Honest to Man [antikvár]

PREFACE The chmate of thought regarding rehgion has changed profoundly in the last two decades. When, in 1955,1 gave two broadcasts entitled 'Morals without Religion', in which I expressed scepticism about the traditional Christian doctrines, I was subjected to a storm of abuse: today, similar views are expressed by Anglican bishops and nobody turns a hair. The fashionable view at the present time is that the important thing about Christianity is not its cosmology but its ethic. Protestant Churchmen admit cheerfully that most of the statements in the creeds are only 'symbolically' true, but they maintain none the less that Christianity is profoundly important and that it is essential to preserve it in some form, since—to quote Lady Stocks in a recent Any Questions programme—'the best expression of a moral order the world has yet had is the Christian one'. In the nineteen-fifties I was inclined to share this view, and in my broadcasts I argued simply that it was a mistake to tie a live ethic to a dying theology. But it dawned on me later that my admiration for Christian ethics was based mainly on an inadequate knowledge of the Gospels, combined with the slanted view of history that I, like most of my generation, had acquired at school. Wider reading has now convinced me that there is no ground for