( Contemporary Vignette ) The Christed Sociology - In Matter and Spirit .

The tide of the twentieth century was flowing in a different direction altogether. It was the picture palaces, their fronts so brilliantly lighted, inside so mysteriously dark, that provided our true churches and chapels. There we sat, separately or clasped together, in scented darkness ( in those days attendants during intervals squirted perfume like Flit over the heads of the patrons in their seats ) and worshipped our tribal gods – sex, money and violence – as they were projected on to the screen and entered into our own minds and bodies . Thus the new gospel was propounded – in the beginning was the Flesh and the Flesh became Word; to be carnally minded is life – dying in the Spirit to be re-born in the Flesh. There was no more ardent acolyte than I, and yet, trudging homewards late at night along the empty tram-lines, a fearful sense of desolation would fall upon me . I strained my ear, but heard only the sound of my own footsteps ; I peered ahead, but saw nothing except the tramlines reaching into the distance. And You – where were You then ? Ready ! the answer comes back – ready, but unsummoned .





In 1920, when I was seventeen, I went to Cambridge , rather, as it seems in retrospect, in fulfillment of my father’s aspirations than mine . It was he, not I, who spoke of an Alma Mater, of sporting one’s oak, etc., etc . His Fabian heroes, in their tweed suits and ample coloured ties, with their enriched voices and flow of eager words, seemed to him the flower of mankind, and he hoped that Cambridge would make me another such. Alas, dear man, it was not to be. His innocent snobbishness, of a kind very prevalent in the Labor Party, then as now, led him, without his being aware of it, to want to have me made in the image of all that, as a Socialist, he most deplored . I thought of this years later when Lord Snow, after a spirited recommendation of comprehensive schools to his fellow-peers, let out that he was sending his own son to Eton. Only as children of God are we equal ; all other claims to equality – social, economic, racial, intellectual, sexual – only serve in practice to intensify inequality . For this reason Your commandment to love our fellow men follows after, and depends upon, the commandment to love God . How marvelous is the love thus-attained – the faces looming up, young and old, sullen and gay, beautiful and plain, clever and stupid, black, pink and grey ; all brothers and sisters, all equally dear !



( Brother Malcolm Muggeridge , from “ Jesus Rediscovered ” )

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