Most of the country near London may be classed as Greater London. One is still among the factories or in a suburb. But the county of Ladbrokeshire is rural, remarkably intact, and only a county or two away from the capital. If I feel I have rotted long enough in Rotting Hill, if I want to be where the Machine Age has not dirtied the buttercups or choked the throat of a cow with soot, I go up into Ladbrokeshire.

    Last summer I found myself in the ancient township of Blatchover, and at the top of the hill got out and entered Blatchover Church. I know nothing of the history of Ladbrokeshire and imagine that it must have had a period of great prosperity judging from its churches. The wool-trade probably would be responsible for this, around the time England was freeing itself from exploitation by the Hanseatic League and ceasing to be just a “wool-farm” for the Germans. Cloth merchants were responsible for the building of fine churches in other parts of England; their presence in Ladbrokeshire, in their burgess “halls”, was doubtless the reason for this crop of rectories and vicarages. Blatchover was, seemingly, a skinners’ town, and I suppose the church is the work of the Skinners’ Guild.

    Inside it is one of the most beautiful churches I know. Gilded banners of the apostles, showing their bearded figures in blues and blacks, with patches and strips of icy white, depend the entire length of the chancel, which has two ornate chapels on either side of it. Such embellishments, for there are many others, including a large and beautifully carved Pietà, and a Bavarian Madonna, bequeathed by a refugee, furnish it handsomely as well as visibly sanctify it. But without the hanging banners and carved pillars it would be a rich and splendid interior. In this church Robert Blaise, the former vicar, who was a peculiarly liberal cleric, at a certain moment installed the Red Flag—perhaps among these saintly banners, I do not know. On the South Wall is the chapel of John Ball, one of the inspirers of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. History is full of rhymes, and one of the first to be impressed upon our infant memory is one that this aggressive priest borrowed from the German.

    When Adam delved and Eve span,

    Who was then the gentleman?

    Dick Bartleton, the present incumbent, is almost as liberal as his predecessor. He follows Ball in believing that “Things will never go well in England so long as goods be not in common”. Upon a table, not far from the Chapel of John Ball, is a great deal of inexpensive literature reflecting the same priestly abhorrence of property shown by Ball. You may buy, for a penny or two, little pamphlets explaining that socialism is identical with the teaching of Christ. (With this, I may say, I am in complete agreement.) Dick Bartleton, in a little brochure of his own, describes how a believer in Christ ought to vote. “Jesus was a partisan: he did not hesitate to take his stand with the weaker side. He ranged himself fearlessly upon the side of the oppressed and the exploited, and condemned the exploiter and the master-class. We, as Christians, must follow the example of Jesus Christ.” As I have always hated any government, and despised any employer, and have always been exploited, I was of course glad to see Dick ranging Jesus on our side. I hoped he was not making any exceptions in favour of some governments.

    Straight-from-the-shoulder Dick Bartleton preaches a grand sermon, they say. He has one of the saints of revolution in his South Wall and he, too, teaches that nothing will ever go well in England until goods are held a great deal more in common than is the case at present. In the social history of England in these years it is worthy of note how many clergy—both clergymen and ministers—are at least as economically “advanced” as is the present Government. Some even are open and declared members of the communist party. (How they reconcile Marxist materialism with the Christian idealism I cannot guess.) A socialist society exists of Anglican clergymen, whose delegate at a recent Paris conference was a Sheffield clergyman married to a Bishop’s daughter. This phenomenon should be compared with the attitude of the French priesthood before the French Revolution.

    I left Blatchover’s beautiful church with regret. That night I passed at Meldrum not far away, and from that place drove over next morning to visit a clergyman of a very different type from the Vicar of Blatchover, yet equally, if not more, unconventional. It is this clergyman, the Reverend Matthew Laming, and the story of his rebellion, which are the subject of the present chapter. It is far more usual to find a contemporary clergyman agreeing with the powers that be, than to find one in active opposition. Matthew Laming is not unique, but he is one of a small number of country clergy attempting to stem the socialist tide. It is only worth while putting this episode on record because it demonstrates how futile any such resistance has become. It seems to me I am ideally suited to report objectively this conflict between a centralizing Government and a dissident country clergyman. For my part the English village is only a pathetic relic; it depresses me rather, so there is no sentiment to bias me there. Then centralization is not a thing to which I personally am averse. Further, I regard centralization as quite inevitable—which is of some importance. On the other hand I admire this resister: and many of his beliefs I share—his attitude to war, for instance, is almost identical with my own. I meet very few people in England who think intelligently about war. Most stick their chests out. Perhaps the best way to give an idea of Laming’s quality would be to quote from the editorial of the Meldrum Deanery Magazine, which is from his pen. We have Dick Bartleton with his primitive interpretation of Christianity, and then Rymer elsewhere, with his highly personal version of the same religion; Laming is quite distinct from either of these—not primitive at all, holding more to the traditional substance of the Catholic Church: but in Laming’s case, a minority economics of a most violent kind complicates his traditionalism, and, at the moment, causes him to occupy a far more revolutionary position than the popular leftism of Dick Bartleton. Yet in both his case and Dick’s the aggravating cause and prime incentive is Christianity.

    Here then are the passages from the editorial, headlined “Remembrance”, for it is a short sermon for Flanders Poppy day.

    “We misuse this solemn season unless we make the effort to reflect on some of the causes that produce the catastrophes. ‘What is the use of experience if you do not reflect?’ Anatole France’s L’Ile des Pinguins had a great sale in France about 1908, but the lesson of the following extract was not understood: ‘These are doubtless,’ replied the interpreter, ‘industrial wars. People without commerce and industry are not obliged to make war but business people must perforce have a policy of conquest. Our wars increase in number, necessarily, along with our productive activity. When one of our industries cannot dispose of its product you have to make a war to open new markets. Thus, this year, we have had a coal war, a copper war, and a cotton war. In Third-Zealand we have killed off two-thirds of the natives in order to force the remainder to buy umbrellas and braces.’ The endeavour was made between two wars to explain why industries are unable to dispose of their products in the home market, but counter-efforts were made to suppress rather than to spread the truth that the chief reason was the restriction of buying-power.

    “Murder, after all, is repellent to the Christian conscience, but through some natural or injected perversity it is too readily assumed that mass murder is justifiable and that any analysis of the causes of mass murder deeper than those of a hysterical press is indecent and irrelevant to the Church’s work. Yet Christian ethics are no more confined to the Seventh Commandment (against adultery) than the American Constitution is confined to the Eighteenth Amendment (against alcohol).

    “Here are some lines written in 1938 on ‘The Silence in Britain’. The author believed it would be the last Silence:

    ‘A million of our dead to make us free,

    Whose dying marked the path of usury.

    Eight thousand million pounds they cost to kill

    Eight thousand pounds per man each grave to fill…

    And on that scale full interest we’ve paid:

    Six thousand million pounds in twenty years,

    Cash value of the Nation’s blood and tears.

    As tribute from war’s wild and bloody reek

    Each corpse still yields them seven pounds a week.’

