Salient. The Newspaper of Victoria University College. Vol. 19, No. 8. July 1, 1955

[Introduction]

St. Paul, writing to the people at Corinth, ascribed unbelief to the mental climate of the age, to the blanketing effects of its common modes of thought, and to a lethargy which refuses to break free. "The spirit of this world", he says, "has blinded their eyes . . ."

I want to examine briefly "the spirit of this world" in terms of our own society. Intellectually we live in a defeated age. Whatever the future will have to say about this generation, whatever tribute it will pay to its valour and endurance, it will not name it among man's groat epochs; it will never rank it with the age of Pericles, of Augustus, of Elizabeth, of Victoria, with those eras, in short, in which man has walked with confidence, shaping life according to his purpose, and sure of his future. There are "horrid faces in the gloom", and hopelessness has reared its ugly head. Why?

First because the fact of God's existence has been diligently eliminated from the thinking of the day. I commend to you the recent book of Professor Butterfield. "Christianity and History". There is no need for me to stress the authority of the professor of modern history in the University of Cambridge. And Professor Butterfield says quite simply: "It is not always realised that belief in God gives us greater elasticity of mind."

Duped by the pundits, young people sometimes imagine that faith in God commands a sacrifice of mental freedom, a circumscribing of the wits. Nothing of the sort. Life and the world are seen with greater clarity when faith in God sanctifies the mind.

It is those who refuse to make the great assumption who see facts awry. Leave out a basic fact and all manner of disaster is likely to overtake one's reasoning.

Read again Well's entertaining fantasy, The Kingdom of the Blind. The newcomer to the Andean valley was quite unable to talk to the blind inhabitants. His language, rich in the terminology of sight, meant nothing to them. They lacked a dimension of the mind.

The best minds, if firmly determined to follow an atheistic pattern of thought, can be similarly bemused.