In my copy of the New Testament I underline passages which take my fancy. Nearly all of them are about the deceitfulness of the cares of this world and of riches, about how concupiscence and vanity separate us from God, about glorying in tribulation which brings patience, experience and hope, about the flesh lusting against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh, these being contrary to one another so that we cannot do the things that we would do, and so on. It is difficult to think of any sentiments which would be more intrinsically unsympathetic in most clerical circles. They are, I should say, about the most unpopular sentences it is possible to utter today; at religious gatherings they cause malaise and irritation; on radio and television panels derision and incredulity. When I use them I am often accused of insincerity or affectation, so rooted are the opposite assumptions - that by caring about the world we shall make it better, that we must aim collectively to get richer in order to get happier and happier, that the unrestrained satisfaction of our earthly hopes and desires is the way to physical, mental and spiritual contentment.
In the face of the otherworldliness which I still unfashionably find in the Gospels, as far as I am concerned the whole edifice of twentieth-century materialism - and the utopian hopes that go therewith - falls flat on it face. One is delivered from the myth of progress. The terrible vision of a Scandinavian-American paradise, with longer lives, more and better aphrodisiacs and more leisure and amenities for all, dissolves into nightmare, awaking from which one advances gingerly upon the sublime truth that to live it is necessary to die, that a life can only be kept by being lost - propositions which strike contemporary minds as pessimistic, but which seem to me optimistic to the point of insanity, implying as they do, that it is possible for mere man, with his brief life and stunted vision, to aspire after a universal understanding and a universal love. Is this being a Christian?
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