    “As the old fallacies are readily embraced by almost every politician, as the effort to stamp out small villages goes almost unchecked, as the ‘first fruit and flower’ who might put things right have been destroyed, the commonwealth defence system is liquidated from within and from without.” He concludes as follows:

    “The issue is put candidly by a well-known critic and reformer: ‘It is clear beyond question that the gates of hell are wide open, and the torrent of evil will sweep away anything not intrinsically stronger than evil.’ We need to search our own consciences to decide whether we are intrinsically stronger than evil and to turn our backs on tainted public ‘servants’ and tarnished principles that have bedevilled our land for so many, many years—the architects of ruin.” The passage continues: “You know that long-distance air-pilots mark on their course-charts the ‘point of non-return’—where you must go on, because you can’t return to your base. The devil has passed the point of non-return and we had better recognize it.”

    Now of course this extract consists mainly of quotations. It is perhaps a vocational trick, but it is a method to which the Reverend Matthew Laming, Vicar of Ketwood, frequently has recourse. He will conceal himself in a cloud of quotations, in the way a clergyman’s admonitions reach us in the form of a hail of judgements picked out of sacred texts. It is his voice, but the words are those of the saints and prophets, and of God Himself.

    But there is another thing. Laming has no desire to say, “This is what I think, this is what I say.” It is what IS that interests him, not what is Laming’s, what a multitude of elect witnesses from the past and in the present day recognized as real. Such is the nature of his speech, for he is quite a modest man, and not interested to set up a personal mind: he prefers a common currency. He is a priest, that is enough for him. And in his principal work so far (unpublished, for it is one of those books which publishers recoil from at the impact of the first sentence and upon first sighting the subject-matter in the Contents page), The English Church and Usury, it is as a priest he writes. He is sometimes an almost embarrassingly unassuming man. He is no Prince Hamlet, to use a phrase of a contemporary poet, just a quiet background gentleman, coming on the scene with a deeply courteous aloofness. Then from this secondary figure, destined for silence it would seem, proceed to issue words—many words. These words lay bare the roguery of practically all the leading characters. This is not a Thersites act at all: this anomalous background gentleman in a quiet undertone carries on a shocked soliloquy. None of the other characters pay any attention to him. So in his writing he most exactly talks to himself—and perhaps to posterity. For one day I expect, his history of Usury may be unearthed, in a world grown liberal once more; a faded text, in the by then almost invisible typescript. I am supposing that it will come into the possession of a historian. “History” will not, of course, to the men of that time signify a fairy-tale of the past, composed as a department of propaganda, but be a matter of impartial factual research, as disinterested and unbiased as an ethnological treatise. Let us go a step farther with this imaginary historian of the future, and say that he has just completed a massive work, the title of which is to be Causes for the Eclipse of the Christian Nations of the West. It might well be that after perusing Laming’s typewritten analytical account of the origin and development of Usury, this poor man would consign to the dustbin what he had written.

    Here we have been assuming among many other things that to our historian of a distant future none of the Social Credit material of the past forty years is available. I hope I shall not be seeming to tone down my estimate of Laming’s book if I say I am not claiming that it is a master-work. After all it is but an enlargement of a university “thesis”. It is the subject-matter which is of such overwhelming significance, that alone is what would attract the historian, more especially when, as in this case, it is handled with exceptional skill. Finally, this is not to be understood as saying that I subscribe to the social theories of the “Creditors”, or regard the solution they favour as valid, only that the condition to which they persistently call attention appears at least as blood-curdling to me as it does to them.

    The word “usury”, it must be realized, does not refer to that minor nuisance, the trade done beneath the familiar sign of a trinity of brass balls. The Banks and Insurance Companies, the coiners of false credit, the whole of the iniquitous Credit system, is what is involved—the chairman of your bank is an arch-usurer. And somewhere stands the Minotaur at the heart of the labyrinth. Obviously what Debt has done to ruin our civilization cannot possibly be exaggerated. A great War means a great Debt. And there is now so vast a mountain of Debt that we merely exist in order to pay it off, which, slave as we may, day and night, we can never do.

    In the editorial I have quoted we saw the gates of Hell wide open, and out of them streaming the legions of the Fiend. “We need to search our conscience,” he says, “to decide whether we are intrinsically stronger than evil.” Evil is admittedly strong: have we in our moral nature enough of evil’s opposite to overcome this enormous onslaught rushing at us out of the gates of Hell? That is the question. Up to a point, only, is “evil” for Laming what it is for Dick Bartleton. And I am sure the latter would be apt to welcome as a Saviour what in Laming’s eyes would be the Fiend. Their resemblances and differences are equally striking, the simple—not to say simpliste—contrast of the rich man and the poor man—the Haves and the Have-nots would hardly suffice as a complete picture of the ills of the world for Laming: though (in the above quotation) the instigators of the coal wars, the copper wars, and the umbrella wars are the same as they would be for Bartleton. There, their villains would be the same villains. Laming is interested in many more things than the other and he worries about many more things. In the end, his economics do become hostile to any cut-and-dried “working-class-in-power” theorists. That is not because the working-class is not in his heart: but talking about that exclusively is a way of banishing so many other questions.

    I stayed at “The Maid’s Head” at Meldrum that night, having arranged for a car to call at ten, for the five-or six-mile drive to Ketwood. During breakfast a man at a neighbouring table addressed some remarks to me, and after a little he said he was a farmer. His farm was in Northampton. He had just returned from a holiday at Bournemouth. And now he had somehow got to Meldrum—perhaps sightseeing, hoping to see the famous Caves. It transpired that he was fond of music. We are all of course devoted to it—except when someone in the next flat turns on a radio—which is mostly off and on all day—and music is certainly the noisiest of the arts. But this man played himself.

    His instrument was the violin which he practised from two to six hours daily. I asked him if he had any stock. No, he had no stock. “Not a horse?” At the word horse this musical farmer’s big red shiny face (oval in shape with a small dark moustache) acquired an expression at once surprised and disgusted. “No, I would not have a horse on the place,” he told me. When I asked why, the main reason seemed to be because it was an animal. Horses had to be fed and cleaned, at awkward hours—in the early morning for instance. A hired man had to get to the farm before anyone else was up if one had a horse (while one was still dreaming in a Heal bed of Beethoven Quartets) and the hired man didn’t like it either.

    It was a new experience for me encountering prosperous middle-aged farmers, with oiled hair but tight and ungainly clothes—far from their farms, drifting around the countryside en touriste with a favourite pet hound and (doubtless) a violin-case.

    As to the driver of the car who took me to Ketwood after breakfast—a man of robust intelligence—his views on the modern farmer were extreme in character and communicated with great readiness. There was nothing he could find too bad to say about the modern farmer. When I enquired if there was much stock in these parts he exclaimed derisively: “Stock?” No, he said, no young farmer would have anything to do with stock. They did everything, the farmers of today, on their backsides on a machine. Sowing, reaping, hoeing, harrowing, ploughing, was all done with a machine. As to the combine harvester, there is no more criticised implement, and he had plenty to say about that. Only signing a cheque couldn’t be done with a machine—and that was all the work a young farmer ever did, and it was as much as he could manage.

