Malcolm Muggeridge.

A watery, wintry dawn seen across London roofs is exceedingly lovely. It is as though the old Thames were once more flowing through deserted, desolate marshes. In the stillness, London seems only a dream, a shadow, with no corporeal existence. Seeing it thus, I reflected that the greatness of Christian civilization, of which London is a manifestation, derives from the religion out of which it was born.

Throughout all its cruel history, the idea has been kept alive that men belong to one family, with one father in Heaven, and so must be brothers one with another. However imperfectly, this concept finds expression in law, in art, in all institutions, in the whole apparatus of society.

Materialism, whether in the American or the Russian version, is the exact antithesis of such a concept. It claims for the ego all rights because there is nothing but the ego, and therefore leads back to barbarism, to the condition before civilization existed.

This is absolutely and irretrievably the consequence of setting up Man as his own God. Thither we are now moving, with what accompaniment of horrors cannot be imagined. I feel this deluge upon me, and ask only that I may be vouchsafed the strength to live out what remains of my own days, in the light of truth as I have seen it – that Man lives in so far as the ego dies, that self-abnegation is greater than self-assertion, that to bow the head before the wonder and mystery of creation is more fitting than to raise it in defiance, and that the imagination alone can light a path through the forests of the night, Paul, Blake, Beethoven, Constable and many, many others contributing to that sublime radiance.

Goodness has an aroma of sweetness, evil a stench. This is not fanciful, but a fact. Between the powers of darkness operating through the will, and those of light operating through the imagination or soul, there is ceaseless war – a conflict which takes place collectively, as well as inside each individual.

This recalls an image in ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ – Christian, climbing up a mountain in the shade keeps seeing round each bend the sunshine in which he longs to be but never reaches. Like all Bunyan’s images, it is perfect because it recalls an exact experience. How excluded one feels in the chill shade when one sees the earth bathed in sunshine, seemingly near, yet out of reach. So it is possible to be excluded from goodness.

’Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee,’ is, perhaps, the most poignant of all prayers. It is also true that goodness exists by virtue of itself and not by virtue of the acts it induces.

Goodness in itself spreads light; the halo is an authentic phenomenon. The mere presence of goodness destroys its opposite as light destroys darkness. Nothing needs to be said, or even done.

In the presence of goodness anger is consumed, arrogance expires, lustfulness flickers out – a fire without fuel. For days, and even weeks, the light can be lost sight of, the task forgotten. Then, in a despairing moment, remembrance comes, and resolution is again summoned up.

There is no other answer to despair -neither drug nor stimulant, neither sleep nor wakefulness; no change of scene, or of companionship, or of way of life; no satiety of the senses. This is a hunger which bread will not satisfy, a thirst which drink will not quench. The only satisfaction lies in self- abnegation; the way, as the New Testament says, is narrow, and the gate to it is straight.

Yet along this way alone is life worth living; can, indeed, be lived at all. Generalised plans for human felicity are all doomed, not merely to failure, but to produce the exact opposite of what was intended. Each individual must find the way alone and follow it alone.

Who knows what future horrors the pursuit of collective chimera may hold. It may even be that Man, in the Will’s final frenzy, will blow the earth itself to pieces, and himself with it. No matter. All that will be lost is a speck of dust travelling through the universe – that’s nothing. What remains is eternity and Man’s part in it – that’s everything.