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The Cockpit

S.C.M. Campaign

I am more than a little concerned about this campaign to be run by the student Christian Movement in Victoria College from March 13th onwards, in which I have to figure as a speaker more or less prominently.

I know that when I attend at V.U.C. I shall be met by a number of people who will willingly listen to my declaration that the Christian faith is true, however great their difficulty may be in translating their conviction of its truth into literal obedience But these people I meet frequently, and it is not with them that I am concerned. What I am concerned to do is to meet with those for whom the Christian faith is either a rumour, a legend, or a pathetic fallacy.

This is frankly an invitation to those who consider that the Christian relgion is a delusion harmless or vicious, to state the reasons which hey think to weigh heavily or ever conclusively against it.

It may clear the ground it I state shortly the propositions which I intend to defend as true They are these:—

That the facts of our own lives and of our own time, properly understood and honestly faced, are a testimony to the truth of the Christian creed, and that consequently the Communist Manifesto and all other Credos whatsoever are false in so far as they deny the realities to which the Christian creed assents.

That the important destinations to which attention ought to be given are not those between one social theory and another or between different ways of setting the world right, but between the Christian faith—which holds that the crucial fact with which all men and all nations, all societies and parties, have to reckon is the personal intervention of God in the life of the world which the Christian Church calls the Incarnation and all philosophies which leave this fact out of account. This remains so in spite of the [unclear: feetieness] of utterance of the modern [unclear: church] and makes the Church, in spite of its weakness, the [unclear: custodian] of the only hope of a really new society.

That the really urgent question facing us and the whole of civilisation in this age is whether, as men of the twentieth century acquainted with the new learning, products of and sharers in an [unclear: industrid] capitalist society, we can give at honest assent to the central [unclear: thesis] in the Christian faith while facing realistically all the facts of the [unclear: postwar] world. The answer which we shall give to all other questions, personal and sociological political and economic, depends both as of accuracy and fruitfulness on the answer [unclear: w] give to this one.

It is positively certain, of course that many who read "Smad" think such propositions either irrelevant or false I should be glad if them will tell me so, with reasons, for I hold them, on the contrary, to be most solemnly true,—I am, etc.,