    Rymer had insisted that the farms must be run as factories. Since the poetry of farming has vanished, or is vanishing, anyway, it does not seem to matter very much if collective farming is introduced at once. It would, of course, be more economic. I would never sacrifice poetry to economics. But since there is no poetry! To this, however, Laming would not agree, though he confirmed that the young farmers were very averse to having stock. Those large work-making quadrupeds, horses and cattle, were universally unpopular in this neighbourhood. But my driver was an almost Ruskinian “reactionary”: of the new-fangled schools the Government were introducing he disapproved as much as did Laming, though no doubt for different reasons.

    Ketwood Vicarage is not screened from the road. The front door was open and the sound of the car’s arrival brought to the door a small shirt-sleeved reddish man—with the general working-class appearance imposed on a class whose stipend amounts to the earnings of a not very lucky railway porter. How much better, this, than the well-heeled patronising cleric of the past, who treated his villagers as if they were villeins and he a medieval abbot.

    This shirt-sleeved man, standing just inside his door, looked at me as I came up with some severity, indeed with suspicion and animosity. (I had not announced my arrival.) He stood there, his small head thrust forward in displeased enquiry. “Yes?” he said. “Mr. Laming?” said I. “That is my name,” said he, and stood frowning at me. And this is where I reach the part this young clergyman was playing in the civil war between the old order and the new order. He was in the midst of an encounter with the Socialist Government: the issue that of the continued existence of the Village School. In respect to that he stood for the old order: for the Family against the State, and he mistook me, at first, for an emissary of the Socialists. Such persons were often despatched from the offices of the local education Czar, and even from London itself, to harry, to intimidate or to cajole. How he received these officers might be judged from his bellicose attitude as in the present instance he stood on guard just inside his front door.

    It is amusing to compare the weight of the respective parties to this battle. On the one side is the terrible colossus of socialism: on the other this frail, impecunious, clerc. It is extraordinary how this small animal, without I expect any serious backing, can defy the omnipotent State—even if it is only as yet omnipotent-in-the-making. But he is possessed of a great deal of will and his entire being has been hardened into a resistant human particle in the social body by the agency of an economic creed both aggressive and unorthodox. It is, of course, the Christian ethic, as interpreted by this professional of religion, which has produced an unbreakable belief, at once mystical and practical. He believes—in as radical a sense as that of physical apprehension—that it is an evil impulse on the part of the Government to break up the villages and to turn all of England into a factory—to break up the home of the peasant—to work for the destruction of the Family. Two creeds combine to assure him of the malignity of this action.

    Laming is much younger than the other clergyman of whom I have written, much more the modern intellectual. His wife is a very handsome young woman, with the brave and simple carriage of the head, the fresh fair skin, of a pre-Raphaelite creation. So he is not, after all, alone in his village-school battle. And he has a perfect army of chickens, geese, ducks, and goats. This host is visible the moment you step out of the road into the Vicarage precinct. A background as reassuring as a private army. His wife rather weakened this impression for me, however, by complaining that he would never allow any of the birds to be killed!

    The London papers had most of them carried accounts of the struggle going on in the villages—for the vicar of Ketwood was not the only resister—against the closing of the village schools and setting up in their place of the “Central Rural Primary Schools”. Press photographs had made me familiar with the “dauntless breast” of this village champion. I had read how when the village school had been closed in accordance with the decree of the central authorities, the vicar, acting for the parents of the children, had set up a village school of his own in the Church House. That was about all I knew concerning my host (for as soon as we had reached his living-room he asked me if I would have lunch, and I most gratefully agreed to do so). My sociological curiosity had been aroused by this showdown between Family and State, one of the major issues in the present collectivization of our society, if it is not the greatest of all. Laming’s own words may be quoted in this connection. “In this small matter of the Parents’ School,” he writes, “we can see huge issues at stake.” And this is certainly no exaggeration.

    Later I shall be making use of his circumstantial report more fully, but at this point I will quote from the opening pages. It will provide what is needed by way of background to this storm in a tea-cup. Here are his words:

    “During the war, the village schoolmistress and her assistant were reinforced by a third teacher to deal with the evacuees. They had a hard struggle with the uncultivated city children. There is no one rich in the place, and the local people had known many years of acutest depression, but they retained a culture of the fields which had no trace of servility, or of city slickness. After the war, the headmistress was specially commended for her notable work. When we came to the village, the evacuees were leaving and the third teacher soon took another post. A scullery had been added and a sand-pit.

    “It would have been in 1946 that the children over eleven were suddenly told that they were to attend a central school, at Blatchover, to which they would be driven by car. This event caused little stir in the village, and mothers felt that their children would have better opportunities at a larger school. As it turned out, we should probably have been wise to have made a strong protest at the time: this would have been, I suppose, good politics.

    “This left about thirty children at the village school, and they were divided into two classes, the upper of which held children between seven and ten. The children left when they reached eleven. Several of the older children have told me, without being asked, that they would much rather have continued their education at Ketwood. I believe the head-master of Blatchover at the time, a man of great experience and ability, thought that they would have been as well in their own village. But working teachers have little say in educational policy. Some of the parents complained about their children having to wait for the car in bad weather. But parents have even less say in their children’s education than the teachers. The whole organization is in the hands of a few experts, assisted by an army of clerks. We were to learn what ‘Stateism’ could mean, and to hear a great deal about the ‘expert’ whose word was law.

    “But on the whole no one was very worried about the more distant education of the children over eleven. We still had our headmistress and her assistant, and the school was in excellent repair. When school time was over, the children had the freedom of many acres for their playground, and rarely abused it.

    “Early in 1947 we read in a local newspaper that Ketwood Council School was scheduled for closure in the Ladbrokeshire Educational Committee’s Development plan. This was the first warning, and the village reacted sharply.

    “It might make matters clearer to explain briefly the educational set-up of this county. The County Council has many committees, and one of the most important is the Education Committee. The Education Committee has power to co-opt, and divides the county into three for educational administration. The committee appoints an Education Officer for the County, whom we will call Mr. Ladbrokeshire, and officers in charge of each division. Ketwood falls into the mid-Ladbrokeshire division, and the immediate supervisor for education is the Mid-Ladbrokeshire Education Officer. These officers, needless to say, have a tidy salary, and the mid-Ladbrokeshire officer alone—Mr. Mid, we can call him—has thirty-two secretaries, housed in a Georgian mansion.

    “The teachers have no effective organization that deals with educational policy, nor do the parents. In other words, the children’s education is in the hands of a few ‘experts’ with a nominal check that the committee can apply. Committees usually back their paid officials, we found. The teachers have, if not a fear, at least a great respect for these officials, in whose appointment they have no voice and over whose policy they have no control. This, of course, robs the teaching profession of its integrity, and the officials doubtless know how to indicate the big stick of finance in their cupboard. All of the committee might be, or have been, practising teachers, but this does not prevent the profoundest cleavage between ‘expert-teacher’ and ‘working-teacher’. The expert is, in fact, master of the situation instead of servant, while the parents who might be allowed some ‘representation’ have no voice whatsoever.

