LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
" RECONVERSION " OR " REVIVAL "
Sm,—Prayers were offered in many Anglican churches on March lath, which was the day of St. Gregory, for " the reconversion of England."
The particularity of the phrase was arresting. To speak of the decay'
of religion and of the need for a " religious revival " has become so common that it has acquired almost the meaninglessness of a cliché.
Also, it is misleading. Between the concepts " religious revival " and " reconversion of England " there is a world of difference in atmosphere and assumption. Apart from the fact that a " religious revival " may be essentially, nothing more than a failure of nerve or an outburst of mass hysteria, a revival suggests something latent, whereas a reconversion implies something lost. And that, today, is the more accurate. As a recent correspondence in The Spectator established, not more than to per cent, of the population can be considered practising Christians of any de- nomination. The work of St. Gregory, who sent missionaries to the English, would seem to need doing again.
In other ways, " reconversion " is the better, because the more exact, phrase. It assumes an agent and an object—that is to say, the Church and its belief. It does not cloud the issue, as " revival" does, by allowing
emotional vagueness to pass itself off as dogmatic precision. The in- habitants of sixth-century England were not urged by Gregory's mis-
sionaries to subscribe to an ethical system or to emulate the piety of certain like-minded individuals. They were asked to accept a creed, taught with authority by a corporate body. And the need is not less today. For too long we have been living on inherited spiritual capital, and not the least disturbing aspect of the consequent bankruptcy is the facile hope that we can regain " Christian standards " while dispensing with Christian dogma.
There are many societies and individuals within the Church itself who are aware of this need and who see that the most urgent task is to make apparent the interconnexion of dogma, prayer and life. The Liturgical Movement, on one hand, and the Malvern Conference, on the other, are different approaches to the same problem which, on the Continent, has found something of a solution in Jocism.
This is not the place to elaborate the method, but only to call attention to the nature of the need. The setting apart of March 29th as a Day of National Prayer may have helped to focus that nature more sharply. It is not without significance that when, in the House of Commons on March t8th, one Member asked whether on this day " there would be issued an appeal to the nation to return to God with humble, penitent hearts," another Member interjected a request for " setting aside a day on which clergymen should do some work for the national effort." And it • was not felt to be odd that one of our legislators should show himself totally ignorant about the first principles of the Church's life.
It is too easy to sneer at the Day of National Prayer as being a mani- festation of that false conception of religion which has been so well described as " using God as a washing-well for preserving the status quo." But the Church might well insist that the laity should understand that, as far as she is concerned, every day is a day of prayer in which the needs of the whole nation are remembered before God in perpetual intercession ; that that, indeed, is one of the reasons why she exists, and that it is for that purpose she ha': set apart certain men.
She will indeed welcome to a corporate act of prayer all those who, self-divorced from her inner life, attended on March 29th from motives of convention or patr'otism or mere interested experimentalism. But in her enduring and universal calendar the important thing about March 29th was its being Palm Sunday. That is wktat she has to preach. If to the additional thousands who gathered in the churches on that day the despised " clergymen " made bold to explain simply, as missionaries instructing those without knowledge, what Palm Sunday is and what the rites connected with it mean, then something of the relation between dogma, prayer, and life might have become apparent to the congre- gations. Then a step would be taken towards the " reconversion of England." And in a reconverted England, a " revival " would be irrele- vant and a special " Day of National Prayer " an anachronism.—Yours, &c.,
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