The Dark Age
I Heard a Voice. By F. R. Barry. (Christophers.
THE Christian Church, to any sympathetic observer, is a heart- breaking institution. Christians themselves are more aware of this than those outside can be. But in an age that largely despairs of progress and is disillusioned about all political experiments, the Church is very certainly not futile; it has a word to say that is relevant to the present chaos, practical and full of hope. We can imagine some future historian into whose hands these two pamphlets had chanced to fall saying, " It was because the Christian Church gave this lead that civilisation sur- vived and was renewed through those years of war," or, alternatively, " It was because the men of that day would not listen to this message that civilisation collapsed and a Dark Age set in." The Church's first concern is not with politics and the salvaging of civilisation, but, if there be a God who, as Canon Barry says, is not interested only in religion but also, as Creator, in the whole of human life, then there can be no way out for humanity unless civilisation rest upon the fear of God. And, if there be no God, then God help us all!
Canon Barry would be the last to claim that he is saying any- thing new or distinctive in these pamphlets. He is saying— superlatively well—what Christian teachers all over the country are saying, only with less fire and force. The reader must not look here for theology in any technical sense nor for an expo- sition of the Gospel. The writer is concerned with the present crisis in history and with the hope of Christendom.
That foul and terrible thing sttich we cal. Nazidom is a symp- tom nearly as much as it is a cause. It is thrown up out of the dark sub-conscious depths of mass-resentment: into it has been poured all the revengefulness and hate and cruelty of disappointed and frustrated men who 'nave failed to find the true end of living, who have sought and found in - perverted loyalty the Satanic substitute for . true religion.
In his reprinted broadcast addresses, I Heard a Voice, Canon Barry pleads with passion that neutrality in religion is no longer possible. In Faith in Dark Ages he analyses our present plight, discusses the old problem of Christianity and Compromise, and opens the question of the working of the living God in history: " As we watch the triumph of the human spirit matching itself against such desperate odds, we know we are living in a new dimension. We are learning anew that the eternal order is man's
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