    “The announcement about Ketwood brought a crowd to the Parish Meeting in March. Ketwood was then considered too small to have a Parish Council, so an elected chairman presided over our civil affairs assisted by a clerk. The previous year the parish meeting had been drowsy and poorly attended: a few desultory remarks about drains, an unhopeful question about electricity, and the re-election of the chairman had practically completed the business. It was the shadow of a lost autonomy. But in 1947 we had a topic, and all agreed that the school ought not to be closed. The Welsh fire of the schoolmistress’s husband had its rousing effect. He and I were selected to go into the matter. The meeting decided to send a protest to the Ladbrokeshire Education Authority, and to hold a parents’ meeting.”

    For the documenting of this account of mine I have happily been able to avail myself of the log of the dissident young parson. And wherever I can with advantage use the authentic delivery of the central figure in this little drama I shall do so. The above extract shows us exactly how the storm broke. We see the official army of secretaries, in their Georgian mansion, on the one side, and the handful of villagers, and the ill-paid clergyman upon the other. For we cannot suppose that Matthew Laming received any very substantial support from his diocesan superiors, since his bishop advised the diocese in a speech that “the lion’s tail must not be twisted too hard”. The lion, of course, in this case, was Britannic socialism.

    Let us now go back to the living-room of the embattled Vicar, where he sat curled up in a monstrous chair, like a squirrel in the bole of a tree, but unlike a squirrel surrounded, frame to frame, by a gallery of dismal Victorian portraits; there was not much in this poor Vicar’s living-room, except for the panelling of the portraits. Outside the windows swarmed all the cook-pot animals he has collected but refuses to kill—which is why there are so many. He will devour their eggs, but declines to murder them, which relates this Ladbrokeshire divine to St. Francis and I suppose the “Sons of Freedom” (Canadian Doukobors). Alas he is thin, very much too thin. As I gazed at this aesthetic, under-nourished figure I hoped that Providence would strike down a goose with lightning and his wife, pouncing on it with alacrity, carry it in triumph to the kitchen. In a lengthy circumstantial report of his struggle with the Government over the village school, he writes that he was “cleaning out the chickens” when I arrived. He was taken off guard, looking as present-day clergymen must always do except when wearing their Sunday suit. At first he was shy. When a little later he learned from me that I knew other clergymen he was more at ease, and ceased endeavouring to conceal a hole in the elbow of his shirt. He actually smiled with a flicker of mischief while I was narrating the sartorial plight of Rymer—not of course revealing my friend’s name nor the part of England where he has his vicarage.

    “Are you proposing to go through with this?” I enquired.

    He started as if I had awoken him by sticking a pin into his leg.

    “With…? Yes. At—at least I hope I can, you know.”

    Under similar circumstances what would be the attitude of a minister in the United States? It is, of course, not difficult to imagine the pugnacious poses, the jutting chin, the eyes narrowed to slits, the boastful words. He would “lick the pants off” the administration. This little Ladbrokeshire vicar had with great determination and considerable skill disputed the right of a well-nigh totalitarian government to start the work of liquidating the family in his village. But he allowed no trace of aggressiveness to appear in the deprecating angle of his head and the quietest, almost apologetic expression of his personality.

    His wife came in to say that lunch was ready. Her beauty looks as if it had been rarefied in the atmosphere of some mountain valley. We (which includes one of their two delightful children) ate our spam, an egg, an apple, very simple fare, though I was ashamed of eating it as I was well aware how limited was the larder of a poor clergyman in the Crippsian Ice Age. Battalions of geese waddled around outside, while fat hens pecked around the kitchen door, and the cocks crowed at the tops of their voices. Food on two legs was triumphantly vocal. It was like a meal with St. Francis in a time of dearth, but haunted by edible birds, which one knew to be a mischievous device of Satan.

    “So Cotton is your M.P.?”

    We were on our way back to the sitting-room, and I remembered I had intended to ask him about this.

    “Unfortunately, yes,” he said in a voice of resigned regret. “Cotton had a lot to do with framing the bill, in a pre-socialist administration, and with seeing that eventually it found its way into the statute book,” he told me mildly, and a little sadly.

    “However, there are just as many socialists all of whose instincts are Tory, as there are conservatives who would change England into a quite different country.”

    “I suppose so.”

    “Have you seen this mis-cast King’s Man, this conservative with socialist leanings?” I asked.

    “He came over here,” he told me.

    Apparently as a member for the Halchester division he thought he would come over and find out exactly what was happening in Ketwood. One day Laming found him on his doorstep. The politician asked the vicar to step outside and have a talk. Laming answered no—you come inside if you wish to speak to me. The politician preferred outside. He beckoned the frowning clergyman (for the Laming that is shown to me is not what a man whose foolishness had opened the gates to Abstraction would see). For some moments this “you-come-out—no-you-come-in” continued and then the “great man” became a little less great and went inside. There Laming reminded him of the part he had played in the passing of the Bill which decreed the centralizing of the rural schools. But here Mr. Cotton protested that he had not intended schools for the younger children to be interfered with. Subsequently in all Ladbrokeshire papers Cotton published the following statement: “In my view it is most undesirable that children of ten years old and under should be removed from their villages for instruction in regional Schools. It is most important that in those earliest years they should remain in the neighbourhood of their families, and not be taken away to an abstract centre where they become alienated from parental disciplines. This has always been my view: and it was the intention of those of us who were responsible for the act decreeing the new organization of rural education that the village schools where children of ten years and under receive their instruction should remain intact. It is for me a matter of great regret to see these original plans overridden.”

    Such was the defence of Mr. Cotton, and he repudiated any responsibility for the recent high-handed actions of the socialist government. This is what Mr. Cotton explained to the indignant young clergyman, standing outside the improvised class-room in the latter’s house—headquarters of the revolt against socialism—with which revolt, of course, this politician wished to have no contacts, though he did wish (on the time-honoured English principle of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds) to disinculpate himself of so socialist an intention as nationalizing small children.

    “Hell is paved with good intentions,” I commented, and the Vicar of Ketwood agreed that the hell of totalitarian socialism must always be paved with Liberal altruism and Conservative attempts to steal the thunders of the Labour Opposition, or shall we say, as it is a question of a pavement, by planks stolen out of the socialists’ platform.

    “Autocratic state-socialism, a monster with great ugly teeth in it you say, is undeniably one of the most repulsive forms of government! Is any sort of socialism acceptable?” I enquired. Laming digests leading questions—from a friend—uneasily. I have a parson friend who is painfully reminiscent of a Gilbert and Sullivan or a Du Maurier curate who would cry if a friend seemed displeased with him, but with non-friends, if need be, is as tough as a Hemingway hero (if you cut out the bloody climax). Laming is an intellectual: and the answer was obvious. He only looked surprised.

    “Religious communities are instances of a type of socialism of a very good kind. Christian society in the Middle Ages offers many examples of… yes, communism.”

