WHAT WILL JONES SWALLOW?
SIR,—After enjoying last Christmas the rare pleasure' of listening to Mr. Henry Fairlie opening a sale of work in his ancestral Nonconformist chapel, was interested to sec him speak up in the Spectator for the conservation of the Church of England, and her preservation from all awkward questions. But his blast of the orthodox trumpet, directed at the Modern Churchmen's Union, comes rather too easily.
Spending much of his time among politicians, whose instinct is to blur meaning in the interests of mass persuasion rather than to refine it in the interests of truth, Mr. Fairlie appears to suppose that the 'success' or 'failure' of a Christian church may best be judged by the enthusiasm of its party workers for its constitution, or by its standing in some celestial opinion poll.
But it is more difficult than that. Christians in the modern world are required to decide, without relying on supernatural leaks from one of Mr. Fairlie's authoritative sources, why they believe that a faith which is historically questionable, philosophically inconsistent and morally eccentric is nevertheless true. Reading the same newspaper reports as Mr. Fairlie, I took it that the Modern Churchmen were facing up to this problem. Perhaps if your contribu- tor had not (as it appears) forsaken Presbyterian theological sobriety for alien ecclesiastical intoxi- cants, he would have had an inkling of what a theo- logian as subtle and sensitive as Ian Ramsey was talking about.
CHRISTOPHER DRIVER
6 Church Road, Highgate, N6
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