A Christmas Sermon

“Glory be to God in the highest and on earth peace, goodwill toward men.”

I wonder how many eager young clergymen will use this as the text of their Christmas sermon, pointing out, with varying degrees of emphasis, its relevance to Vietnam, to the alleged European détente, to the plight of the underdeveloped nations and to the wildly misnamed “ecumenical” movement in the Church. Few, I fancy, will observe the order of precedence accorded to these amiable slogans. Yet the “multitude of the Heavenly host” must, at some committee stage, have agreed on a formula. Peace and goodwill should follow as a necessary consequence of the first activity; to tackle the business of implementing these proposals from the other end, and say that through the exercise of goodwill establishing peace on earth God will be glorified, is a syllogistic inversion comparable to saying that where agricultural fertilizer will increase the corn yield for peasants to eat, further eating by peasants must cause more corn to grow which will produce the fertilizer necessary for the whole process.

AW

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Auberon Waugh

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“Glory be to God in the highest and on earth peace, goodwill toward men.”

I wonder how many eager young clergymen will use this as the text of their Christmas sermon, pointing out, with varying degrees of emphasis, its relevance to Vietnam, to the alleged European détente, to the plight of the underdeveloped nations and to the wildly misnamed “ecumenical” movement in the Church. Few, I fancy, will observe the order of precedence accorded to these amiable slogans. Yet the “multitude of the Heavenly host” must, at some committee stage, have agreed on a formula. Peace and goodwill should follow as a necessary consequence of the first activity; to tackle the business of implementing these proposals from the other end, and say that through the exercise of goodwill establishing peace on earth God will be glorified, is a syllogistic inversion comparable to saying that where agricultural fertilizer will increase the corn yield for peasants to eat, further eating by peasants must cause more corn to grow which will produce the fertilizer necessary for the whole process.