We are all very aware of the glaring inequalities that exist between the rich and the poor countries of the world, and of the cries for help (usually in the form of financial aid) that come from every side One thing that is overlooked, either because we feel that we can do nothing about it, because we are too diplomatic, because we do not want to meddle in the internal politics of nation states, because we ourselves are hardly an example, or because we are in fact profiting from the situation, is the growing imbalance of wealth inside many of the countries in Africa today. The fact that we feel we can do nothing, or do not want to do anything has helped to hide the situation, to relegate it to a limbo. Very often we just do not want to talk about it. And yet there can be no hope of development if this very basic problem is not tackled.

That it exists is evident to anyone who has ever worked in Africa. The usual dichotomy is between rural and urban areas, wealth accumulates in the cities and not in the rural areas, although at times up to 95% of the population live in the countryside and provides the nation’s wealth. The cities give the impression of a progressive, intense and thrusting development, the rural areas appear to be stagnant or even regressing.

And yet to portray the problem in these terms is only to tell half the truth; there is a mixture of poverty and wealth in both urban and rural areas. Each African country has at least one showpiece of a city; tall buildings, offices, apartments, or hotels. There are flyovers, underpasses, or freeways; elegant shopping centres dot the town which is no doubt surrounded by affluent suburbs.

The many recent discussions in the churches on the “ministry of women” have only served to reveal the sterility of the topic when considered as an end in itself, apart from the wider context in which it belongs, a context which itself needs to be re-examined: the responsibility of every member of God’s church to minister.

The arguments on women and the priesthood face a particular danger in the Roman church, where there is an unhealthy focus on priesthood, to the exclusion of every other aspect of Christian ministry. This has produced a church in which rigid conformity to the three estates—the priesthood, the “religious life”, the lay state—has blinded its members to Christ’s exhortation to every soul to seek out freedom and wholeness. The result has been a misuse of the concept of vocation. Any member of the church who gives exceptional evidence of a spiritual dimension to his life, or exhibits an interest in the workings of the institutional church is expected and channelled to go on to something higher, and this means to take a step up the hierarchical ladder which has been devised. In this way his universal Christian vocation is subsumed into a specialist vocation which the church regards as superior. Such a system fails to profit by and encourage the growth of those of its members who are permanently committed to the lay state. Most especially is this anachronistic in the modem world where education and the tools of civilisation are no longer the special charge of the church but within the grasp and gift of everybody. Such a development in the Christian world should be joyfully accepted as heralding the replacement of institutionalised and elitist knowledge by equality of opportunity and, therefore, of contribution.

Since the nineteen-thirties and forties, when the late Sir Herbert Read, author of Reason and Romanticism, was an influential figure in literary England, Romanticism as an avowed literary attitude has suffered an eclipse, even if vulgarized forms of Romanticism are more prevalent in society at large than ever before. Less prominent than Read was the equally Romantic critic and moralist, J. Middleton Murry. Among Murry’s younger associates was F. A.Lea, the author of several studies of Romantic writers including Shelley, Carlyle and Nietzsche. Now Mr Lea has come forward with a book of literary studies which again raises the Romantic banner. Voices in the Wilderness, studies of six “prophetic” writers of the modem age, Blake, Wordsworth, Carlyle, D H Lawrence, Middleton Murry and Arthur Koestler, is the second volume of a dual work the first volume of which, The Ethics of Reason, is a philosophical examination of attempts from Socrates onwards to define “the good man”. Voices in the Wilderness, however, is complete in itself, and constitutes a very revealing exposition of the Romantic viewpoint.

Like most people whose thoughts and feelings are not limited to their own immediate circumstances, Mr Lea is appalled by the joyless collectivism towards which human societies seem inevitably to be progressing. He diagnoses the root of our trouble to lie in the Utilitarian philosophy born, he believes, out of eighteenth-century materialism with its seductive creed of “happiness here”, confused pragmatically and illogically with an abstract Christian altruism based on contradictory expectations of “happiness hereafter”. One of the consequences of this pervasive Utilitarianism is a widespread present inability to achieve originality, i.e. to penetrate beyond general concepts fixed by language into the truth of particular perceptions: to see things as they miraculously are.