Religion: Sermon in the Times

Twice a year, at Easter and Christmas, the London Times turns over its leading editorial to religion. The editorial writer for the occasion is not a Timesman but an Anglican parson: 53-year-old Canon Spencer Leeson, who recently gave up the $16,000-a-year headmastership of illustrious Winchester College (prep school) to become a parish priest in one of Portsmouth’s worst-blitzed areas. Said the Times leader:

“From the days of the French Revolution onwards a new religion has been taking possession of the souls of men—a religion of secular humanism. The main articles of this faith are that the exercise of reason and the extension of education are in themselves enough to purify and strengthen the nature of man and enable him to make the world a progressively better place; that a high standard of moral conduct can be confidently commended to the hearts of men on its own merits and by its own authority. . . .

“How oddly does that once prophetic message read today! How many broken hopes lie on each side of that grand, sweeping highway! For new national religions have arisen in our time with a power and a grip on the soul of men far surpassing that of the gentle and humane rationalist appeal.

“They marshaled .behind them great hosts of men & women and boys & girls, filled full with the conviction that they had a true and living gospel for a decadent world, and ready to carry that gospel wherever the range of guns and bombs can reach. . . . And now a whole generation is looking helplessly round for some faith as powerful and as transforming that they can erect in opposition to this portentous, man-devouring sphinx of their own creation. . . .

“How if a man were to hear again—it was the faith of all Western Europe once, and on jt the civilization of today is founded—that He who hung on the cross on the first Good Friday was not simply a man but the Son of God. . . ?

“How if he were to hear that with the resurrection of Christ on the first Easter Day the full freedom of the human soul was finally attained, and that to a believer who accepts Good Friday and Easter Day in a spirit of true faith and penitence there is made available a source of spiritual strength which, however often he may fall, will raise him up again and that will finally in the depths of eternity bring him to that perfection that was in the beginning designed for him?

“This is the core of the Christian faith; and no matter how deeply divided from each other Christians may be in matters of worship and order, in this central conviction they are united. Over large areas of its spiritual life the world has forgotten it. Yet the faith lives on. . . .”