RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS
135
I knew more than twenty years ago as Oxford undergraduates–
leopards unlikely to change their spots-I quoted to myself: "Not
thus are souls redeemed." They appeared to be impressed only by
the dramatic possibilities of the confessional and by the Church's
amusingly strict stand on the Seventh Commandment. Waugh, I
hear, prides himself on being the more orthodox of the two, but has
not on that account become a whit more Christ-like. When he turns
his bowler-hat into a begging-bowl and carries a palmer's ragged
staff instead of a rolled silk-umbrella, I shall be less reluctant to
believe in the reported revival.
There are, I agree, a few self-conscious intellectuals who have
become converted because Western civilization is threatened by
Communism; they feel that since their irreligious predecessors sold the
pass to the Marxists it is now their honorable duty to rally the
defense of the citadel. Privately, they still regard much Catholic doc–
trine as preposterous, but feel the pragmatic need of assuming its
truth. "And why not?"-I hear them argue with their critical con–
sciences-"If mathematicians can assume that 2+2=5, and base a
fascinating and coherent new system on it, why should we humanists
balk at the doctrine of the Incarnation?"
The practical core of the questionnaire is:
((If we are to have
an integral religious culture again, can its tradition be purely Chris–
tian? Will not the tradition of any civilization have to be essentially
pluralistic?"
But Christianity is itself "essentially pluralistic" and has
been so ever since Judaic and Gentile Christianity parted company
somewhere about the year 50 A.D., the Judaic Church maintaining
its connexion with the Pharisaic synagogue and denying Jesus' god–
head, while the Gentile Church came under the influence of Greek,
Syrian and Egyptian mystery cults and proclaimed J esus the Second
Person of the Gnostic Trinity. Both these Churches were pacifist;
but in the fourth century A.D., Gentile Christianity suddenly turned
into a militant State religion and began to swallow whatever pagan
cults it thought it could digest-though later it had to spew some
out as heretical.
St. Paul, the founder of the Gentile Church, boasted that he
was all things to all men, a Jew to Jews, a Gentile to Gentiles-how–
ever shoddy a man's works, faith in the mercy of Christ was enough
to save him from Hell. This reckless dispensation forced wide open the
