Professor Marsh's Section

The second part of the book, Professor Marsh on the attitude of Church towards social problems, also does great damage to history and reality. But once Dr. Munz had deprived the Christian Church of its essentials the approach to social problems easily becomes paramount and is tied up with the ignoring of dogma as Professor Marsh insists that it should.

Nevertheless it is to be hoped that any criticism of this section of the book will be moro seriously received than the criticism made of his talk in 1951. Two reasonable letters appeared in the press immediately afterwards—but there was no reply from Professor Marsh.

Put briefly Professor Marsh scolded and scolds the Churches for: emphasising dogma rather than Christian behaviour, not keeping up with the times by taking stands and modifying views, not taking stands on social problems and not being sufficiently or directly enough in contact with these problems. It is not necessary to reply to these inaccurate contentions except to say that they are erroneous. We have no reliable conflicting evidence from Professor Marsh.

The test will come when the criticism of this book is seen by the learned authors. If they argue as Dr. Munz argued on personal rather than on historical grounds or if they refuse to desert the ivory towers of scholarship at all like Professor Marsh in the newspaper, then we seriously doubt that soundness of the University approach to intellectual problema.

Historian.