Where does one find in the Gospels, thoughts such as these expressed in the antique language of 2000 years ago? Well one doesn’t. There is a hint of it in John Ch.2, but the Gospels are not concerned with the Secular world; so naturally they are not concerned with the family, which is the fundamental building block of secular Society. They are concerned with the relationship of God to man, and man to God. So any Church which claims to champion family loyalty and stability, should surely have extended the Gospel message to link up the relationships in the family with the relationship between man or woman and God? This the C.of E. has manifestly failed to do, or there would have been no need for me to write my first book, “Man’s Relationship with God”; alternatively, the clergy would have described it as something that everyone knew already, if any of them read it. That wasn’t so. It was obvious that the thought was disconcertingly new to those who read it. They hated it. If a Church fails to link up these two relationships, then it effectively condemns its adherents to live in two worlds: the religious world of God on Sunday, and the secular world of the family on weekdays. In the secular world everyone is separated from God, and therefore forced to sin; but this does not matter, because on Sunday this sin is expiated by the general confession of sins, which we had no alternative but to commit. I find it difficult to understand how intelligent people can subscribe to such hypocrisy. Not only that; it is splitting the Psyche into compartments, which I would have thought put mental health seriously into jeopardy. The trouble is that Jung’s precept that the Self must not fall out with the vastly bigger Psyche, or mental illness results, cuts right across the traditions of 2000 years. But then the Church is unlikely to be enamoured of Jung’s dream about Strasbourg cathedral, whose obvious interpretation was that the Almighty was utterly sickened with His Church! Modern scientific thought does make it difficult to accept the Church’s teaching, without considerable modification. But whose fault is that?
It is the same in psychology, as in geology, in fossil remains and the age of the earth, as in physics and the extent of the cosmos both in space and time, as in biology and a true understanding of the evolution of man, and above all in leadership and a true if limited understanding of the nature of War; you cannot opt out of modern knowledge. If you do, as Aristotle said, you preclude yourself from all community. And the “modern knowledge” that the Second World War has taught us with almost inhuman and cogent persuasiveness is that you need a marriage of minds nowadays for the proper and effective conduct of War. Those who dabble in War, and either from personal ambition or incurable dishonesty prefer to ignore this lesson, and try to strut about in the old-fashioned way, are likely to be out-manoeuvred by those willing to be more ruthless than themselves.