Bivine intervention?
Sir: Your two Devizes correspondents (April 3) would have Her Majesty, as Head of the Church of England, order a day of prayer in order to seek divine guidance in the momentous issue of affirming our membership of the EEC. "The foolishness of God," they say, "is wiser than men." This may be so but surely a little scepticism may be pardoned when we think of the dire catastrophies that have blighted His two great annual festivals (the Darwen disaster at Christmas and of course cruel chaos in Cambodia and Vietnam over Easter). In an extraordinarily relevant passage on the alleged Divine intervention in human affairs Richard Jefferies in The Story of My Heart wrote: "A man of intellect and humanity could cause everything to happen in an infinitely superior way". Jefferies believed there was no hope of curing the foolishness of man so long as the alibi of overall ordainment by God existed. Denying that any intelligence whatever interferes in human affairs, he adds in a noble passage: "Consider only the fates which overtake the little children. Human suffering is so great, so endless, so awful that I can hardly write of it. I could not go into hospitals and face it, as some do, lest my mind should be temporarily., overcome. The whole and the worst the worst pessimist can say is far beneath the least particle of the truth, so immense is the misery of man."
G. Reichardt 12a Mount Pleasant Road, Poole
Previous page
