, and that desire has not been superseded. Thus it seems to me that although the acids of modern thought may quickly dissolve myth and superstition, nothing can destroy the basic need which led to the emergence of religion. A false view of "the gods" may easily be blown away by the first breath of scientific knowledge, but a true faith in God is not destroyed but rather enhanced by every fresh discovery of the complexity of God’s wisdom. I believe the time may come when it will seem ludicrous for men to discover layer after layer of truth which bears all the marks of pattern and design, and then categorically to declare that there is no Designer! I see nothing farfetched in the idea that man may one day consider it just as important to make spiritual discoveries and live in harmony with the spiritual pattern as he now thinks it so important to discover, and cooperate with, physical laws.

It has sometimes been suggested that what modern man needs is a religion composed of all the best elements of the existing world religions, purged of course of their magical, superstitious and miraculous elements and presented in an ethical form which might win widespread acceptance among men of good will. It could be argued that such a synthetic religion would provide a suitable acknowledgment of the Supreme Wisdom behind all observable phenomena, and while properly respecting the visions and ideals of religious founders, would not affront modern intelligence by retaining what is plainly irrational. It is only when we come to examine the world’s religions in some detail that we realize the impossibility of such a synthesis. Naturally, in all religions there is a common denominator of human ethics, although even this is not as high as some humanists with a Christian tradition behind them would suppose. It is when we come to study the basic conceptions of God, the relationship between man and God, the impact of belief upon social conduct and the view of life after death, that we realize how wide and deep are the gulfs between the leading religions. If we attempt to combine them into one modern super-religion we are left with something very like humanism. For since human beings would be the judges of which tenets are included and which are excluded we find ourselves back again in the closed humanist world which denies supernatural revelation. Thus I believe it is essential to have revelation if we are to have a religion which can give purpose and power to human living. To my mind there must be a breaking through into human life of information about an order both supra-human and ultra-human. Otherwise the best we can do is to form an ethical society with its objectives and horizon limited to this planet.

It is not my purpose, and indeed it is not within my competence, to write a book about Comparative Religion. There are several such books quite readily available for those who want to study the subject. But I must make a few observations to underline the impossibility of synthesizing the great religions. For example, according to Islam, God is a strict unity and although compassionate he is predominantly a God of power rather than of love. God and man are permanently separate; God orders man’s destiny (Kismet) and freedom is an illusion. Sin is as much foreordained as righteousness. Conversion may be forcible, and women are regarded as inferior to men. Of course many Moslems are better than their creed, but we can at once see how irreconcilable Islam is, for example, with Christianity. The central point of the Christian Faith is the indissoluble link between God and man, expressed through Christ; man is free to choose either good or evil; God’s purpose is to bring all men into the right relationship with himself; and in the teaching of Christ there is neither class distinction, color bar, nor discrimination between the sexes. In fact the only common ground between Christianity and Islam is the belief that God is infinitely greater than man and is a God to be worshipped and served. Now what compatibility can we find between these two great faiths, and either Buddhism or Hinduism, in which millions have their only experience of religion? Again, to pick a few random but important points -- Buddha himself was agnostic about the existence of God. He held that the question had no bearing on practical living. Consequently any problems of the relationship between God and man simply do not arise. Sin, which is a matter of antisocial behavior, results in repeated unpleasant reincarnations into this present world, while the ultimate state is the abolition of either existence or desire (Nirvana). Now although the teaching of Buddha contains much that is beautiful and compassionate, it is a known fact that in predominantly Buddhist countries for centuries very little was done to relieve suffering or ameliorate the lot of other people. After all, if a man were working out atonement for sins in a past life by his present suffering, what right had anyone to interfere with the process? Hinduism is also equally difficult to combine with any other world religion. Within it are enormous varieties of philosophical and popular belief. Common ground with Buddhism may be found in the doctrines of rebirth and Nirvana, but there are many contradictory notions held within the framework of this religious system. It has been observed with some truth that, at any rate in the past, a Hindu could believe anything so long as he observed caste, reverenced the cow and accepted the Veda as revelation! According to Hindu philosophy God is the unknowable Absolute, while at the same time man is God, the apparent distinction being due to illusion (maya), which in turn is due to ignorance (avidya). Within the almost unbelievable latitude of belief allowed by Hinduism there stands out the most rigid caste system which the world has ever known. Of course it is true that this system is being slowly broken down under the various modern pressures, but it remains an essential part of official Hinduism, and a lasting memorial to man’s religious inhumanity to man.

Let us think of another great world religion, Judaism, the religion of the Jews. It is indeed hard not to be thought unfair to this monotheistic religion which has given so much to the moral thinking of the Western world. A religion which could produce the Ten Commandments and the inspired writing of the Old Testament prophets, for example, cannot but command the greatest respect, while those of us who are Christians should never forget that the teaching of the New Testament sprang historically from Judaism. It is only when we come to examine the religion of the Jews more closely that we find its severe limitations. It tends to be both backward-looking and inward-looking and it is a religion for one people only, containing no intention of embracing the whole of mankind within its system. Orthodox Judaism by its very nature cannot be combined with or incorporated into any other religious creed. It can never become the religion for modern Gentile man.

I should like to make it plain at this point that I am not saying that there do not exist within the great world religions true, honest, wise and good men. Of course there are many such, and many men and women rise far above the spirit of their particular creed. Furthermore, Eastern religions, despite that wealth of fantasy, myth and legend which make them quite unacceptable to modern minds with an historic sense, possess a keen perception of the spiritual as opposed to the material. They underline the virtues of quiet meditation, of contemplation and of control of the body by the mind and spirit in a way which is foreign to most Western minds, but which might yet prove valuable to modern Western man in his busy, noise-infested world. Thus, while we are bound to reject the fictitious and fanciful content of Eastern religions, we might do well to accept techniques of practicing religion which we in the West have almost wholly neglected.

But if we are to find a religious system which cannot be outdated or outgrown, from which the acids of modernity can only remove accretions and encrustations, a religion which properly practiced produces the highest forms of human behavior, and offers both supernatural pattern and spiritual power beyond human endeavor, then I believe we shall have to take a fresh look at Christianity. We shall have to look at it with new eyes, forgetting the distortions, suppressions and misapprehensions to which it has been subjected over the centuries. We shall have to overlook men’s blindness to its revolutionary character, their stupidity in attempting to confine the spiritual within the temporal and their many sad demonstrable failures in Christian living. Then we may be able to touch again the heart and center of something which I believe reorientates the whole of human thinking, feeling and action.