The Rock, May 1997
In England Now

Truth and Trust

"Tories Deserve to Lose", and "Labour Doesn't Deserve to Win".

Those were the two headlines on the front cover of the Economist just
before the General Election on May 1st. The Economist is one of the
best informed and well-written journals on world affairs, and its
opinions deserve to be taken seriously. Except, that is, when it strays,
as it does from time to time, into the realms of subjects like abortion
and women priests when its writers are no better informed than those
of most other "liberal" journals.

But of that, more in a moment.

In the event, Labour won handsomely with an overall majority in the
region of one hundred and eighty seats, an achievement which surprised
many people, not least the winners themselves.

People are naturally asking why this upset occurred. Something similar
happened in Canada a year or two back. But the size of  the débâcle
over here was, I believe, contributed to by a particular British trait,
namely a Fit of Morality.

Lord Macaulay's much-quoted but widely misapplied  dictum “We know
no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical
fits of morality....” which are the opening lines of his Essay on
Moore's Life of Lord Byron comes to mind. It forms part of a much
longer quotation and, wrenched from its context, is popularly understood
to say that all moral perceptions of the British public at all times
are bound to be insincere and faulty. This in turn has been applied
by those with an anti-morality axe to grind to imply that Macaulay
was stating that all forms of public indignation, however expressed
are inherently ridiculous.

But that's not at all what he was saying. So far from being "soft"
on moral principles, Macaulay has some fairly trenchant things to
say in the very next paragraph:

It is clear [he says] that those vices which destroy domestic happiness
ought to be as much as possible repressed. It is equally clear that
they cannot be repressed by penal legislation. It is therefore right
and desirable that public opinion should be directed against them.
But it should be directed against them steadily, and temperately,
not by sudden fits and starts. There should be one weight and one
measure. ...It is good that a certain portion of disgrace should constantly
attend on certain bad actions. But it is not good that the offenders
should merely have to stand the risks of a lottery of infamy, that
ninety-nine out of every hundred should escape, and that the hundredth,
perhaps the most innocent of the hundred, should pay for all"

In other words Macaulay is not inveighing against the "punishment
of wickedness and vice", but against its uneven and excessive application,
particularly, as he saw it, in the case of Lord Byron. At a time of
exceedingly licentious behaviour, especially amongst the aristocracy,
Lord Byron's misdeeds seemed to catch the full wrath of the public
opinion. Macaulay, whilst accepting the shortcomings of Byron is nevertheless
concerned to redress the balance and to portray him in a more favourable
light.

There is little doubt that the British public wanted to punish the
Tory administration of the past 15 years for its misdemeanours, real
and imagined. The ballot box gave them the opportunity to do so, and
the popular cry of "Time For a Change" was gratified to the point
of indulgence.

It is salutary, however, in the wake of such an event to take heed
to Macaulay's words and realise that "popular justice" is likely both
to be misdirected and over-enthusiastic. John Major and his colleagues
certainly deserved retribution for their sleaze, errors of judgement
and other shortcomings; equally certainly the severity of their chastisement
was unmerited.  But such is political life, and nobody should complain,
least of all the losers, if from time to time a freak result occurs.

Such certainties, however, should never be mistaken either for truth
or justice, though they may contain elements of both. The notion that
the truth can be determined by popular ballot is as ridiculous as
the idea that justice can be administered that way.

For popular opinion is notoriously open to swings of mood and to propaganda
(why else would people spend so much money on advertising?) and popular
justice (as Macaulay pointed out) is likely to result in an unjust
sentence being passed on a small minority of those on trial.

This is particularly the case with revealed truth, which is the stock
in trade of the Christian Church. As Christians we believe that we
have been entrusted with the truth by God both about himself, ourselves
and the world which we inhabit. The idea that such truth can be safeguarded
by entrusting it to the wishes of the majority is one which no intelligent
person would even have entertained a hundred years ago.

Synodical, democratic, government in the Church has increasingly shown
this to be the case. Opinions are expressed, reports written and canons
passed which bear no relationship whatever to the "faith once delivered
to the saints". And the justification for them is simply the (supposedly
self-evident) principle that "the majority of people want them".

Now the majority of people, amongst whom I include myself, want a
whole lot of things. For some it's money, for others power, others
still sell their souls for such messes of pottage as success, fulfilment
or gratification; yet others, wishing that the world, or life, were
different from how it manifestly is, would like to believe that the
passing of a law, or a popular vote will make all the difference.

The facts are otherwise. After a while people either come to realise
that they haven't got what they wanted, or else that they didn't really
want that particular thing as much as they thought in the first place.

