FEEDING THE LIONS SIR,—In her apology to Lady Wootton, Monica
Furlong explains her irresponsible misstatement by saying that she was left in 'an absurdly highly-strung condition' after reading the '162 pages of closely- packed anti-Christian propaganda' that make up the first four-fifths of my Humanist Anthology.
These offending pages begin with extracts from Lao Tzu, Confucius, Pericles. Epicurus. Mencius, Cicero, Lucretius, Seneca, Plutarch, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. To call this 'anti-Christian propaganda' is surely an extreme application of the principle that he that is not for us is against. us. Among the later authors quoted are (to select some typical figures) Montaigne, Spinoza, Voltaire, Hume, Adam Smith, Gibbon, Paine, John Stuart Mill, Darwin, Freud, Gilbert Murray, Bertrand Russell, Einstein and E. M. Forster. There is certainly con- siderable criticism of Christianity, but Mrs. Furlong's statement that the first 162 pages of the Anthology contain nothing else is quite untrue.
In any case, why should anti-Christian polemic he called propaganda, while anti-Humanist polemic (such as Monica Furlong's review) is called fair criticism?
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