    “All true communisms are of a religious character. You come to a full stop when you try to think of any others. The communism existing in primitive societies is conditioned by supernatural pressures. I am aware that it might be said: ‘What is the difference between pressure by supernatural agency and compulsion by terrorist police methods? Do they not boil down to the same thing?’ The compulsion, however, is of an entirely different nature. Religion is as the communists say a drug. Men to whom this drug has been skilfully administered exist in a dream. They will live on bread and water gladly, anaesthetized by incantations and prayers. There is no substitute for some such drug. The artist, especially the musician would understand immediately what I mean. They administer drugs. Men die quite easily to the sound of the pipes. There are no spells and drugs in socialism of the same potency as a Bach Mass.”

    My young host was naturally shy of this talk of drugs. He nodded politely and said:

    “No communism works.”

    His voice was full of decision. But we were approaching this question differently, it was plain.

    “Only within the framework of a religion?” I sought his confirmation.

    “That is so, I think. Yes.”

    “Without the appropriate drug the rational faculty breaks down the solidarity in a very short time.”

    “Not the reason, surely you do not mean that,” he protested politely.

    “You must not scorn stupefying agents. The human reason is merely a nuisance without—without—”

    “I think I see what you mean.”

    I examined the massed portraits on the walls of nineteenth-century statesmen and soldiers. All of them might have been portraits of the same man—say a quick-change artist who disguised himself successively as some prominent general or politician. I rose and studied one carefully.

    “My father painted all of them. When his army life was over—he was a soldier—he copied portraits as a hobby.”

    This of course accounted for the curious likeness. They served rather to empty the room than to fill it. This vacant look suited the vicar. He is a man who is quite indifferent to his personal surroundings, and the dark anonymous portrait gallery, for heaven knows who these soldiers and politicians were, was an ideal setting for him. To have a parent weave a pattern of anonymity in his ruminative old age of decorated nobodies, was for Laming a good arrangement. He is unquestionably somebody. He sits symbolically ringed with painted mediocrity. Lightly he rests there, a squirrel that plans. His worried head propped upon his hand, he spoke of the duplicity of the state.

    “All administrations,” I pointed out, “of Right as much as Left, lie deliberately, without stopping, in a democratic state. When Cripps solemnly announced that the pound would never be devalued, I knew that it must have been arranged to devalue it. And in a surprisingly short time devaluation occurred. In a similar way President Roosevelt in an election address solemnly declared American boys would

    never again be asked to fight on foreign soil. He was elected, and soon afterwards American boys were fighting on foreign soil. How else can you rule a modern democracy? The newspapers in a two or more Party state make any other course impossible. No one is shocked that the diplomat practices every duplicity (and the skilfuller the liar the better the diplomat). The limitation imposed upon the democratic politician’s power-impulses is responsible for an ugly mood, and he would actually come to relish deceiving this ignorant multitude which possessed the right to strip him of power at the ballot-boxes.”

    “I suppose so,” said Laming.

    “Democracy confers much power but stops short at the real thing. It is like a woman who is a sexual tease. It wears out a man very greedy of power. He gets to hate in the end this jade democracy, who says, ‘Rule me—but I shall dismiss you at once if you take too many liberties.’ As you know all our Ministers are wrecks. The cause is the strain imposed on their temperament because of all the things they are not allowed to do.”

    Laming laughed discreetly.

    “Slyness develops to a terrible extent. For instance, nurses. Everyone hates nurses, and the Administration is no exception to the rule. But it was common knowledge that the payment nurses received was archaic: a quarter of a century ago it might have sufficed, but for some time it has been recognized to be scandalously small. In these circumstances it was suddenly announced in the Press that a New Deal for Nurses had been decreed by a benevolent Government.”

    Laming nodded. “Yes. I read about that. I suppose they had to do something.”

    “Well, listen. A shopkeeper in Rotting Hill with whom I gossip, and actually a socialist, has a sister who is a nurse at a large London hospital. This sister spent a week-end with him a fortnight ago. What she imparted on the subject of the New Deal for Nurses filled him with indignant astonishment. When the New Deal came into force, she was owed eighty pounds, of this she received only five or six. The new scheme was retroactive as much as twelve months. Another nurse who was owed forty or fifty pounds received nothing, but actually had to pay six pounds.”

    “How extraordinary.”

    “Yes. The explanation is that under the new ruling nurses have to pay for their own keep, there is an increase in income-tax payments, and so on. Consequently these nurses, earning four pounds instead of three a week are much worse off instead of better off, but the Government has had all the benefit of the ballyhoo.”

    “Ho, ho, ho,” cheerlessly but expressively hooted Laming.

    “That is, of course, frightfully sly,” I continued.

    “I should think it is.”

    “Do not let us blame Ministers for this, it must be the work of some malignant underling. I cannot see Bevin or Cripps or Attlee—much as they must dislike nurses, having spent considerable periods in their company—I cannot see any of them playing so scurvy a trick.”

    “Oh!”

    “No. I am not interested in Party. Only in a Party spirit could one suppose that a Minister could think up so vindictive a trick. And the same applies to many other disgraceful tricks, yes and major acts of legislation.”

    “They are responsible, aren’t they?”

    “But they are grey and old and full of sleep.”

    “Oh, I see. I must remember that in future.”

    “Whether it is the collective policy of the Cabinet or not, there are steps taken under their aegis leading in a direction I regard as humanly bad. Here is an example. What a National Health Act dentist receives for an entire dental plate, top and bottom, is nine pounds. He and his mechanic cannot be expected to turn out a very good plate for that money, and they in effect do not turn out an awfully good plate. But it is now planned to supersede the present old-world picture of thousands of little free-enterprise outfits, each making its own little dental plates and the same man doing a stopping as extracts a tooth. ‘Clinics’ are to be set up, where the little client of the Welfare State can have the mass extraction in one department and get his plate in another: a building where thousands of dental artisans will be emptying the gums of teeth and clapping little plastic plates into rows of little open mouths in assembly-line fashion. In the United States I have seen establishments given up to mass extraction of teeth. My own reaction to such methods is to find them degrading. If more and more of that is socialism I don’t like socialism. The men now in power seem to regard it as part of their sacred mission to create an assembly-line world and to reproduce the atmosphere of the factory in every part of human life, from the dentist’s chair to the marriage bed. This I am sure is nothing specifically to do with socialism. But it is inseparable from socialism as it is served up today.”

    “To make everything in the image of a machine is an idiosyncrasy, yes, it is.” Laming nodded.

    “Not only an idiosyncrasy of British socialism. But the trouble is that our socialists are inclined to think the more mechanistic a thing is the more socialist. This is referred to as planning. There was too little planning formerly: our chaotic cities bear witness to that. But an over-planned life is at least as bad as no plan at all. It is their rigour that is the worst thing about our new masters—not their socialism.”

    “Socialism is always rigid,” Laming objected, “that is what is bad about Socialism, it is not something peculiar to these socialists. The collectivizing of society involves the tightening up of every control. No, I do not see how it can be otherwise than rigid.”

    “Whether that be so or not, the intoxication of industrial techniques seems to impel men everywhere to transform any human process into a mechanical process. This is described by Toynbee as the Apathetic Fallacy. The sense of power obtained from the control of a machine must not be forgotten. Finally, infection from Russia is a big factor. Industry was made into a power-god there.”

