Christians, said Canon L. J. Collins in St. Paul's on
Sunday, ought to meddle in politics. That depends. I have just been reading a pamphlet by Canon Collins and Mr. Victor Gollancz called Christianity and the War Crisis (Gollancz, 6d.) which appears to me by no means a happy form of meddling. Emotional in phrasing, the pamphlet raises a number of old points (by no means all of them good) as though they were new, mixes theology and politics unttelpfully and advances various proposals which seem to have no close relation to realities. It is, in fact, no "aberration in the human mind" which speaks of some lifty millions of English men, women and children generically as "England," and similarly with Russia, America, and so on ; it is merely a matter of common sense and convenience. The contention : "We have a War Office but no Peace Office. Could anything be more irrational ? " is neither pew nor very bright ; we have a Foreign Office whose business it is to work ceaselessly for peace (as on the whole it does) and to add a Peace Office "charged with the prevention of war by every spiritual and psychological method" could only produce confusion, superfluity or futility ; Mr. Bevin's views on this would be instructive. As for the declaration that "President Truman, Mr. Attlee, Mr. Stalin, President Mao and the rest [the French no doubt also ran] must meet immediately," the idea had, in fact, occurred to one or two people already, but the further idea: "If you don't succeed at the first conference have another conference and then another" probably hadn't. The suggestion may be that so long as you are conferring you won't go to war. Another suggestion is that an aggressor who wanted to go to war might decline to confer.
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