[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] Sxn,—Captain Powell's comments on
Dr. Barker's article on Communism seem to confuse the issues. We shall get no further if the protagonists on one side or the other continue to argue for this or that philosophy upon the ground that, its disciples do or do not live up to it. Men are often better than their unworthy creeds, and always worse than their noble ones ; and the point at issue is not how far Christians, whether lay or clerical, fail the Christian ideal, nor how often Communists are decent people in spite of their philosophy ; but what are the respective merits, as philosophies, of Chris- tianity and Communism. The Christian objection to Marx's dialectical materialism is that it flatly denies all spiritual values. It is not the social or political aspect of Communism that estranges a Christian, but that philosophical basis of crude materialism which Marx invented for its support, and his disciples still insist upon. The irreconcilable conflict between a spiritual and a material philosophy cannot be resolved, or in any way affected, by irrelevant instances of the failure of disciples to live up to their creeds.
Let it be granted that Christian Popes and priests have often been venal and corrupt, and Christian laymen often little better than heathens. Let (IS grant that Communists often argot., and even behave, as if they admitted the reality of an everlasting, transcendental difference between right and wrong. Their respective creeds leave them both equally without philosophical or logical defence. It only means. what every student of human nature knows, that men will always succumb to their natural instincts when they find their creeds too difficult to put into practice. But that does not mean that it does not matter what a man's creed is. For the leaders of men take their philosophies seriously, and will teach this or that according to their creeds, and their teaching will lead to a popular bias in favour of a spiritual or a material ideology. Now Christian ideology, however far Christians fail it, does " make for righteousness." Materialism, at best, can only make for material well-being. It cannot make for righteousness because it does not believe that there is "any sieh thing," and it must inevitably and for ever be repudiated by those for whom spiritual values are the final and eternal Reality. Perhaps, as Mr. Hamilton Fyfe contends, Dr. Barker's definition of " Faith " (belief in the invisible) is not quite complete, but surely Mr. Hamilton Fyfe is seeking to prejudice the issue when he says faith in human nature is finer and more creative " than the faith which the school- boy" (who must be grown-up by this time) " pungently defined as belief in what you know to be untrue." But that was not Dr. Barker's definition of Faith, so Mr. Hamilton Fyfe's schoolboy is beside the mark. But if Dr. Barker limited unduly the meaning of faith, Mr. Hamilton leyfe certainly unduly extends it when he applies it to all sorts of things outside the main issue between the two philosophies. You may have faith in anything—in a flutter on the Stock Exchange, or a patent medicine, or a dictator, or a rope, but such trivial faiths are hardly more irrelevant to the contro- versy than Mr. Hamilton Fyfc's faith in "equality of chances." Faith is backing your " intuition " further than your logic will take you, whether it be faith in God or faith in man ; and there is no Irian who has not had to do that again and again from the day that he groped for the breast as a new- born child. But the faith that Dr. Barker had in mind, as relevant to the controversy, was quite obviously men's faith in their intuitions of God.—! am, Sir, yours faithfully, Ecchinswell house, Newbury. A. IRVING MUNTZ.
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