Irrelevant Doctrine?

Basil Kingsley Martin, the cheerfully scolding editor of Britain's weekly New Statesman and Nation, looks like a nonconformist minister--which his father was. In his column last fortnight, he let fly at one of his favorite targets--the Church:

"Why does the Church of England make so few recruits? The main answer is surely fairly simple. People are more interested in problems that we used to call religious than ever before, but the reason why they don't go to church is that they don't and can't believe what is taught there. Once people believed that they were going to heaven or hell in the same sense that they would get to Manchester if they started from Euston and to Brighton if they went from Victoria. Nothing can revive that belief. Once they believed that Christian principles had something to do with public conduct. But why should . . . anybody . .. expect people to go to church and listen with respect to a priest reading the Sermon on the Mount, when they know that atom bombs are being made for use? The Church decays because the doctrines so often seem irrelevant to the issues of life and death, about which it is supposed to give the answers."

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