Getting away from God
John Stewart Collis
The author died earlier this year. This article was found among his papers by his biographer, Richard Ingrains.
We hear a great deal nowadays about the need for religion, even the need for a new religion — as if anything could be more absurd. And, of course, the phrase 'a Revival of Religion' never dies. 'Youth' is particularly taken up with this. The reli- gion is going to help you to 'find yourself' or 'your identity'. There are plenty of fake saviours on hand — never have there been so many as in our day when the great official religions have lost their authority to such an extent.
I don't see much point in 'the Young' flattering themselves on their concern for religion, nor anything admirable in the way in which they hand themselves over to quacks of every kind. Often the 'saviours' are just psychological and psychiatric quacks, who are the worst of all, and seem to be multiplying every day.
• What should they do? Go in for educa- tion. Learn to read. Take up solid study'in history and anthropology, and then, or at the same time, concentrate upon the mar- vel of natural phenomena. They will find that they can do without the supernatural. If this is not enough for them, then surely their spiritual needs can be satisfied by the Catholic Church. It provides everything they could possibly need, including glo- rious buildings in which to attend imagina- tive rituals and hear magnificent liturgies, hymns and psalms. And if the difficulty of taking doctrine literally is too difficult for them in these modern times, they can still take it symbolically. In this sense the Mass is as real as the sunset and can enrich the soul as much as a personal mystical experi- ence; and indeed, on that plane, it can be a
religious experience, to be repeated not too often, but whenever the inspiration is really needed.
In any case, all who have an ear for literature can continue indefinitely to glory in the Bible and Prayer Book. Unfortu- nately, most of the clergy are against this. .,.11eY wish to scrap the Bible and Prayer lok. At present they have no power to .1" it, but they wish to shelve it. In fact, they have already produced a substitute
which they actually call the New English Bible. The idea behind the thing is that the Authorised Version may be at times a little difficult to understand. So let us make it plainer, they have said, more consonant with modern speech. Now we will bring it nearer to the man in the street.
In this they are mistaken. They do not bring it nearer. They make it farther off. We read the words, 'Come unto me all ye who are weary and heavy-laden and I will give you rest.' We may well rightly think that these words, though translated, could have been spoken ten thousand years ago. Indeed, they speak to us over the centuries in a miraculous way. If, instead of those words, we read: 'Not to worry. Everything will be all right. Come round to me and I'll help you to relax', we know, the simplest person knows, that they are modern words used only in our own day. They could never have been spoken by Jesus. His words are not brought nearer, they are quite simply annihilated. True, the phrase above is not what is substituted in the New English Bible. I invented it in order to make my point really clear. Take a genuine and rather mild example of what has been done. 'A voice crying in the wilderness' has been changed to 'a voice shouting in the desert'. In the first version we have a phrase of outstanding appeal, if not terribly easy to define, save by stressing the obvious that the very `crying' (which we take at once as 'crying out') is a verb of imaginative appeal and the noun 'wilderness' still more so. The overtones" or undertones in the sentence are wonderfully evocative. 'Shouting in the desert' conjures up nothing, evokes no- thing more than an angry oil man whose car has stuck in the sand.
In a quiet, though devastating critique of these translators, Robert Nye referred to them as 'serious and responsible men' by way of being polite. But seriousness is no passport to an understanding of art. These men, in the literal sense of the word, are illiterate — that is to say, they do not know what literature is. To them the destruction of a work of art is not noticed. If there was a public for it they would give us Shakespeare in verbal modern dress, with the same seriousness and sense of responsi- bility.
But these men are not only illiterate, they are so stupid that they could not see the pit that lay open before them. Of course this and that passage of the Bible are obscure and the language perhaps a bit too archaic, and it would be quite right to explain it and have footnotes in modern usage. But they could not see that as soon as they had decided to alter whole passages they would be faced with the necessity of altering every passage. For if they didn't do so and kept passages of the Authorised Version which were perfectly clear as well as beautiful, those passages just would not fit with the prosaic version. So every sentence had to be lowered. You couldn't say 'crying in the wilderness', you had to lower it to, `shouting in the desert'. You couldn't say, 'the lilies of the field, they toil not, neither do they spin, but Solomon in his glory was not arrayed like one of these', you had to take the poetry away in order that the terrible prose of the new version would not appear as tawdry as it is. There is no department in the modern scene where the lust for violence and destruction is not evident. The clergy cannot very well hack down our cathedrals to make way, for council houses; that wouldn't find Hill support.
But they can satisfy their feelings by destroying the Bible, with the added knowledge that it is amongst our greatest works of art.
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