The pagan society and the Christian impulse
"A false balance is abomination to the Lord: but a just weight is his delight." Thus Proverbs 11, 1. And then, "When pride cometh, then cometh shame: but with the lowly is wisdom." , There can hardly have been, since the grimmest days of the war, a Christmas of greater gloom for Britain and, indeed, for most of the western world. All about us is disaster and the prospect of more disaster; ruin and the prospect of more ruin; division and selfishness and the prospect of more division and selfishness. The country staggers, it seems, towards its fall and, as mflation rips away the protective screening of that self-esteem which has sustained us in adversity for so long, our politicians and other leaders alike seem beyond measure helpless in the face of approaching calamity. Even the people, whose courage and determination have so often surpassed the courage and determination of their leaders, seem bewildered and lost.
Christianity properly understood is not necessarily in such times a religion of comfort. It depends, rather, on the spirit in which God is approached, and the kind of sustenance which is sought from Him. The false balance of the Proverbs is useless, for God does not stand by waiting to bestow on his children the relief and blessings which they think they ought to have, and deserve. Rather, the purpose of prayer is simply to establish a communion with God, and an awareness of our duty to suffer in return for His suffering. Christianity in any of its varieties does not produce, and cannot produce, programmes for solving inflation, or righting the balance of payments deficit, or feeding the poor or saving the country. What can sometimes happen, however, is that the inner strength derived from communion with God — the right balance to which the false is antithetical — flows over into the more quotidian work of the day, producing a decline of selfishness and an increase in righteousness. For, "Riches profit not in the day of wrath: but righteousness delivereth from death." (Proverbs 11, 4) Most of the recently developing characteristics of our polity have been selfish and unChristian. Greed has marked the proceedings of section after section of the community, but it has been a greed and a selfishness untinged by that sturdy self-reliance which can characterise the inner certainty of the Christian, poor or rich, middle or working class. The greed of our nation has manifested itself most often in the constantly renewed demand that the state should provide — not merely the necessities of life and of national defence, but the luxuries, the material to satisfy quirks of personality and fortune, everything, in a word, that is demanded, Without thought of provision by self for self and family, without thought for the need of those one might help.
And yet we are given to regarding the aspirations at least of our society as noble, Uplifting, humane. They are almost the reverse of that: for, increasingly, the religion of statism has infected both our politics and our public affairs, and statism inevitably leads to the determination of the nature of good by the morally and spiritually null state itself. In a pure state — that is, a purely pagan system — any sense of right balance, of proportion, of purpose, gives way to an eternal demand of circuses for the people and power for the bureaucracy. Things of man alone become predominant in their supposed importance. Any sense of another purpose to life is lost; and all our lives begin to lose that sense of the higher nature of man in relation to the purpose which God has laid down for him, which has hitherto elevated us above the purely animal level. Indeed, ethnologists and anthropologists have begun to notice a higher sense of duty among some animal families than among men. Our sense of living for the glory of God has departed us; and we are the worse therefor.
Self-indulgence has increasingly replaced selfdependence. Even the violence which has so marked the unhappy evolution of events in Northern Ireland is a self-indulgent phenomenon. The disproportion of the false balance against which the authors of the Proverbs inveigh was never more evident than in the vicious campaign of the IRA, and the false religion which characterises the utterances and the actions of all the extremes of Irish politics is a denial of God, as well as a denial of the common humanity of men living in democratic societies. But extremism, towards which all frustrated indulgence and selfishness tends, is present in every compartment of our national life. Sexual permissiveness has led increasingly towards sexual indulgence of the grossest kind and created campaigns for even greater indulgence and greater perversion. Especially in the field of property development the greed for profit has been marked by the same kind of indulgence, leading to the same kind of extremism and, while the generality of wage demands has emphatically not been of the same kind, the industrial actions of many workers and unions have. Nor is the comparison between such widely differentiated areas of human activity in the least far-fetched. A society rises and falls as a result of the whole chemistry of its Interrelations and activities: the whole chemistry of ours is now unhealthy in the extreme.
Injustice, violence and self-indulgence may, of course, exist even within a society principally animated by the Christian message. Sin abounds everywhere, even in the most righteous of communities. The great distinction, however, is between a society in which the Christian impulse is so strong that the forces of sin are restrained, and in which the sinner has some real hope of redemption. Ours, as it rapidly becomes a pagan society, even though its paganism is to some extent muted by supposedly humanitarian professions, seems bent on destroying what remains of its Christian Impulse and thus it seeks to destroy its own finer impulses as well. Only by the renewal of the Christian impulse, only by revival of the appreciation of our duty towards God, can a beginning be made on the resolution of our difficulties. Only thus can the abomination of the false balance be replaced by the righteousness of the correct balance. And the correct balance begins with God.
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