[To THE EDITOR Or THE " SPECTATOR. " )
Sin,--The following extract from a letter recently received from a private in France so entirely endorses Mr. Ellis's letter in your issue of June 9th that I hope that you will find room for its insertion. The writer is an agnostic, whose attitude may be summed up in his own words: " I should have no inclination to contend against the Christianity of Hankey. I admire it and like it so greatly that I should hate to try and contradict it, although to me it carries no logical conviction." He proceeds as follows :-- " What seizes me most regarding Christianity (the Churches, I should say) after the war is the grotesque blasphemous absurdity cf pampered young curates and bigoted smug young ministers— whose cloth, or aspiration to it, saved them, young and fit, from the Army—standing up to tell the returned fighters how Christ gave His life to save men . . . the one who was too valuable to God to risk his skin . . . the others who know the Via Crucis and Calvary in their own flesh. It is unthinkable. I can't help feeling bitter about it."
The Archbishops can yet redeem the situation, and relieve what te most of the younga clergy must be an intolerable strain. The clergy, who might have been out here but have not, will speak to the fighting men as out of a dead generation, and in an unknown language. There will be no recollection, as my friend's letter indicates, of Bishops' orders—only of the fact that they did not seme. And it is not too late. A letter received the same week from a friend in South Africa tells of a large assortment of their spiritual pastors and masters sailing at once for the front, and this in a diocese with about a hundred priests. It tells of the diocese buying motors and motor-cycles to enable parishes to be combined, of services cut down, and adds: " It is going to he the making of the laity, I fancy, and (low be it said!) of the clergy who go! " May I add one word? The ranks of the R.A.M.C. or at the fighting units are still open. Service in the Church Army or Y.M.C.A. huts (to which many are now coming) is better than nothing, but it is not there that you will find a single other fit and healthy man of military age.—I am, Sir, &e., A CHAPLAIN TO THE FORMS. B.E.F.
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