Actually it is not difficult. Because error and distortion are written into all human thought and communication, we are all driven in the end to rely on our own judgement and initiative. Or to demonstrate that we haven’t got any! This is particularly so in War, where as the elder von Moltke said, no plan lasts longer than the first serious contact with the enemy, because junior commanders must then be allowed to act on their own initiative. So if Jesus saved the world, it was not so much in showing us the way to heaven, nor by relieving us of the burden of sin (although that is an unqualified mercy), it was in setting our spirits free, to act on our own initiative, and to exercise as best we can our own judgement. Best of all, if we do this in furtherance of what we believe are our vocations; and my vocation was to fight tooth and nail in the Law Courts for justice. Jesus, the culmination of countless ages of cosmic, geological, and biological evolution, sets Mankind free, if it is humble enough to invoke his spirit, to create a new heaven and a new earth if it wants to; because acting in his spirit will itself create the community that goes with it. Much as I love the Liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer; the vision it portrays is not exactly this one. But I end this book by concluding that the only certainty in this world lies in a sense of communion with the Almighty, which is in harmony with everything in the Prayer Book. And if you have sufficient imagination to look through His eyes, just for a moment, it is highly unlikely that He would have wanted Man to find “certainty” anywhere else, isn’t it? So we end in agreement.
I hope that my contribution to a solution of the Church’s difficulty in coming to terms both with science and the last War has sufficient intellectual rigour to withstand criticism, but sufficient suave urbanity to appeal to the ordinary reader. In summary, no intellectual discipline is worth much, until you have considered the unspoken and usually unconscious assumptions that underlie the attitude of mind responsible for that discipline. This is equally true for religion, science and War.