THE GOSPELS RE-READ [To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR]
Sta,—Where, may I respectfully ask Mr. Joad, do the Gospels speak about " God% eternal punishment of sinners "? The Gospels, re-read, seem to point in another direction. " This is the condemnation, that Light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light." The slothful servant puts himself into the darkness by his love of sloth. Dives is where he is because of his love of luxury. Hell is the confusion which man by his own perversity brings upon himself. It is that " nemesis " which, as the Greek tragedians had earlier seen, dogs the heels of sin. " Things are what they are, and the consequences of things are what they will be." And mankind is permanently in debt to Christ for the courage, the candour, yes, and the " austerity," with which He has warned us against the danger of turning away from the light we possess, or of failing to use our opportunities of doing good.
The shallow optimist thinks to get rid of this darker side of life by negating it or explaining it away. One might with equal futility hope thus to get quit of the law of gravitation. The unique greatness of Christ is in the way He goes direct to the heart of the trouble. He deals a death-blow at sin by securing, at the cost of supreme sacrifice, its forgiveness.
Mr. Joad, in his re-reading of the Gospels, seems to have stopped short at the record of the Passion. But it is herein, with all its mystery, that man's hope is enshrined. For in Christ those who have known Him best have found God ; and at His Cross they have with adoring gratitude perceived that their sin can be put away.
It is here, therefore, that is to be sought the key to Mr. Joad's enigma of the Gospels, for it is the Cross that, against everything to the contrary, perpetually proves God's love. To the " intellectual " now, as in the apostolic age, the Cross is sometimes " foolishness." You cannot crunch Christianity into a smooth philosophy. It is all the time a valiant facing of facts about God and man. But it is the most reasonable thing in all the world that, if God loves us, He should will to redeem us. And, even though we are completely out of our depth as to the manner in which it has pleased Him to achieve this, we who accept the Gospel of the Cross know that whatever our past, the future is bright with an unquenchable hope.—I am,
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