Thus George Moore, Tom Stoppard’s brilliant, bespectacled version of the modem moral philosopher. In Jumpers, Stoppard has managed to do with contemporary Anglo-Saxon philosophy what he did earlier in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Bead with modem literary criticism—to make of an academic discipline a playing field for his sport, and of its preoccupations so much grist for the artist’s mill. Stoppard’s wit draws the finest of lines between the serious and the outlandish; and his irreverence makes for good fun—at the expense of his earnest protagonist. But George wins us, albeit the way a warm puppy wins us; and we can summon a measure of sympathy for his plight. George moves in a world where all his colleagues benignly presume that intelligent people outgrow belief in God; and so, he feels defensive about his commitment to a deity fashioned of old by the philosophers.

It really does not matter to most believers today, I suppose, that the onus for proving the existence of God has passed to them. Believers are not so interested as they used to be in cornering the adversaries in the labyrinth of the Five Ways. What the believer may feel, however, is a certain social onus, as he rubs shoulders with that large company, now in the ascendancy, who look upon him as they might look upon a curious fossil unearthed in a Palestinian excavation.

That the tide has turned and the believer has ridden out with it to an exile in a foreign land characterizes the current Christian Sitz im Leben. Our poets sensed, three and four generations ago, that this would be the climate of the twentieth century.