    “In a society predominantly agricultural socialism would be inhuman just the same,” Laming politely but firmly insisted. Socialism for him could only signify a reformatory for anti-social humanity, or a puritan austerity parching up the human world.

    I lit a cigarette, and he courteously watched me.

    “I might become a socialist,” I announced.

    “Oh yes? Oh.”

    “As an obscure member in that racket I should be scrupulous about several things. For instance, I should make no objection to the closing of the village schools!”

    “Oh yes?”

    “No. That would be ridiculous. But I should set a limit, in my mind, beyond which mechanization should not go. Also I should propose, for those taking office, a thorough overhaul; with a view to checking up on power-complexes, latent as well as in flower.”

    “Oh, really. I see.”

    As we sat silent Laming gazed at the floor. And then we began talking about the Parents’ School, as he called it. He did not appear embarrassed as a result of my thoughtless confession that I would regard it as ridiculous to oppose the closure of Village Schools. He may have assumed that I was joking, and he regards himself as somewhat slow in recognizing the absurd. At lunch he had given me an outline of what had occurred. Since we had been back in the sitting-room I had been going into the political backgrounds of the dispute about the village school. I wished to acquaint myself with his attitude towards Welfare State politics in general, for at that time I had not of course read anything he had written. I enjoyed his youthful firmness, but he could not be acquitted of rigidity himself. His politics, I felt, were two-dimensional.

    This young clergyman belonged to the type of Englishmen of which the most perfect specimens are Edmund Burke, Henry Maine, and a half-dozen others. Those who experience the violent “rebound of a powerful mind from… philosophical Radicalism,” to use Maine’s words, are described today as “reactionaries”. More clumsily they might be termed “rebounders”. Reactionary is of course a term originated by the radicals, as a way of describing a man who shies away or violently “bounds” or bounces off, radical dogmas. In this sense Laming is undoubtedly reactionary.

    I must here interpolate a reminder. There are of course other types of mind equally powerful, which rebound with equal violence: but in this case it is from the spectacle of the abuses flourishing in the systems to which Maine and Burke gave their support. And I must add that there is, in my opinion, an even powerfuller type of mind which does not rebound in this manner at all. I refer to that order of mind which prefers not to see things in such stark black and white.

    Laming’s recoil from the radical is extremely severe, but his disinclination to appear in a passionate role leads to a deceptive assumption of philosophic composure. But beneath perhaps not a saintly but a properly priestly aversion from passion, could be found enough fighting spirit to equip a wild cat. Sublimated as it is, it enables him to appear hardly interested at times.

    It was a Saturday so, if I was to see the improvised village school in full swing, it would be necessary to come over again on Monday. This I decided to do. Accordingly at eleven o’clock on that day I found myself once more at Ketwood Vicarage, a very different place to what it had been two days earlier. It was now a school.

    Let me quote from the typed report of the Parents’ School a short passage explaining how the school had taken shape.

    “Everyone wanted a school to be opened in Ketwood. We could use the Church Room, which had been a Church School before the Council School was built. One man and three ladies offered to help with the teaching. We enrolled cleaning and catering committees. Several people offered to give one child his midday meal with their own children, and the residue fell to my wife to feed in the Vicarage. Numerous offers of equipment were made, of potatoes, and of labour and materials to make a boys’ lavatory. We also enrolled an entertainments committee to provide funds. And we chose a treasurer. We decided to follow the times and terms of the Council School…”

    There were between twenty and thirty children all told. “A Mr. Adams of East Gidding, the next village, had offered to help me with the juniors, and two ladies were going to alternate with the infants, one of these, Mrs. Tracey, was a parent herself, and the other, Miss Pusey, was a farmer’s daughter. We also had voluntary needlework and music teachers.”

    The Church Room was divided by a screen; the upper end was reserved for the juniors, the lower end for the infants. Sufficient small chairs and tables were somehow collected, and so the school could begin. Where Laming is describing the opening day he writes: “After religious instruction I gave the boys writing, composition, and sums. At dinner-time my wife found a large party to feed. But farmers had provided the potatoes, and as long as rabbits were seasonable we had plenty of them. A farmer’s wife gave a pudding for almost every day of the year.”

    The day I visited the school, classes were proceeding both in the Church House and at the Vicarage, and I suppose this was always the case. In the room lying between the sitting-room and the front door a drawing lesson was in progress, and these village children had filled this largish nursery, the use to which it normally is put, with barbaric and sometimes arresting images. A farmer’s daughter presided over these creative enterprises. A short way down the road is the Church House. There we found engaged in strenuous pedagogy a highly-competent volunteer, Mr. Dunns.

    Here is what Laming writes about this colleague.

    “I was pleased to receive the following from a Mr. Dunns who was then living in a London hotel. ‘… My last permanent job as a teacher ended in 1925 when I resigned from the Hong Kong Government Schools to enter business. During the last war, however, I assisted the Rev. —— in running a school in an internment camp in China.’ (All these names are fictitious, lest their presence in this context should lead to victimization).” Such caution I feel is excessive. At least I think I may say that the East Gidding helper is not Adams but Carson and the author of those excellent verses I quoted, used by Laming in his Church magazine editorial.

    Laming is a Robinson Crusoe, a castaway in a hostile social element. Carson and the ex-schoolmaster are fellow castaways: though I am not aware what Mr. Dunns’ views are, he knows communist China and has certainly thought his thoughts. These men of bad will, each one a misfit or displaced, had put much enthusiastic ill-will into the creation of this academy for infants outside the law. For although the local educational authorities had informed Laming that they would not prosecute immediately, it was quite certain that prosecution would ensue before long.

    In Laming’s detailed account of the Parents’ School many facts connected with the methods of the bureaucracy, and even more to the point, the state of mind of the socialist officials, are brought to our notice. I have here before me the young Vicar’s Notes, in which he parades his authorities, all affirming the inviolability of the Family. His authorities did not, to my surprise, seem very good ones. That, however, is immaterial: the main thing was that this clergyman, like all good clergymen, was holding fast to the past, to the tradition, and standing in the way of innovation. Religion is an immovable block of dogmas, anchored in the past; it belongs to the past, in order to survive, it must prevent people, at all costs, from getting too far away from the past. Obstruction, and again obstruction, is its watchword. Laming should have had more impressive a battalion of authorities, for it is also the priest’s business to persuade and to overawe with Authority. But the main thing is that he should stand in the way of Progress, that he should point back to the Past, and the Family stands for all that is stable, and is essentially a thing of the sacred Past, and if for no other reason its integrity must be defended with heroic desperation. I hesitated about his authorities, but it is better for me not to quote such stuff as this: “John Stuart Mill… quotes Lord Atkin as saying, in 1919: ‘Each house is a domain into which the King’s writ does not seem to run, and to which his officers do not seek to be admitted,’ and he adds, ‘In Seymayne’s Case (1604) it laid down: “the house of Everyman is to him as his castle and fortress”.’ Who is this likely to edify or to convince? I will not burden you with such musty testimony, if only to protect in this instance the heroic little clergyman from himself. It is enough to stand witness, as I am doing, that Laming is one of the most retrograde individuals in England; through and through “anti-moderne”, authentically contemporary in all his tissues with Aquinas.

