CHRISTIANITY AND CHURCHGOING
• [To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] Sin,—" Curiouser. and curiouser." Mr. W. Smith's second lettet is even more remarkable than his first, remarkable, I mean, for the way in which he extracts from the Gospels a meaning which is the exact opposite to that which their writers intended. But we have no right to isolate the Gospels from their his- torical background and to ignore the purpose of the writers of them. Is there any other book in the world which is treated in this way ? If you shut your eyes to the Faith of the Church which produced them and regard them as so much material for the exercise of ingenuity, a substitute for a crossword puzzle or the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, • of course you can make them prove any theory you like, even that put forward by Mr. W. Smith., And so, according to his view, the Jesus whom we .thought was described as one who went, about doing good, one who refused to resist His enemies and suffered death in consequence, this Jesus was all the time a not very successful political adventurer. Well, well ! Mr. Smith may be right, of course, but how surprised Mark or Luke would be to know that all their efforts to portray a merciful Saviour have resulted in giving us a picture of a Barabbas, which "sticks out a mile " ! Alas ! poor Theo-. philus, who wast "to know the certainty of those things wherein thou wast instructed." Thy instructors have badly led thee astray. (Or can it be that Theophilus was taught that Jesus was a mere politician ?) Personally I think that the Church would not have taken the trouble to produce the Gospels unless they had thought that Jesus was the Son of God, and that this belief of theirs is important evidence. If the Faith of the Church is proved to be wrong, it is only by twisting the words of those who believed the Faith and wrote to confirm their people in that
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