'WITHOUT A HEARER ?'
SIR,—It seems, judging from the complaints of Mr. Vaughan Wilkes in your issue of October 14, that Church circles are still content to offer a sweeping diagnosis of our maladies, cap it with a patent medicine (the Church Militant), and not to question the health of the physician. If one is indeed prepared to accept the analy- sis of Mr. Vaughan Wilkes, it is still, surely, permissible to ask whether his thesis does not hang precariously on the assumption that the Church is not, in fact, largely responsible for the evil symptoms which he detects.
To accuse the Church of inactivity, lack of necessary aggressiveness or ignorance of the situation would, moreover, dangerously sim- plify the issue. The parish priest is still actively concerned with his flock, things religious are more, rather than less, accessible to the apathetic multitude, and, to judge from the religious life of this University—here by no means irrelevant—the missionary spirit is far from dead. And yet only the proselytism of Mr. Billy Graham seems to bear fruit. The weakness lies less in the failure of the Church to make itself heard above the worldly babble than in its ill-chosen techniques of communi- cation. From the fairy-story approach, and consequent impotence, of Sunday school teaching to the unreal traditionalism of parish (and university) sermons is a sad tale of good intentions bedevilled by anachronisms of vocabulary and Method. Regretfully or no, one must as yet question the capacity of the Church to attempt, let alone establish, an alternative to the tactics of American evangel- ism. Until experiments are made, to take the place of half-truths of diagnosis, one must, it seems, concur with Matthew Arnold that 'as lucidity is a condition from which the Chris- tianity of the future cannot escape, so it is a condition from which the Church and the clergy cannot escape either. At present they seem scarcely to • comprehend this.' — Yours faithfully, H. A. 1. DEANS St. John's College, Cambridge
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