In times of strain and calamity the old dark gods emerge from the jungle and crude, primitive religion comes back. We are today threatened with it again in the prevailing cult of astrology.
With these words famed Anglican Bishop Frank Russell Barry of Southwell lashed out last week at Britain’s wartime astrology craze. “Few things,” he added, “are more demoralizing than to yield to the tyranny of superstition—that moral and intellectual corrosive which destroys the will and undermines the character. . . . If this . . . were to get a hold upon our people it would bring defeat, ruin and damnation. The religion of Christ can never come to terms with it.”
Slight, deaf, intense Bishop Barry knows his wars. A winner of the D.S.O. for heroism as a chaplain in World War I, he has since served as Archdeacon of Egypt, Chaplain to the King, Canon of Westminster, and Vicar of the University Church at Oxford, which he packed with undergraduates as it had never been packed before—even by John Henry (later Cardinal) Newman. No stuffed shirt, he lists his recreations in Who’s Who as “indescribable.”
When the Abbey was hit in the blitz last May, Canon Barry’s house in the adjoining cloister was completely burned and he lost all he owned except what he had on. Up all night putting out other fires, he had to goto Oxford next morning to deliver a lecture with nothing but a cassock to hide the battered pair of flannel trousers (“Oxford bags”) he had worn firefighting. Afterwards he went into an Oxford shop to buy a more respectable pair of pants. The proprietor looked at him disdainfully: “Don’t you realize there is a war on?” “Yes,” said Dr. Barry.
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