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IN his drama "A Man for all Seasons", the playwright Robert Bolt presents to us in Sir Thomas More a man who loved life in great variety and seized its sweetest and highest fruits to the full, yet who, when at last driven to retreat from "that final area where he located his self, could no more be budged than a cliff". And in his preface, Bolt diagnoses the desperate sickness of our generation, that more and more people act only from expediency and fewer and fewer from principle and rooted conviction. To adapt a metaphor which runs through the play, the rodent of rationalism has gnawed through the lifeline that moors our selfhood and we are left drifting helplessly over the wild, dark waters. It is significant that, rationalist and humanist though he is, Bolt had to utilise a man of deep religious conviction and piety for his hero of unshakable conviction.

More was a Romanist; the heroes of this study were not. They were, for the most part, as stubbornly convinced that the Roman church is the harlot woman of the Apocalypse as More was that they were unspeakable heretics. Yet, in a profound sense, there was more in common between them, despite their utterly irreconcilable beliefs and manner of life, than between both of them and our own generation.

It has been related in this book how an entire region, because its inhabitants preferred to accept death and exile rather than betray their true selves and their convictions, became so depopulated that a dispensation of polygamy was promulgated by the Roman church. This appears as madness to our generation, dedicated as it is to expediency and conformity. "These people must have been cranks, religious maniacs, fools, masochists in love with martyrdom."

But the evidence is overwhelming that they were nothing of the sort. True, some of them, perhaps, a majority were drawn from

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social classes beset by powerful economic frustrations. But, in the main, they were people who had a love and zest for life, ennobled by a rich spiritual fellowship among themselves. Many of them were the flower of their generation, if the deeper qualities of mercy, brotherly kindness, tolerance, human sympathy and sensitivity are considered the yardstick of character. Friends and enemies alike, in an age when religion begat as much brutality and foulness as politics does today, bore insistent testimony that here were people who dared to be different, not for the stubbornness of pride and vainconceit, but for the meekness and gentleness of Christ. They lit a lamp for their day and generation.

"You are the salt of the earth." Jesus of Nazareth invested the tiny band that he called apart to testify to him and all he stood for with a staggering responsibility. Into all the world they were to go. Not with the hope of converting the world, but with the aim of creating and forming a redemptive society that would be as the savour of salt in a world of corruption. In parable, metaphor and allegory, the Gospels illuminate the Master's teaching as embodying the one element of permanence and true selfhood in a world of doubt, changeableness and transcience. To build on it was to build on rock; by it one entered the light and joy of the bridal festivities while outside was the darkness; to bear witness to it was to be bearing lamps which shone with divine illumination; it was enduring bread and living water. In the wild darkness of the stormy night human guidance was in vain, and all their rowing brought no aid to a boat sinking with water. They were unable to discern any ethical landmarks; in all their doubts and fears they were in jeopardy. It was the voice of the Lord which stilled their storm.

The world has had -- so it is said -- an age of gold, an age of faith, an age of reason. Now perhaps we are in the age of uncertainty; which is strange since we know more about things than ever before. Yet we do not know what to give in exchange for our souls. "For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits himself?" That is true enough now, but in the day of reckoning if our self has been compromised and sacrificed to the Moloch of expediency, what will there be left to perpetuate?

"You are the salt of the earth." Many of the characters in this book, most of them virtually unknown, worked and struggled to season their generation with the savour of sincerity, charity and

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faith, and they are their own commendation. Many of them wrote, not with the cool pen of the academic theologian, but with the passionate intensity of tested conviction and a love that overflowed from a source which they felt was infinitely more precious than anything that this world affords. There is much we can learn from them.

CHAPTER 18 | CONTENTS | BIBILOGRAPHY