Religion: Words & Works

¶After the Archbishop of York urged prayers for good weather to help crops, the Rev. Roger Lloyd, Canon of Winchester, wrote in the British weekly Time & Tide: “The Christian is bound to believe that all natural law is given by God in creation, and is intended to be a necessary part of the environment . . . The first heresy in prayer, as Archbishop Temple used to say, is the attempt to persuade God to change His mind—blasphemy in the attempt and calamity in the result . . . Our Lord . . . specifically ordered us to pray for and to heal the sick. But about the weather He had nothing to say. He simply accepted it.”

¶Writing in the British Dominican review, Blackfriars, Oxford’s professor of Eastern religions and ethics, Robert C. Zaehner, takes apart Novelist Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception, in which Huxley proclaims that a drug called mescalin produced in him something like a religious experience. “This is the [familiar] experience of union with nature; it is not union with God,” writes Zaehner. “The Doors of Perception cannot … be classed as a holy book; for holiness implies peace. There is no peace here . . .” Far from approaching the Beatific Vision, Huxley “came nearer than he knew to the gates of Hell.”

¶In Ceylon, the Rev. Bob Richards, 28, consultant in Christian life activities at California’s La Verne College, world’s top pole vaulter and holder of the national A.A.U. decathlon title, was invited to address the Sunday school of the Methodist Church in Colombo. Suddenly the invitation was canceled. Reason: Bob, known as “the pole-vaulting padre,” was found to have participated in Sunday sports.