Plus c’est la même chose, plus ça change. It is only to be expected that this strange looking-glass country should even oblige one to put platitudes back to front. In the seventies, all appears to be exactly as it was in the sixties, if not more so, with the Vorster brothers reigning supreme in Church and State—the Prime Minister’s elder brother was elected Moderator of the N.G.K., the biggest of the three Galvinist Afrikaner churches, at their synod last year. And yet there is a change in the smell of things, at least to my nostrils. I will try to illustrate this state of affairs by a miscellany of episodes that have marked the last eighteen months.

We begin with the Msini case. Mr Msini is a crippled African who works, I believe as a night watchman, for a firm in Wellington, about forty miles from Cape Town.

We pray for a good death and a perfect end in every service of Compline. When is death (thanatos) good (eu-) ? Every man must answer this according to his definition of goodness. Does goodness depend merely on the absence of pain in the sufferer or of grief in the spectators? Death is such a negative subject that to make it good one must see some positive content of love, compassion, even bravery and perhaps immortality set around it, within it and beyond it. Only then is death euthanatos (the good death).

Dictionaries define euthanasia as ‘gentle easy death’, but euthanasia is a euphemism which like a shroud hides the reality. When the sprightly old lady died in her sleep no one would call it euthanasia, but it is. If a man had a stroke and sank slowly and gently without pain to death in a couple of days and the doctor gave only one brandy, no one would accuse him of assisting euthanasia.

Christians are accused of discounting human suffering. Catholics are charged with increasing people’s sufferings in order to keep the rules of the Church, sometimes with regarding suffering as a just punishment, and even with considering it as something good and desirable in itself. In addition, your profession and mine are closely and continually connected with suffering in a variety of forms, and while on occasion we may be forgiven for seeing life in terms of little else, the possibility of this one-sided view at least prevents us from evading the fact that there is a great deal of suffering in ordinary life and that as both Christians and professionals we are compelled to think seriously of it.

Suppose we begin with this idea of suffering as a punishment, or a judgment, or a visitation of divine wrath. It is not uncommon to meet people who regard their sufferings as a judgment, and who gloomily go further and say that not only is God punishing them, but he is quite right to do so.

‘If you have faith’, St Cyril of Jerusalem tells his catechumens, ‘you won’t only receive remission of your sins, you’ll also do things beyond the power of man. Please God, you’ll receive the gift of prophecy.’

In the previous two articles, we have been dissecting the Pente-costal doctrine of ‘baptism in the Spirit’, and concluded that the strict New Testament teaching is that the experience and the manifestation of the Spirit belong to sacramental baptism. However, even in the New Testament there is the puzzling case of the Samaritan converts who were baptized but didn’t receive the Spirit (which means, for Luke, simply that they did not show any visible sign of the Spirit; we should not interpolate Pauline considerations into the story). So spiritual writers of east and west have always had to allow that, all too often, baptized Christians live and feel as though they were still living under the Law, before the coming of faith.

Gandhi is much too easily dismissed, sweepingly over-simplified, decried as an unpractical idealist, and thought to have failed in what he set out to do. It depends on what you call failure. Jerusalem stoned the prophets, the Messiah was crucified, Gandhi and Martin Luther King were assassinated, and their teaching seems only to survive precariously. But as Horace Alexander writes, ‘The impression he has made in circles where people are trying to break away from the hideous tyranny of violence and counter-violence, which threatens quickly to destroy the whole world, is specially worth examining’. This interest seems to be more in his philosophy of life than in this or that political action, but Gandhi himself never separated politics from his religious philosophy. He is a world figure, who has a message for mankind, and we have in this book an account of his message less in words than in events, although the illuminating reasons for his decisions are always given.