SIR,—Unless the Dean of St. Paul's claims that the Archbishops,
or the Church, or even the Dean himself, have absolute knowledge of the Nature of God he is bound to admit that the Spirit of God is ever seeking to lead us into fuller knowledge of the Divine nature. It is not difficult to imagine that had our present Archbishops been in office at the end of the eighteenth century, when the majority of churchmen saw no contradiction between the fact of slavery and their knowledge of the nature of God, the archiepiscopal comment upon the action of Wilberforce and his associates might well have been : " For some liberation is a genuine vocation." Even so there might have been a Dean of St. Paul's to declare the impossibility of such a voca- tion because the principle was false, as indeed the majority of ecclesi- astics believed it to be. That is not the first time, nor the last, that a minority, courageous in both thought and action, has proved to be the occasion of a fuller understanding of the nature of God. Surely we are not to understand that the Dean regards this as a " comic " speculation?
The confusion, which seems to arise solely from the fact that the Dean, unlike the Archbishops, is assured that the principle of pacifi- cism is flatly contrary to the nature of God, is intensified by the Principal of Ripon Hall, who seeks to prove the error of pacificism by the unsupported statement that pacificist propaganda was one of the causes of the present war. This is to confuse pacificism with the general desire to avoid war and promote peace which is characteristic of our country. On the basis of this false premise, Principal Major would deny to pacificists that right to utter their conscientious convictions which, presumably, Dean Matthews accepts.
I venture to believe that .many a plain man is deeply thankful that the Archbishops have recognised the vainer of the witness of the pacificists even though they themselves cannot- follow that way.— Yours faithfully, E. BENSON PERKINS. 23 Hawthorn Lane, Wilmslow, Manchester.
[This correspondence is now closed.—ED., The Spectator.]
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