It was an uneasy summer. Yet all seemed usual enough on the crowded freeways, the trailers loaded with the burdens that Americans bear for their annual love affair with what they imagine to be the past: guns and fishing rods, plaid shirts and folksong records, bags of charcoal nuggets for the forest cook-outs, stickers on the rear window of Yoshe-mite, Virginia City and Gettysburg. But the papers they read as they sat at the teakwood tables in Oregon camping grounds or lay by the motel pools in Florida always told the same story: a single theme whose only variations were Bull Connor’s police dogs savaging the Negro boys or the high-pressure hoses mowing a black mob down, or, as summer ended, the exploded bomb in Birmingham, Alabama, and the broken bodies of children in the street. And there had been the Washington march and a quarter-of-a-million witnesses to all this huge iniquity.

James Baldwin’s book had headed the best-seller list in the NewYork Times all summer long. And The Fire Next Time, enraged and apocalyptic, matched the new mood. Somehow the old arguments had become as irrelevant as war-time rationing. And even the high-minded, faithful over the years to the National Association for the Advancement of the Colored People (and how suddenly archaic that had come to sound!), seemed still to be speaking of another time, another place and certainly another people. The religious leaders, with various degrees of caution, sounded trumpets—mostly of tin, it must be admitted. And Catholic Bishops spoke afresh, or at least again, of the Natural Law.

How is Christianity involved in the Negro struggle? Dr Martin Luther King has appealed to stricty Christian motives. He has based his nonviolence on his belief that love can unite men, even enemies, in truth. That is to say that he has clearly spelled out the struggle for freedom not as a struggle for the Negro alone, but also for the white man. From the start, the non-violent element in the Negro struggle is oriented toward ‘healing’ the sin of racism and toward unity in reconciliation. An absolutely necessary element in this reconciliation is that the white man should allow himself to learn the mute lesson which is addressed to him in the suffering, the non-violent protest, the loving acceptance of punishment for the violation of unjust laws, which the Negro freely and willingly brings down upon himself in the white man’s presence, in the hope that the oppressor may come to see his own injustice.

The purpose of this suffering, freely sought and accepted in the spirit of Christ, is the liberation of the Negro and the redemption of the white man, blinded by his endemic sin of racial injustice. In other words, the struggle for liberty is not merely regarded by this most significant sector of the Negro population, as a fight for political rights. It is this, and it is also much more. It is what Gandhi called Satyagraha—a struggle first of all for the truth, outside and independent of specific political contingencies.

The front cover of the Penguin paperback Piers the Ploughman shows a woodcut of Langland lying beside a Malvern stream watching his vision of Piers. Piers is plowing the field of the world—there are the jackdaws flapping up out of the furrows and the sun shining hotly. Piers is giving Will a straight look, and Will is looking back: respectful, but a little dull and sheepish. They are both, naturally, barefoot. Then this other book, in covers exceedingly hard, and with no woodcut, opens to page thirty-five and, after a pointed quotation from St Augustine, commences a summary: ‘The Church needs, not only one to form her in the first place, but always, because she is deformed, a reformer. And this is Christ himself. This is why, throughout everything that we must not shirk saying, and in painful compassion and sorrowfully recognizing our co-responsibility, about the shadow-side of the Church, yet we can always firmly believe, in glad and unshakable faith, not in a sinful Church but in the holy Church.’ And further down the page (of The Council, Reform and Reunion) Hans Küng goes on: ‘ . . . insofar as God’s holy Church is a Church of men and sinful men, she, with everything that she is and has, is subject to that word of the Lord which reads “Do penance and be converted.” Insofar as the Church is deformed, she has to be reformed: ecclesia reformanda.’