RELIGION AND CHURCHES
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—I was looking forward with some interest to an article on the question of the organized Church being necessary to religion, but Mr. Joad (Dec. 13th) disappointed by a complete failure to come anywhere near his subject. By striking a false scent at the beginning of his article he has not dealt with the question at issue at all but has been misled into saying a great many things of varying degrees of irrelevancy.
He makes the deplorable blunder of thinking that mysticism is the same as true religion and seems to imagine that the test of a Church is its power to enable men to " enjoy religious experience."
Frankness compels me to assert that Mr. Joad does not know what true religion is, nor what the Church exists for. It may be that Roman Catholics, Anglicans and mystics of all churches will go part of the way with him, but in the interest of true religion I have a decided objection to admitting that the function of the Church is to work up, communicate or foster psychological states, as if religion were the enjoyment of an experience !
It would take much more space than I dare claim to enter into the question of what true religion is, but let me only advise Mr. Joad to go to the Bible and to Jesus, and he will not find that true prophetic religion is the " delicious desert " and " dazzling darkness " of which the mystics speak. He will find in the Bible not mysticism but the world—the world with its men and women, hunger, death, riches, weddings, politics, wars, harlots, priests, kings and all the rest of the shadows which make up this life. Then into the very midst of those vanities there strikes the word of God and the Judgment of God, the only event that gives them significance. That is true
religion. He that hath ears to hear let him hear."
You will fmd in the Bible men with their violent moods of repentance and exultation which you might call mystical (although I doubt it), but no one who knows what the Bible is driving at would ever make the mistake of thinking that its revelation is meant to tickle our souls with enjoyable experi- ences. Let Mr. Joad take his conception of religion to the Bible and it will wither like a highly scented flower under the scorching fire of an Amos or a Jeremiah in much the same way as it would wilt under the scorn of the modern atheist who would label it "dope". Yet Mr. Joad talks complacently of the future of religion being one in which the experience of the mystics will be increasingly the experience of the man RI the street !
No doubt a severe enough attack can be made against the organized Church but it will have to be made by one who knows that the Church is not an academy for producing mystics. I will not trespass upon your space by attempting to define the Church. That is not necessary for my present purpose which is merely to point out that Mr. Joad has not yet issued a challenge to the Church.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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