    So it is for what he stands, in line with the natural law, that is interesting and respectable (I say respectable because I am not myself an advocate for the Past—though I should not be writing this were I an advocate for Progress either). Where he sees so well the futility of “gaining debating points” when describing the course taken by his enemies, he fails to recognize, it seems to me, this futility of debating points in the service of religion. But let me quote him where he is describing an interview with the enemy, to make clearer what I mean. “The mistake of the officials was to treat this expression of natural feeling of natural law as a subject off which to score debating points. This was a stupid and untimely attitude. We stood for the family unit and the Village, while they stood for what appeared to us an abstraction, ‘the Children’.”

    This is actually very well expressed, and abstraction is precisely the word demanded. Laming says that he and his Village are for the concrete (“the family unit and the Village”), whereas his enemies are for something theoretic and abstract. The concreteness which Laming has acquired from his scholastic reading and his sympathy for the roman communion is possibly the main attribute of this frail but resolute priest.

    Not only did the action of the State in closing down the Village schools seem to Laming to be putting an axe to the roots of a civilization which had endured for nearly two thousand years, but he feels that the utterances as well as the actions of the officials concerned first and last, revealed a considerable degree of consciousness of what they were doing. Some of the most instructive passages in his Notes are those dealing with the contacts of the officials with himself and the spokesmen of the Village. The outfit which the Village of Ketwood had to deal with was the Mid. Ladbrokeshire. You will recall that Laming refers to the official in command of this region as “Mr. Mid”. Here is a note describing a meeting at Ketwood between “Mr. Mid”, the Villagers and Laming with his associates in the Parents’ School Scheme.

    “Mr. Adams of East Gidding made elaborate imputations against Mr. Mid’s strict veracity—he would not venture on anything more explicit, certainly not a word of four letters. Mr. Mid replied hotly that he thought an attempt was being made to insult him! This passage incited Mr. Mid to a rash frankness. When a resident said that the closure of the school would kill the village, Mr. Mid said that the small village would dwindle away in the next twenty years: agriculture was all right, it only needed a man and machines; industry was what needed attention. He would prefer to cart labourers from towns than children to centres for education. I wondered, afterwards, what Cobbett would have said to this thesis; the Ladbrokeshire villages, in his time, had about double their present inhabitants, and Cobbett constantly complained of the flow of people away from fertile parts to barren areas.

    “Then a calm and rational parent suggested that it was inhuman for young children to wait about for the proposed transport in bad weather, and asked Mr. Mid to consider a concession on the grounds of humanity. ‘I cannot afford to be human,’ was Mr. Mid’s answer.

    “Several ex-service men were parents, and they raised a clamour about ‘freedom’. Mr. Mid rounded on them. ‘You are not free,’ he said. Only people who had as high a salary as Mr. Mid were free and he could afford to send his daughter a considerable distance from Halchester. The others had, in reality, no choice or freedom.”

    The following is one of the most instructive passages of all.

    “But the most important remarks of Mr. Frost were those that described conversations he had had with other members of these committees, in to which he had introduced himself in our interests. Alderman G., an educationalist of high position who has been mentioned several times, told Mr. Frost that he ‘had no time for parents’. Alderman B., who also had more than a finger in the educational pie, declared to Mr. Frost that ‘parents were the greatest obstacle to their children’s education’. These phrases need underlining. They need contrasting with the American view, expressed in the House Committee’s Report on unAmerican Activities, which combats the Marxian view that: ‘Women should have children for the state to educate, train and use, but parents should not have any say in training according to their own ideas.’ Then it follows that these remarks attributed to Aldermen G. and B., although they would be considered unAmerican and Marxian, are not un-British. The inferences are that the family as a unit has been irreparably destroyed in England, the educational authorities taking good care that it should not crop up again, and that a Marxian form of education has been substituted in its place.”

    These words, “Parents are the greatest enemies of their children”, is the key to the official attitude. In the official world of Education they occupy much the same position as horses in the official world of agriculture.

    I have here a cutting from the Sunday Express which spot-lights the Horse as a bugbear of the mechanizing innovator, symbolic of another day as is the Parent. “Lord Leigh, Midlands agriculturist, said at a ploughing competition at Warwick yesterday that the best ploughing was done by horses—not traction. Then he challenged a reported statement by Mr. Harry Ferguson, the tractor manufacturer, that the ‘horse is the real enemy of agriculture’.”

    Next are a few lines from the Laming Report about Blatchover’s vicar, which serve to bring into sharp relief the conflicting views of the traditional clergy and the Socialist clergy.

    “My surprise was, I suppose, due to a report that Mr. Blatchover had called the Ketwood parents selfish. But anyone quotes Robespierre now and then. And the Christian Crusade, which originated at Blatchover under Mr. Blatchover’s predecessor, claimed to have reconciled Christianity and Marxism. Marx, of course, had a poor opinion of the family and family life.”

    With considerable good sense, however, Laming points out that, whatever one may think of his position, Dick Bartleton is an honest man.

    “At the same time Mr. Blatchover’s position as a Christian-communist (and the Archbishop of York said that this was a valid position, whatever the reader considers!) is more honest than that of ‘conservatives’, etc., who introduce communism by stealth. I dare say that my guess about Russia is as worthless as is Mr. Blatchover’s.”

    There are many things in this fascinating report I should have liked to have quoted, but I must turn to the last pages where we come to the dénouement, which, as could be foreseen from the start, was dismal and disheartening. The village as well as the improvised personnel, at a meeting full of sadness for Laming, voted that the Parents’ School dissolve, and that the children, after all, obey the dictates of the centralizing State. Let me give you this in the language of the defeated Vicar.

    “Then the ladies began their movement. How far it was concocted of influences from without, it was not possible to guess. But one of the ladies said that if the school continued the children would probably be victimized in the matter of scholarships, and would at any rate be deprived of free medical treatment, etc. Other mothers followed. A secret ballot was suggested. Then a father interjected that if anyone could not state their opinion openly, it was not worth much. So each parent was asked whether he or she wished (a) the School to be continued at Ketwood; (b) their child to attend Melton or (c) Blatchover. The voting fell into three nearly equal groups. A third did not mind whether their children attended Melton or Blatchover: a third desired Blatchover; and a third—predominantly men—wanted Ketwood private school to continue. Mr. Adams used all his eloquence in vain. Mr. Dunns supported him. A lame resolution was carried that those who wanted to should continue Ketwood school. But the firm opposition of the ladies (my wife is excepted from all this) was evident enough.

    “Partly, of course, the split was due to weariness. The women had carried most of the burden of teaching (the infants), of cleaning and of catering. The housewife’s lot is ‘not a happy one’. Then fear of victimization and of missing something for the children was at work. Few families these days are solid enough to educate or provide for the education of their young beyond a very tender age.

    “But there is another factor, which I will barely indicate, that was added to the monotonous economic motive. It may be that men are less completely suburbanized, in this land, than their women. And the suburban dweller, who supplies neither food nor thought, is less free and more infantile than members of real towns or real countrysides.”

