A SPECTATOR 'S NOTEBOOK
OCCUPIED part of the week-end with reading Lord Vansittart's
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Lessons of My Life, some aspects of which Mr. Harold Nicolson discussed in The Spectator last week. Lord Vansittart's general thesis is familiar, and fundamentally I agree with it, though he needs to realise how narrow is the division between a philippic and a tirade. What interested me particularly was the excursion into theology in his chapter on " The Future of Faith." He admits that it is with some trepidation that he here ventures outside his own sphere, and the emotion is not perhaps entirely superfluous. To say that " German faith has removed no mountains save its neigh- bours' landmarks. There is a Christian curse on that practice," raises some doubts ; the Higher Criticism is responsible for many innovations, but it has not yet, so far as I know, moved the Book of Deuteronomy into the New Testament. The statement that Christianity enjoins forgiveness of our enemies " only on condition— and that condition is repentance," provokes other questions. Does the teaching of Christ enjoin that? I can remember no such con- dition attached, for example, to the answer to Peter's question about how often he should forgive his neighbour who sinned against him. Human forgiveness conditional on repentance postulates a power which no man possesses to judge of the quality of repentance. Again, when Lord Vansittart, quoting some preacher's words about " what John Wesley called ' offering them Christ,'" asks "cannot the offer be the practical Christ that can be harmonised with practical politics? " he comes perilously near suggesting the adaptation of the eternal to suit the changing exigencies of the temporal. Reichbishop Muller and his German Christians know all there is to know about that.
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Or, one point I can reassure Lord Vansittart. He complains both of the embarrassing doggerel of most hymns currently sung and of the sterility of the Lessons read in churches. On the hymns I should be prepared to defend Watts and Wesley and Addison, among others, against most rivals, but let me take up the other challenge, about the Lessons. " The Testaments, Old and New," says Lord Vansittart most justly, " are full of the finest poetry in the world. Ypt how seldom do we get the best of this wealth of choice? We must be content with dearth, when all the best of Job and Isaiah and Paul is waiting to delight the ear. How often do we get such loveliness as the last two chapters of Ecclesiastes, one of the great thrills of literature? " The answer to the last question is simple. We get it regularly once a year on the Sunday before Advent. We certainly get all the best of Isaiah and Paul throughout the year. Of Job, we get chapters t, 8, 19 and 29 at Mattins and more (including the magnificent description of a mine in chapter 28) at Evensong. I am speaking of the Lectionary in the 1928 Prayer Book, but the older Table of Lessons meets Lord Vansittart's needs equally. Can Job and Isaiah and Paul be " wait- ing to delight the car" because the ear is otherwise engaged?
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In the address he gave to the Classical Association at Cambridge a fortnight ago, M. Demetrius Caclamanos, the former Greek Minister in London, told a suggestive story which deserves wider circulation. M. Venizelos, it seems, made a translation of Thucydides into modern Greek. At one time, while he was in exile during a dictatorial regime in Greece, the secret police got hold of the manuscript. The regime then in power had already excised Pericles' Funeral Oration from school editions of Thucydides " in order to preserve the minds of youth from the contamination of the principles of human dignity and freedom." (The effect of that, incidentally, was an abnormal demand on the bookshops for the History of the Peloponnesian War, unexpurgated). As for the Venizelos translation, the police, having seized it, put it in a bag and hid the bag in the basement of a police-station, where by a fortunate chance it was subsequently discovered, after its author's death, by some normally democratic official, who gave it to the Greek-states- man's widow ; M. Caclamanos himself has since had the translation published in this country by the Oxford University Press. M. Venizelos, it may be added, had intended to write a commentary on the political and social aspects of Thucydides, based on his own wide experience. Unfortunately, he did not live to do that.
I thought (and hoped) that with the demise of the still-born University of Sulgrave we had got to the end of the degree-peddling business so far as this country was concerned. The College of Divine Metaphysics, Incorporated, of Indianapolis, with an " English Branch office " at Boscombe, Bournemouth, had not yet swum into my ken. It is a " religious educational institution" running corre- spondence courses mostly at 5o dollars, or £12, a course. Their range may be indicated by the fact that the syllabus of the Meta- physical Healing Course includes " The Good of God in Foods," " The Perfect Christ Body," "Inmost Spiritual Breath," and "The Cure of Kidney and Bladder Trouble." The degrees of Ps.D. (Doctor of Psychology), Ms.D. (Doctor of Metaphysics), and, needless to say. D.D., are conferred. I must not forget the "Psychology of Business Success " courses, which include four lectures on intuition and two on The Master Man. There must be a branch at Berchtesgaden as well as at Boscombe—where, by the way, at 20 Gordon Road, a Dr. E. A. Quinion accepts remittances.
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I should not dream of calling Colonel McCormick, proprietor of the Chicago Tribune, a grotesque person, but he unquestionably harbours strange ideas, for apparently his suggestion that Anglo- American co-operation should be achieved and crystallised through the entry of the nations of the British Commonwealth into the American Union is intended to be taken seriously. There is full provision, says the expansive Colonel, in the American Constitution for the admission of new States, and although Great Britain would have to give up royalty and all that, a constitutional king doesn't mean very much anyway. He means, in fact, things that Col. McCormick would never understand.
* * * Writing last week of Brigadier Kisch, I mentioned that he had desired to acquire Palestinian nationality if it could be done without sacrificing British nationality. I am reminded that Col. Kisch, as he then was, explained in his Palestine Diary that he did, in fact, acquire Palestinian nationality in November, 1926, and was thereupon required to surrender his British passport. It was not till January, 1929, that the passport was returned, the Home Office and the Law Officers of the Crown having by that time decided that acquisition of Palestinian nationality did not annul British nationality.
JANus.
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