Under Thirty Page
CAN I BE A CHRISTIAN ?-VII
[The writer is a member of a Cambridge women's college] ALTHOUGH I recognise myself to be insufficiently equipped for such a task, being a very young under-thirty of nineteen years of age, I feel I must take up the challenge "Is no one at Cambridge interested in Christianity ? " Cambridge fortunately lacks notoriety for its religious activities ; but that the present generation of her undergraduates has a very real interest in Christianity can be proved by a visit to any of the Cambridge churches or College Chapels on every Sunday of term.
My own interest is that of a good many of my immediate contemporaries : anxious, eager, groping, muddle-headed. We recognise that the Christian code of ethics is more vital, more ethical than that of any other system of morals proposed by any other philosopher from Plato to Marx. Yet we cannot accept the mystical foundation of Christianity, the theology which is the basis of its ethical teaching. We cannot repeat with any real conviction : "I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic Church ; the Communion of Saints ; the Forgiveness of sins ; the Resurrection of the body, and the Life Everlasting." In the words of Abelard, we cannot "hold our Faith firmly in our minds," nor learn "to accept with profit that which cannot be explained."
What has led to this deplorable "middle state" of being neither sinner nor saint, neither atheist nor Christian, this condition of compromise which Dante rightly punishes with the pains of hell ? For myself, I do not believe that the blame is entirely mine. I struggle hard, through the diversion and toil of university life, to clarify my ideas, to discover what I think, what I believe, and why. But the task is difficult : I have no training in the subject and there seems no one to help. This at least is my experience of those who have tried to guide my groping steps.
My parents have never attempted to instruct or influence me in religious Matters. They left that to those whom they considered better qualified for the task : school divinity mistresses and the Ministers of the Anglican Church. Of the former, those I have met (I have probably been unfor- tunate) have been delightful women, but totally incompetent as teachers of Christianity. Their mode of attack was either dreary emotionalism of the Holman Hunt type, which swept many of my friends into an hysterical desire for con- firmation at the age of fourteen, or a dry-as-dust com- mentary on the text of the Old Testament, totally lacking in any inspiration whatsoever. From both my mind revolted, and I led a small party of rebels who took Bernard Shaw as their master, and a form of bear-baiting as their tactics. There were women whose well-trained minds and knowledge of philosophy, both ancient and modern, equipped them admirably for religious instruction ; so we discovered afterwards, for school etiquette unfortunately excluded them from expressing their views : they belonged to the Roman Catholic Faith.
So I left school, convinced that Christianity had nothing to offer me, and plunged headlong into University life. Contacts with the minds of some of the leading thinkers of the day, especially on my own subject of history ; decisions to be taken on the leading problems of today and yesterday ; it is difficult to find a path through the overwhelming, powerful wilderness. I had to learn to assimilate a confusion of vital knowledge : nibblings at the greater and lesser philosophers, Aristotle, Plato, Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abelard, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Bacon, Marx, Rosenberg : the tangled mass of politics past and present, from Herr Hitler's seizure of Austria to the distant struggle of Empire and Papacy in the Middle Ages. If my words and phrases are incoherent, they are but a reflection of the morass that is my mind. It did not take long to realise that the pungent witticisms and vague intellectual mysticism of Bernard Shaw were of no help at all. My confidence in the self-sufficiency of the individual and the force of human reason began to fade before my own failure to cope with the wealth of new experi- ence, both emotional and intellectual, that I met. I discussed my muddle with friends of my own age. at first diffidently, then fiercely, always gropingly. It was a case of the blind kading the blind.
As an historian, I had to admit that we might have missed the real point of Christianity : a religion that had survived the vicissitudes of two thousand years must have something in its appeal that is vital and powerful, something that has been lost for us by the slip-shod methods of our teachers. They had never taught us the story of the struggles and puzzles of heretics like ourselves which had repeated themselves with endless monotony throughout the Christian era ; never rated us for our want of faith, nor discovered to us the fact that there was an intellectual approach to religion, so much saner, clearer and stronger than the emotional appeal. Abelard wrote of Christ as the incarnation of the Logos, the eternal wisdom of God ; how much greater was his conception than the nauseating Beverley Nichols attitude, of Christianity being a more potent drug than any other. Yet this latter facet of the Christian religion was the one which had always been stressed, much to our burning indignation.
Still, criticism of others is little help in one's own dilemmas, and we had to make up our minds as best we could on our own attitude towards an unkindly world that threatened to destroy without warning the individual pattern of our lives.
Of what use were our elders in our distress ? There wa; the Church, of course, which we had hitherto despised : emotional comfort and tranquillity we found in the smooth perfection of the services of King's Chapel. It was at best what we most despised, a sort of drug to dull our questioning minds. There were, too, the Ministers of the Church. Those whom we met proved, like the divinity mistresses, delightful as individuals, hopelessly incompetent as expounders of Christianity. They always "talked down," insulted our intelligence with meaningless platitudes or empty rhetoric, either because we were young or because their village or suburban congregation as a whole lacked education. How- ever, preaching is a difficult business, and young minds are intensely critical ; putting aside individuals, considering the Church as a whole, I still find it a failure as a leader of youth. I cannot remember a single crisis, of greater or lesser degree, when the Church has given an authoritative statement of its position that one could hang on to as a rock of security. To take three examples, A. P. Herbert's Divorce Bill, the Abdication, the increased recruitment for the Army and the problem of War : on none of these questions has the Church taken vigorous, decided action which might serve as a guide to troubled and anxious Christians.
Youth needs leadership : the example of the Fascist countries proves that. In nothing do we need it more than in this difficult matter of religion ; and, in my poor harassed judgement, our own native Church of England fails us there.
I fear my opinions are crudely expressed and ill-formed, with all the violence and rudeness that belongs to the very young who are not quite sure of themselves. If this article testifies to my own lack of experience and powers of thought, I hope at any rate that it proves the existence of a very real, if troubled, interest in Christianity at the University of Cambridge.
[The final article on this subject will appear next week. The next series will be entitled " The Use of Leisztre."J
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