There are now signs, at least in the Church of England, that disillusionment
is beginning to set in in a big way. People's trust have been betrayed
and their expectations unfulfilled so often in the past few years
that they are now seriously beginning to believe that they may have
taken a wrong turn.

Evidence of this comes from a number of quarters. For example, Anglican
Bishops from as far apart as Singapore and the Southern Cone of South
America have recently initiated proceedings to excommunicate ECUSA
and get them excluded from the Lambeth Conference in 1998. 

Whether they succeed or not, it is the first crack in the Lambeth
facade to open up. Hitherto American anglican money has been one of
the most influential forces in securing the connivance of Provinces
in less well-to-do parts of the world, particularly in Africa. 

Nearer home the news is equally encouraging. Two highly successful
conferences for would-be ordinands from Forward in Faith were oversubscribed.
That can only mean that young (and not-so-young) men are seeing that
there is a future within Anglicanism for them as priests in God's
Church.

Over five thousand of our integrity attended the York Minster Provincial
Festival on Saturday 17th May. It was the eve of Pentecost and the
theme was Fan The Flames. The Principal Celebrant and Preacher was
Bishop John Gaisford of Beverley (one of the Provincial Episcopal
Visitors). Though I was unable to be present myself I am told by Archdeacon
George Austin (well known to many of the faithful in Canada) that
it was "simply wonderful" and "the collection was something enormous".

This latter fact is in itself significant. English anglicans are not
famous for the amount they put into the collection plate. This is
partly because they know only too well how liberally the powers that
be in the CofE spend anything that comes to hand and a bit more besides!
But it suggests that at least within our constituency the level of
trust is being maintained; whilst the fact that we can easily fill
the Minster is proof, if such were required, that we are not that
dying breed of stick-in-the-muds which some of our opponents  hoped.
Where Truth and Trust are flourishing it is a sure sign that life
is not extinct or about to become so!

Publications are also starting to proliferate. That is always a good
sign. The turning point for Forward in Faith was, and is, the success
of New Directions, Forward! (the weekly pewsheet), and Forward Plus
(the quarterly popular newspaper). 

The faithful are at last beginning to take seriously the threat to
doctrine and morality posed by the Lesbian and Gay lobby. From another
quarter a new publishing venture called Zugon is producing a whole
range of literature under the general heading of of Facts Matter.
This includes well-researched leaflets on the hard facts of life,
including the medical consequences of what homosexuals do to themselves
and to each other, and the way in which the Gay and Lesbian Lobby
is manipulating the truth to further their own ends.

I mentioned Truth and Trust a few moments ago. By far the most hopeful
sign is that Truth and Trust are now, at last, being seen as Endangered
Species, not only in public life generally but also particularly within
the Church of God. 

For many years it has been assumed that the Truth is "something which
everybody believes", and Trust is something which Englishmen exudes
naturally from every pore. It's taken nearly 40 years of telling people
that this is not so for them to begin to take notice.

If everybody believed the Truth, or more particularly if the Truth
was "what everybody (or a majority, say of two-thirds) believes",
then there would be no need for revelation. We'd simply know if something
was true or false. 

The fact of the matter is that most people simply don't have a clue
not only as to what the truth is in the first place, but how to discover
what the truth is if you do want to know. 

As for Trust, most people, even those who enthusiastically protect
other endangered species, whether badgers or bats, simply do not realise
that unless trust is constantly nursed and protected it will simply
wither away.

"Dis-ease" is also beginning to appear outside the comparatively narrow
circles of the Church of England. Journalists, Teachers, Lawyers and
Doctors are just a few of those who are disturbed by just how far
the rot has set in. 

For example, a prominent self-avowed "liberal" journalist, Melanie
Phillips, recently earned the opprobrium of her fellow liberals by
the publication of her book All Shall have Prizes which called into
question the whole nostrum of using education as an tool of social
engineering.

Now she has blotted her copybook once again in an article which she
wrote for the Times last week, which questioned the whole foundation
of liberal presuppositions as they are propagated today. 

Let me quote just a paragraph from her article which was entitled:
The soul of man under new Labour

“It is very confusing”, [she writes] “to be a liberal today. We believe
we live in a liberal society. But our definition of liberal has become
corrupted. It has fallen victim to a mind-set which says the individual
is paramount, personal choice and self-fulfilment trump everything
else, all values are subjective and there is no such thing as objective
right and wrong. These beliefs are not liberalism. They are its antithesis.”

Come back, Macaulay! All is forgiven. Or as Wordsworth wrote in 1802:

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: Altar, sword and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
O raise us up , return to us again,
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power!

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