It is only as one stares into the prospect of defeat, that one sees clearly whether it is worth while fighting. And contemplating the scholastic pedantry described in the last Chapter is staring at defeat all right. What hope has such absurd legalism of overcoming the evil in the world, and of helping to steer us all towards a decent, just society? And yet it is only as one stares into the prospect of a world without Christian churches, that one can see if it is worth while struggling to keep the C.of E. alive. Christianity claims that “Life” is to live in Christ; and those who live only in the world of Nature, or one might add in secular society, are in comparison dead. Well, the trouble is that forms of words which have a brilliant vivacity in their youth, and encapsulate genuine truth, have a habit of turning into meaningless clichés in old age. Hence the need, as I think the Old Testament prophets fully appreciated, to reiterate old truths in modern language with each generation. To suggest that the modern lawyer, who floods the Court with paper, in order to obfuscate the jury’s decision, is not living in a spiritual world, or that the modern mountaineer, who no longer climbs for the pleasure of friendship in the hills, but pushes the standard to unbelievable heights in his thirst for adventure and achievement in his flirtation with death, is not living a spiritual life, is pathetically naïve. In comparison the average church-goer’s spiritual life is non-existent. Yet of course he cannot admit it. It may be a dubious spirituality flirting too much with death; but it is an even more dubious spirituality putting drops of consecrated wine on rice-paper wafers. Some people would say it was playing the fool; whereas it is difficult to describe a ruthless strategy in Court, or pushing the thirst for adventure to extremes, in that way.
In the world in which Jesus lived, it may have been true that to live in him offered new life, and new hope to the downcast; because the Stoics of the Roman Empire were really without hope. But I think it is an over-simplification now. We now know that the world of the mind is unbelievably subtle. Jung has left us in no doubt about that. For example: in every profession, and in every serious situation in that profession, the need to make decisions calls forth an attitude of mind of its own, which is necessary in order to assess the situation in its true perspective, which in turn is the prelude to making any wise decision as to what to do. Very seldom does the attitude of mind of one profession illuminate another. Indeed Winston Churchill in his biography of the Duke of Marlborough, quoted with approval by Field Marshal Montgomery in his Memoirs, said that to adapt the plans of bygone heroes to new situations was the road to catastrophe! To take what Jesus said in the Sermon of the Mount, and without reflection regard it as a blue-print for action 2000 years later, in dramatically different social conditions, and in a dramatically different culture, is madness.