When the mother’s hfe is menaced, and the birth bears a threat not a blessing, is the baby then an aggressor, and accordingly to be disposed of as neatly as possible? Intervention to that effect, is it not demanded by plain common- sense, clear responsibility, a humane scale of values? The Christian Church, however, can never consent to the direct destruction of innocent human hfe—notice the qualifications direct and innocent, through the use of force to repel aggression is approved. Nevertheless our present question, which cannot be summed up in a single brutal or sentimental statement, has been charged with anxiety and misrepresentation: on one side, the Pope has been accused of preferring the unborn baby to the mother, and of a characteristically clerical unconcern for ordinary human tragedies; on the other, materialism and paganism can be too readily ascribed to some of his critics, and their reluctance to go to extreme lengths not allowed for.

Let us begin by recognising how rare is a classical case of Mother v. Child; their relations, from beginning to end, should be for the health of both, and indeed so they are, when the physical, psychological, and moral rules are observed. Women are well designed by God to be mothers. We speak of an ‘expectant’ mother; and certainly she can look forward with happy confidence to the birth of her child. The situation is not abnormal, the condition not pathological, the business not a dangerous operation. A woman when she is in labour hath pain, because her hour is come; but as soon as she is delivered, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a child is born into the world.

Perhaps Frazer’s own theories about the origin and development of religion hardly constitute a present-day challenge of any sort. There is ample evidence that he grew increasingly dissatisfied with them himself, and few students of the subject today would care to subscribe to them as adequate to account for all the facts—even for all the facts which he himself collected, let alone the enormous quantity which have been gathered since his time. It is not, however, of Frazer’s own theories in particular, or even of his own findings, that I propose to speak; I take his name rather as a symbol, for it is that of the leading representative of the widespread dissemination of the comparative study of religion. Comparative religion was studied before Frazer, and it has been studied since. Yet it was Frazer’s great work, more than any other, which aroused the interest of non-specialists. Jane Harrison recalls how, ‘Among my own contemporaries J. G. Frazer was soon to light the dark world of savage superstition with a gleam from The Golden Bough. The happy title of that great book ... made it arrest the attention of scholars.... Tylor had written and spoken; Robertson Smith had seen the Star in the East; in vain; we classical deaf-adders stopped our ears and closed our eyes; but at the mere sound of the magical words “Golden Bough’’ the scales fell—we heard and understood.’ But it was not only to classical scholars that Frazer’s work opened new worlds; and soon it was to become common knowledge that the beliefs and practices of Christian Europe were by no means so peculiar and unique as had been commonly assumed. A nodding acquaintance, at least, with other people’s religions became part of the equipment of any educated man.

When we try to make contact, for the purpose of teaching and explaining the faith, with the pagan mind of our generation, something we might call ‘scientific mindedness’ at once arises as a barrier. (The inverted commas are strictly necessary.) We are not speaking of the truly scientific attitude but of a by-product, to be found both among scientists and among those several removes away from any field of scientific research. I do not mean by ‘scientific mindedness’ simply the attitude that demands tangible proof for every assertion made. Neither do I mean actual knowledge of recent scientific discoveries and theories, requiring particular answers to particular objections. The difficulty is really one of basic mental patterns. The more we are pre-occupied, as Christians, with the truths of revelation, the more these truths will determine the shape of our thinking and our approach to all questions, not only doctrinal ones. The unbeliever is not, of course, so shaped in his mind. But this naturally does not mean that his mind has no determinate shape. The basic mental patterns of the unbelievers of our day are, as we all know, to a large extent laid down by ideas stemming from the scientific discoveries and theories of die last hundred years. It does not matter that a particular individual has perhaps read very litde, even in popular works, of what these discoveries and dieories actually are. He absorbs his mental outlook from them none the less.

But the fact that his actual knowledge is probably slight deprives him of the riches of the scientific outlook, its humility before facts and its acute realisation of its own limitations, and leaves him with illegitimate by-products—a vague assumption of materialism, a vague conviction of the near-omniscience and nearomnipotence of ‘scientists’, and a vague certainty that practically every teaching that has not come directly from ‘the scientists’ has at some time, somehow, been discredited and disproved by them. Against this background we try to trace the truths of revelation.

Mr Blanshard has been at it again. This time he appears in the arena astride not one adversary but two: the twin steeds of the Vatican and the Kremlin, the Black International and the Red. His thesis is that there is a triangular war going on, between Communism and Democracy and Catholic power (he implies some distinction between Catholic power, which is his chosen concern, and Catholicism, which quite evidently is not)—a struggle in which each of the three is fighting the other two simultaneously, and in which there is room for only one ultimate victor.

But though in this book there are two horses in the ring,where in Freedom and Catholic Power there was one, it is really the same turn all over again. The net result is but a deeper denigration of the Catholic Church, by (this time) comparing it for three hundred pages with a Marxist institution whose blackness none of his readers except Communists will any longer doubt. The parallel is of course fascinating (there is never a dull moment): provided you are content for it to have extent without depth—for he never addresses himself to the problem of why, fundamentally, the Church execrates Atheistic Communism, nor vice versa. To him they are both primarily power machines, and anti-majority-rule. It is as easy as that. And parlous plausible.

In one respect there is more restraint than last time. There is none of the bombast about nobody being able to refute a single fact or quotation. On the contrary, his preface saddles responsibility for any mistakes upon himself rather than upon his consultants: though he is freer with the names of the ex-Marxists among these than of the ex-Catholics: ‘Unfortunately it would not be wise to mention all of my friends in Italy who have helped ... to show me the seamier side of Vatican policy’.