Any political idea in a work of literature is like a pistol shot in the midst of a concert.—Stendhal.

I.

It was Silone, I believe, who proposed that we might be communists without the Party and Christians without the Church. Individually, perhaps : collectively, it can scarcely be doubted we lack the necessary courage and self-discipline. Belloc, I suspect, came closer to evaluating our gifts when he advised ‘always keep ahold of nurse. . . .’ The difficulty is, of course, that most of our nurseries are empty of nurses—the last wraith of a political nanny had disappeared some time before Mr Wilson sent for his famous removal van, and now that those long-serving retainers, the Latin Mass and the 1662 Anglican Communion, are skipping among us as vernacular folk masses and Second and Third Series, it is understandable that we should be in some confusion. Indeed, despite Silone, our predicament is such that we cling yet more tightly to the only security available. It is perhaps pleasantly ironic that for many of us the last and most esteemed resource is none other than Progressive nanny. Orwell could see the way of it a quarter of a century ago.

‘Almost everyone nowadays, even the majority of Catholics and Conservatives is progressive, or at least wishes to be thought so. . . . We are all of us good democrats, anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, contemptuous of class distinction, impervious to colour prejudice, and so on and so forth’, (England your England. Seeker and Warburg.)

Regrettably, some of the pleasanter aspects of such a position are now more in question than they were when Orwell wrote—colour prejudice wears all the dignity of democratic consensus—but for the most part the position remains unaltered and has probably been strengthened by the dominant position of television as a means of influencing public attitudes.

In his article on the future in the May issue of Blackfriars Professor Geach argues at some length against the thesis (which I will henceforth call fatalism) that the future is definite and determinate. I am just as firmly convinced as Professor Geach that fatalism is incorrect, but I am not at all sure that the reasons which he puts forward against this theory are sufficient to refute it. Geach’s main argument against fatalism appears to be contained in the following passages:

'P. T. Geach ‘The Future’ in New Blackfriars, vol. 54, number 636 (May, 1973), pp. 209, 211.

However, the simple fact to which Geach draws our attention is not as simple as it looks. ‘Not everything that was going to happen eventually did happen’ may be interpreted in a number of different ways. It could mean:

There is a wide-spread feeling that the recent conference on ‘Salvation Today’ which took place in Bangkok from December 28th, 1972 to January 8th, 1973, under the auspices of the World Council of Churches’ Commission on World Mission and Evangelism, may herald the beginning of a new period in the missionary endeavour of the Christian churches. A significant feature of the conference was that delegates from churches in the Third World outnumbered those from the West. They attacked the sending of missionaries and funds by powerful Western churches to the poor churches in the Third World, urging that the missionary enterprise should become ‘completely mutual and international’, and even proposed a moratorium on the sending of funds and personnel to Third World churches, to allow them to discover their own identity and resources for missionary expansion.

Only a few months after the Bangkok conference had discussed the meaning of ‘Salvation Today’, 720 delegates attended a ‘Congress on Mission and Evangelism’ in Durban, South Africa. As in Bangkok, the greater part of those who took part in the South African congress were ‘Non-Whites’. There was a further similarity of great significance: The aim of the congress was ‘. . . to discover together the relevance of the Gospel and the meaning of mission and evangelism in present-day Southern Africa ... to assess the resources and potential of all Christian churches and agencies for mission and evangelism . . . and to give stimulus, inspiration and encouragement to Christians as they face this task’.

Contradictions in a Controversy

Las Casas has always been surrounded by controversy. Not only clid he play a highly important role in what is known as the ‘Indian Controversy’, but he himself has been the object of violent and protracted dispute. He has been regarded as the glory, and at the same time as the disgrace of Spain; as a fanatic, and a man of enlightenment. He has been used as an example for all kinds of people, for Christians as well as atheists, for Protestants and Catholics, for those on the left as well as those on the right; for people who love Spain, and those who hate the country.

This article does not seek to cast new light on that problem, which is sufficiently vast and complicated to inspire a book and much more. The present task is more modest; it is to look again at one or two important points in the interpretation of Las Casas, and to arrive at a picture which fits better with the man, his thoughts, and his deeply-held desires. I am sure that it is impossible to understand him if his life and work are separated from his basic motives; and this separation has been one of the main sources of the controversy surrounding him. It is also at the bottom of the paradoxical criticism and praise for him that spring out of the turning-point in history known as ‘The Indian Controversy’.

Samuel Purchas (1575-7 to 1626) provides us with a very illuminating example of this contradiction, and his attitude to the Spanish conquest is a case in point. His Relations of the World was first published in 1613, that is 61 years after the first edition of Las Casas’ best-known and most polemical work, the Brevisima Historia de las Destruccion de Las Indias. Now the gap between what Las Casas wrote and the motives of Purchas can be seen clearly expressed in the latter’s writing, for his aims were quite different from those of Las Casas.

The most extreme advocates amongst those who favoured ‘sacerdotalism’ if not theocracy, John Henry Newman was ‘deeply introspective, constantly self-concerned, tirelessly self-recording’. Subsequently he possessed a weak social conscience. In later life, Newman acknowledged that ‘he had never considered social questions in their relation to faith, and had always looked upon the poor as objects for compassion and benevolence’. On this indifference, E. B. Burgum comments that ‘there was no writer of the period, who wrote with a more complete unconsciousness of their existence in state or church’.

Parliamentary reform, educational changes, local government development, the Factory Acts, democracy’s progress, industrialism’s and technology’s dubious side-effects left Newman unstirred. Writes H. L. Stewart: ‘The famine in Ireland, the vast selfishness of the Corn Laws, Chartism, the opium war in China—how a Hebrew prophet would have dealt with them! But one would gather from Newman’s sermons that the social passion of an Isaiah or a Jeremiah had no place in Christianity’.’ Newman was as unconscious as Darwin upon the Beagle of great movements outside the Church. C. F. Harrold comments :