Collected Letters Volume Two: Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931–1949. Walter Hooper. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Walter Hooper
Издательство: HarperCollins
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Жанр произведения: Биографии и Мемуары
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9780007332663
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made his stave ring and rebound again on the bald head of his opponent’). And singlestick would be intolerable-except the sort we used to play with copies of—was it the Spectator or the Law Journal Report?

      The whole puzzle about Christianity in non-European countries is very difficult. To the statement that only the riff-raff are converted, I suppose the enthusiastic missionary would reply that if you had lived under the Roman empire, at the period of the first conversions of all, you would have said exactly the same. (He could quote St Paul, [l] Cor. 1:26 ‘Not many clever people in the ordinary sense, nor many in important positions, nor many people of quality’). This is a very cold, uncomfortable reflection! I take it we could answer it by saying that, at all events, the same kind of riff-raff which now lives on the missions could not have been attracted by a poor and persecuted Church: so that that explanation is ruled out.

      Of course one sees, from all history and from ones own circle, that the people who already have a high intellectual and moral tradition of their own, are, of all people, the least likely to embrace Christianity. Fancy converting a man like J. S. Mill! Or again, the really good Stoic emperors of Rome were the most anti-Christian. Even in the Gospels—does one suppose that the Pharisees, the ‘High Church party’ of Judaism, did not contain most of the refined, educated, enlightened population of Palestine—people, by ordinary standards very much nicer than the women of the town and little tax-farmers (that is modern English for ‘publicans and sinners’) who seem to have made up the background of Our Lord’s circle. Still, we would reply that some Pharisees (e.g. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus) did come in: and, on the other hand, none of the riff-raff came in for money, because there ‘was no money in the thing’.

      On the whole, my present conclusion is that the difficulty about the Oriental present is really the same as the difficulty about the years B.C. For some reason that we cannot find out they are still living in the B.C. period (as there are African tribes still living in the stone-age) and it is apparently not intended that they should yet emerge from it. I admit that I have myself fallen into an Orientalism, and am giving instead of an explanation, the true eastern platitude ‘God is great’. In fact, like Nettleship, ‘I don’t know, you know, I don’t know, you know.’ (Mind you, there is this to be said for my view, that you wd. hardly expect time to be quite as important to God as it is to us.)

      The first day we made Lewes, walking over the bare chalky South Downs all day. The country, except for an occasional gleam of the distant sea—we were avoiding the coast for fear of hikers—is almost exactly the same as the Berkshire downs or the higher parts of Salisbury Plain. The descent into Lewes offered a view of the kind I had hitherto seen only on posters—rounded hill with woods on the top, and one side quarried into a chalk cliff: sticking up dark and heavy against this a little town climbing up to a central Norman castle. We had a very poor inn here, but I was fortunate in sharing a room with Griffiths who carried his asceticism so far as to fling off his eiderdown—greatly to my comfort.

      Next day we had a delicious morning-just such a day as downs are made for, with endless round green slopes in the sunshine, crossed by cloud shadows. The landscape was less like the Plain now. The sides of the hill—we were on a ridgeway—were steep and wooded, giving rather the same effect as the narrower parts of Malvern hills beyond the Wych. We had a fine outlook over variegated blue country to the North Downs. After we had dropped into a village for lunch and climbed onto the ridge again for the afternoon, our troubles began.

      The sun disappeared: an icy wind took us in the flank: and soon there came a torrent of the sort of rain that feels as if ones face were being tattooed and turns the mackintosh on the weather side into a sort of wet suit of tights. At the same time Griffiths began to show his teeth (as I learned afterwards) having engaged Barfield in a metaphysico-religious conversation of such appalling severity and egotism that it included the speaker’s life history and a statement that most of us were infallibly damned. As Beckett and I, half a mile ahead, looked back over that rain beaten ridgeway we could always see the figures in close discussion. Griffiths very tall, thin, high-shouldered, stickless, with enormous pack: arrayed in perfectly cylindrical knickerbockers, very tight in the crutch. Barfield, as you know, with that peculiarly blowsy air, and an ever more expressive droop and shuffle.

      From Bramber we ascended again in a lovely evening after rain, through lovely scenes—the downs here assuming rather the character of moors. But it very soon began to drizzle again, and an error in map reading involved us in hours of stumbling and circling up there in the twilight. We lay at Findon. Griffiths