Begin Here

Mr. Middleton Murry tells me that in the hundreds of letters which reached him after his recent broadcast talks (to be published in the Christian News-Letter books under the title Europe in Travail) the recurring request was, “Tell us what we can do.” The same need finds expression in a letter from one of our members who is a consulting physician in the north of England:

I fear that there has been too much spiritual judgment about the sickness of the world, without deeds. The local church is not going to do anything much in the way of acting midwife to the inevitable new world. It is the common soldier’s fight and initiative in the Christian warfare which needs emphasis now.

So many people whom I meet in my own circle outside the organized Christian Church know that the world is very sick, and many of them have a fair idea of the reason why; but they do not know where they can put their shoulders and shove with any hope of being effective.

I want the News-Letter to give the largest help that it can in finding the answer to the vital question of what we can do. It will have our constant attention. In the meantime Miss Dorothy L. Sayers has given us an important clue in the title of her last book, Begin Here. We must not push the future away into the future. We must begin to shape it now, and we must start where we are.

Widespread initiative is essential to democracy. Where the democratic spirit is alive, people do not wait to be told what to do, but get to work on the job nearest to hand.

To boil the thing down to tin tacks, as a former eminent and practically minded statesman is reported to have been in the habit of saying, if God is alive there is no need to be inhabited by the fact that we cannot see more than a few yards ahead. When we have sincerely offered our lives to Him, He will show us either at once, or as the weeks or months pass, what we can do. When the light comes, let us act on it without delay, with all our might and without looking back. The next steps will be made clear when the time comes.

It is undoubtedly the business of some people to think about a world order. But for most of us excessive occupation with the blue prints of an ideal world is a form of futurism which is an escape from present and immediate duty. An acre or two of solid earth, reclaimed from the desert or jungle, and well dug and watered, is worth a thousand imaginary paradises.

Perhaps the most fruitful thing that we can do is to learn to pray. I am thinking of that deeper experience of prayer in which eager and watchful expectancy becomes a habitual attitude pervading our sub-conscious as well as our conscious life. Our spiritual vitality is not strong enough to overcome the demonic forces at work in the world, or to meet the vast demands of creating a better society. Where can we look for re-invigoration except to an invasion of our daily lives by the spiritual powers of the unseen world? The first necessity is to open our being to the eternal source of Light and Life and Love. “This is the work of God that ye believe.”

Education for a Christian Society

The Supplement is directed to the crucial question raised in Supplement No. 14 [“Educating for a Free Society” by J. H. Oldham] of the kind of society which we want and expect. It gives to that question a most challenging answer. In the eyes of many who know the world as it is, the answer must seem quite mad. I doubt whether we have really understood the world in which we are living and the forces to be reckoned with if we have not inwardly recoiled from the idea of a new Christendom as a foolhardy adventure. When I ventilated the idea more than a year ago in a letter to The Times, which Mr. Eliot has done me the honor of quoting, I said that I wrote as a fool. I still feel that way about it. But I see nothing else to aim at.

The theme of Supplement No. 14 was that you can have a free society only if you prepare its future citizens for life in such a society. Similarly the present Supplement leads up to the conclusion that we can have and maintain a Christian society only by the Christian education of its members. Both are in agreement that the ultimate aim and real purpose of a society may be known by the provision it makes for the preparation of its future citizens.

A recent leading article in The Times on “Religion and National Life” has aroused widespread interest and has been reprinted as a leaflet. It deals with the provision of Christian teaching in the schools – a subject of the highest importance. But this is only one aspect of the large issues which are opened up in this week’s Supplement; and there is a danger, as the correspondence which has followed show, that people may be misled into seeking too easy a remedy for the sickness of modern society. The Christian faith is the ground of all our hopes; but Christian teaching loses its vital meaning if it is divorced from the social aims and practice of the society in which those who receive it have to live. Christian education and a Christian society belong together. A letter from the Bishop of St. Albans appears to suggest that the Christian purpose can be achieved by imitating the methods of Stalin and Hitler in imposing authoritatively a particular creed on the whole community. I cannot think that this is his real intention, since it would be a denial both of the nature of a Christian society and of the method by which we can advance towards it.

We are only making a beginning in the News-Letter in dealing with this vast theme. The questions that have been raised must be probed more deeply and will be followed up with vigor.

Yours sincerely,
J. H. Oldham

* Published in the Christian News-Letter on February 28, 1940

**To access Oldham's Supplement on T. S. Eliot's The Idea of a Christian Culture, visit the Premium Member Content page. If you're not yet a member, join the community today to access premium content.