• CHURCH PARADE
SIR,—The correspondence in your columns about church parades in the Services emboldens me to protest, both as a citizen and a Christian, against what I consider an even greater evil—church parades in the Home Guard: As a citizen, I submit that the members of the Home Guard made a voluntary sacrifice of their leisure at a time when the country was in extreme danger. Since then their service has been made compulsory and their leisure further encroached upon. Both these evils are borne with patience because they are taken as necessary evil*. But what shadow of right can the State pretend for using the power it has thus acquired over them* to compel them to go to church?' Or in what spirit are we to suppose that a man who has lost his Sunday morning for an object which he understands and approves will see his Sunday evening also taken from him for an object which was never even mentioned when he first became a Home Guard? As a- Christian, I submit that such interferences with the private life of the Home Guard are calculated to harden ordinary English indifference into fierce anti- clericalism of the Continental type. Angry men do not reason clearly. They will transfer to the Church itself the resentment they justly feel for the busy-body who has marched them to it. Some of them no doubt are Christians. But why should a Christian by entering the Home Guard be deprived of the right to go to the church and service he chooses with his own wife and children, or be forced to the difficult exercise of praying amidst a crowd of comrades either bitterly resentful
or (worse still) contemptuously patient? War demands compulsions ; all the more reason to guard against gratuitous compulsions which it does not demand. By the mere act of putting on uniform men should not be reduced to the status of toy soldiers, moved about for the mere amusement of their owners.—Yours faithfully, C. S. LEWIS. Magdalen College, Oxford.
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