    I suppose that our quixotic vicar left that meeting with some comprehension at last of the reality of village life in England in mid-twentieth century and some recognition not only of the power of the Welfare State, but of the absurdity of expecting anyone to back you up, except for an excited moment or two, in your defiance of authority.

    The quotations will not, I hope, have been found too fatiguing. All this minutiae, if it can be tolerated, provides one with a close-up as it were, which is invaluable for the student but rather irksome to the general reader. I have taken this risk because of the necessity in such a case to provide convincingly factual data. Should we, or can we, in the twentieth century, have a religion? Can the amateurish, infinitely latitudinarian English Church—allowing, as it does, every idiosyncrasy in its priesthood, so that we find in its ranks everything from a Marxist to a papist—can so doctrinally flaccid and obligingly adulterated a faith—can so go-as-you-please and teach-as-you-like unmilitant an institution as the Church of England, do anything but read the burial service over religion, and keep its grave in a decent condition? It is the Church of England itself that has emptied its churches.

    In Laming and Dick Bartleton we have a vigorous type of priest. The first stands for institutional Christianity: the second for the Christianity of the early Church. The second would echo the injunction of St. Augustine to purge your heart of all human affection, love of mother or father, love of family, love of your friends. These emotions must be eradicated: in their place will be abstract Man. And here is the difference between St. Augustine and the Vicar of Blatchover. The former would install God in the place vacated by Mother, by Family, by Friend. The latter would install Man, as symbolized by the State. The Vicar of Blatchover is, I should say, a very honest and good-hearted man, and there is no reason not to add a devout man. The only thing at issue, in the present context, is whether he is an efficient priest. His kind of mind, or rather his type of faith, may not furnish the best material (I suggest with due humility) for the priestly calling.

    There is institutional religion, of course, and there is religious experience and religious feeling. Institutional religion is a technique for enabling a certain teaching to survive, that is all. The Catholics have been the great masters of that technique. When I read the other day how the Pope had dealt with the question of whether the Holy Mother of God ascended to Heaven as flesh and blood or not, I reflected how excellent the Catholic judgement is. For, of course, he answered, “Yes, as flesh and blood, dressed in the costume of a carpenter’s wife of the period.” In a similar case an Anglican Divine would have reflected how absurd the carnal account would sound to the average bank clerk or stockjobber and would have answered, “No, of course not. She left her mortal envelope on earth.” Yet it seems obvious if you star the Resurrection of the Dead as a major article of faith there must be no obliging modifications to satisfy protests on the score of “unlikelihood”. All effective institutions, determined to endure at all cost—like Russian Communism, for instance—do not debate. No arguments could make them alter a syllable of their doctrine. If you worship a Blue Cow you disregard the standard criticism, to the effect that in the natural order there are no cows of that colour. What is more, it makes it easier for the believer, the colour being an improbable blue. This is not a paradox. The blueness gives the imagination something to bite on, as it were, and with religion the imagination is the high faculty involved.

    The “truth” of the imagination is, of course, quite different from the “truth” of physical science. A Church attempting to assimilate its truth to the truth of the slide-rule is what we have witnessed in England.

    To summarize what I have wished to say: that to endure, an institution cannot be too rigid. The inviolability of the Family is a major doctrine of Catholicism: there any concession would be impossible. The Family is, or was, a microcosm where age, not youth, rules; it was from that fact that it derived its great importance for the Church. Now my point is that the Vicar of Ketwood is the type of institutional clergyman able to appreciate the only terms on which a creed can survive, or rather the only technique that insures endurance. But although his action at Ketwood was a model for what a village priest should do faced with the closing of the village school, there were several small matters he had lost sight of, or had never seen. One was that the village is now, in England, only a name. Then the Family he so rightly set himself to defend, no longer exists—or at least not in the way that in the first instance made it an object of such interest to the Church. I think the fact is that Laming had taken action to protect something which his grandfather or great-grandfather had sold, or had been too sleepy to notice was being removed piecemeal.

    For anyone who has lived in America, where on Sunday the churches are crowded to capacity, England is now almost a country without a religion: I cannot accept Rymer’s theory that in a village where the only people ever present at divine service on Sunday are the Vicar and his family, the rest of the inhabitants being good-Christians-who-do-not-go-to-Church, the Christian religion flourishes. I cannot believe in good Christians who never visit the church at the end of the village street. Although it does not follow that the people who fill the local church in the U.S. are all good Christians, the efficacy of liturgical disciplines appears to me obvious.

    Two world-wars in rapid succession have hurried the end of Christianity in England. Socialism, as time passes, melting into communism, will take religion’s place in the form of a brotherly millennium—a heaven on earth for good socialist boys and girls, and a hell-on-earth for the wicked (vide slave-camps, salt-mines, etc.). In place of Christ there will be men-gods like Stalin or Hitler, a High God being dispensed with. But that is taking the long view: it may be a decade before matters go as far as that. Meanwhile, it is difficult to see how Christianity can live, if only for a moment, except by some heroic measure. One that recommends itself to me, is that all the churches, vicarages, bishops’ palaces, etc., be closed.

    The clergy would then become a missionary army, as friars, I suppose: poor but impassioned men, tramping from village to village, and filling the cities with their prayers and curses. I have mentioned above how the Bishop of Halchester recommended his clergy to refrain from any serious twisting of the Lion’s tail. But having turned its back upon its empty churches and worldly possessions, the Church could if it wanted to nearly twist the old Lion’s tail off its rump. The prisons would be so full of obstreperous friars that there would be no room for the normal delinquents. For it is quite certain that if any sincere Christian expressed his views at the street corner and at the market place concerning any government he would find his way into the lock-up. But probably as the time is so short now before the extinction of all religion has been consummated, it would be better to continue to pretend that there is a religion. So long as men can be found to live a retired country life at about five pounds a week, or for the same sum lead a far less secluded one in a populous suburb, to keep the churches there, since the money involved in the servicing of a national Church would be put to some un-christian use by whatever government received it!

    A final word regarding the Reverend Matthew Laming. The last I heard of him, he was to interview the Principal of the London College of Divinity. That signifies, I think, that his pastorate at Ketwood is coming to an end, and he will temporarily, at least, find himself in a more theoretic field. The Meldrum Deanery Magazine will have less unconventional editorials, the village of Ketwood will prepare to fade away, according to the wishes of the new urban-minded rulers of England, the parents following their children to some approved centre, but repudiating the functions of “The Parent”. The probably ill-made village houses will quickly drop to pieces, and the vicarage become the week-end residence of some suburban spiv.

    Meanwhile, wherever Laming goes, it will seem that the clock has been put back and Anglican Christianity will be seen displaying a Roman energy; and if ever he should come to wear the mitre and leggings of a bishop, an entire diocese would be mobilized on Ketwood lines. A head-on collision with the State would immediately ensue. The Church would be disestablished, its funds sequestrated.

    But the time required to realize this glorious climax, Laming’s career having but just begun, will no doubt be denied him by some Apocalypse.