We have all been aware, indeed for some years now, that Prof. G. R. Driver was preparing a work on the Dead Sea Scrolls. And we knew that it would be a major work, and that it would certainly tell us something new. It was a long wait, but now it is ended, and here is the book, of more than 600 pages, which is throwing to the ground certain positions which had come to be regarded as established. It is the work of a scholar, who is considered one of the finest Hebraists of our time, and of a courteous man, who has many friends, among whom I have the honour to include myself. I cannot forget his charm and humour as chairman at one of my Schweich Lectures on these very same manuscripts in 1959, nor his kind words in the preface which he graciously agreed to write to these lectures when they appeared in print, nor the long talks we had and the meals at Magdalen College and at his home at Oxford, nor the visit we made together to Qumran. All this makes it the more painful to me to be compelled to disagree with what he has written. After I have shared bread and salt with him (and a little more too), he might well say with the psalmist (he would say it in Hebrew): ‘He who did eat of my bread, hath lifted up his heel against me’. But this book is without question one of the most important which has been written about the scrolls, and judgement about it must be made with complete honesty and frankness.

Professor Gregor Smith has done us all a service by writing an important, interesting and honest book. If I want to disagree with him, it is because he has made clearer to me than before what the issues are between secular Christianity and that kind of Christianity – which I shall call radical or revolutionary – which I think is the only alternative. We now know more precisely why there will soon have to be a frank showdown between two quite different kinds of leftwing Christianity. Pace Christopher Driver, we are not ‘all brother radicals under the skin’ (The Guardian, January 13th 1966) and my main debt to Professor Gregor Smith, and the point at which I part company with him most decisively, is that he shows me why his position is not nearly radical enough. Or perhaps it would be better to say he is radical only in a direction which is irrelevant to the real issues of our time, and offers a way of letting off steam through a kind of intellectual safety-valve which, like all safety-valves, works in fact to the preservation of the equilibrium of the present state of things. The trouble with his kind of ‘secular’ Christianity is that, like philosophers, ‘secular’ Christians have only ‘interpreted the world in different ways; the point is to change it’ (Marx, eleventh thesis on Feuerbach). Despite his protests to the contrary, Professor Gregor Smith is, in this respect, a philosopher, and his secular Christianity is, as I hope to show, a philosophical scheme rather than a living faith.

So much has been written in recent months on the problem of family limitation that one must hesitate before adding to the mountain of literature. Yet the situation is desperate: as Catholics try to observe the recent teaching, marriages are wrecked and the toll steadily mounts of those who formally leave the Church, or lapse, or give up the sacraments, or live with a constant sense of bad conscience. Meanwhile we find ourselves isolated on this issue not only from the rest of the secular world – this in itself would not disturb us – but from other Christian bodies; and on a matter on which the New Testament has little to say.

The anguish of individual souls is matched by the physical suffering of whole nations that live in continual hunger. The problem is recognised at last but its vast scale is not always appreciated: on February 6 the Population Reference Bureau in Washington reported that if present trends continue the world population will more than double – that is, there will be over 3,500,000,000 extra mouths to feed – by the end of the century. None of us can grasp a number of such magnitude, so let us put the issue another way. In more and more countries the infant who survives his first few weeks is nearly certain to reach maturity; since the great majority of mankind marry and have children, it follows that if the average family contains only four children the population will almost double with each generation; and it is then only a matter of simple arithmetic to work out how long it will be before there is insufficient standing room on our planet and we shall literally have filled the earth.

‘Time was’, wrote William, ‘when the corrupt love of the flesh had its masters, who were so skilled in their subject that the most famous of them was constrained, even by the lovers and companions of his depravity, to recant by praising the opposite of what he had originally taught’. The reference to Ovid is clear enough. The Ars Amatoria, to a monastic mind of the twelfth century, is the testament of a pastmaster in corruption and perversity, of a persistent follower of the bent of fallen nature, which is away from God, back to the flesh, and downward to the earth.

The due order of nature, for William, is the upward direction that fire takes, for the soul is created to look heavenward, to rise in pure spirituality and be identified with God whose image it is. And it is meant to spiritualise the body, and carry it in that same upward direction – as far as that is possible on earth – aiming at least toward some position between earth and heaven. If heaven is unattainable before death, at least one can strive to be lifted up from the earth. But fallen man, with such as Ovid for his guide, is only too prone to cleave downward, to the flesh, to the earth, and to corruption. And this is the opposition that William traces in the first chapter of his Nature and Dignity of Love, the work which was called Anti-Masonem in the middle ages, on account of its avowed attack on the Ars Amatoria.

Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, Third Marquis of Salisbury and three times Prime Minister of Great Britain, was a man of many principles. One of these was that the more public houses you had in a place the fewer people were likely to get drunk; another was that in the town of Bishops Hatfield, over which he ruled with a benevolent and unquestioned authority, the Roman Catholics must be kept on the other side of the railway. The ‘other side’ is all that most people now see of Hatfield, as they rush northwards along the double lanes of the A. i; but in the days when I lived there the Great North Road passed through the middle of the town, and I can remember at least three public houses – one of them the Eight Bells where Bill Sykes ordered his pint after the murder of Nancy – which the eye of an alert traveller might have caught within the space of sixty seconds. To catch sight of the Roman Catholics you would have had to go a mile or two up the St Albans Road where the Oblates of St Charles maintained their unobtrusive Oratory. The old part of the town was dominated by the spire of St Ethelreda’s church, with the Old Palace of the Bishops of Ely, and the great house and park beyond, and the statue of the third Marquis meeting you as you came out of the station. If ‘Establishment’ means anything, it meant everything at Bishops Hatfield.