Anglicanism and the poetry of John Betjeman.

Gardner, Kevin J.

The critical fate of John Betjeman is a sharply divided one. His work endures the dubious distinction of being enjoyed by millions of readers, many of whom would never read poetry. In spite of his popularity, which earned him the laureateship in 1972, Betjeman has been for the most part either ignored or disdained by critics, although this neglect is palliated by praise for Betjeman from many of his fellow poets, including W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin. (1) The astonishing paucity of scholarly attention to Betjeman is attributable in part to his popularity. It is an ugly truth, and one most critics prefer to hide, that there is an innate prejudice against a successful poet, and even more so against one who used the medium of television so adroitly to advance his favorite causes. (2) If the masses approve, the poetry must be inferior, or so goes a way of thinking since T. S. Eliot. Prejudice also exists against modern poets who so openly eschew the tenets of modernism, and Betjeman's verse is certainly traditional. Instead of innovating with meter and form, he preferred to cast his poems in molds successfully employed by Victorian poets and hymnodists. Although in structure Betjeman was an avowed anti-modernist, he was clearly engaged with his culture, and his language is informed by the sensibility of modernism. In tone Betjeman is frequently a prophet of doom. Like many of his fellow poets, Betjeman rejected the popular fantasy of endless progress and advancement, using poetry as a vehicle to excoriate society for its cultural, spiritual, political, and aesthetic failures.

A further explanation for his rejection by critics is that Betjeman was a religious man. Critics have little trouble coping with the religious poems of seventeenth-century writers, poets who lived in what was still an age of faith, but what should we do with a troublesome twentieth-century poet who persisted in believing the tenets of Christianity despite the overwhelming counter-claims of science and philosophy? Betjeman's faith was public knowledge, and he often spoke fervently of his beliefs, as in this letter written on Christmas Day, 1947, acknowledging his philosophical and theological distinction from other poets:

 Also my view of the world is that man is born to fulfil the purposes
 of his Creator i.e. to Praise his Creator, to stand in awe of Him
 and to dread Him. In this way I differ from most modern poets, who
 are agnostics and have an idea that Man is the centre of the
 Universe or is a helpless bubble blown about by uncontrolled forces.
 (qtd. in Hillier, John Betjeman 400)

Indeed, Betjeman was committed not just to Christianity but to the Church of England. His poems describe the perils of faith and the struggle to believe; they celebrate the social and cultural significance of the Church of England; they reveal the intersection of architecture and faith, of aesthetics and the spirit; and they also demonstrate the social and spiritual failure of the Church, particularly the snobbery and hypocrisy of its clergy and parishioners. Betjeman could be a brilliant ironist, but he could also be sentimental about the Church of England; and even though he was never an unabashed apologist for his church, his rejection of skepticism may be perceived by critics as an intellectual weakness. However, it is the remarkable fact of Betjeman's studied faith in an age of skepticism that makes him interesting and worthy of critical attention.

To appreciate Betjeman's complex and contrasting stances toward religion, let us consider "In Westminster Abbey" and "Sunday Morning, King's Cambridge." (3) These poems are set in two of the most aesthetically and socially important centers of Christian worship in England, though the former has political and the latter academic significance. Together the two poems epitomize the tonal are between outrage and affection that typifies his verse about the English Church. Representing the physical splendor of Anglican worship, "Sunday Morning, King's Cambridge" is ablaze with color. The first stanza describes the procession of the world-renowned choir of the chapel of King's College, Cambridge, and the spiritually overwhelming aesthetics of the building: its stalls, its stained glass, and especially its stunning fan-vaulted ceiling, "a shower that never falls" (6). In stanza two the poet's mind wanders away from the service, and he imagines being outside among the "windy Cambridge courts" (7). (4) Again there is a great emphasis on the vast variety of color, but all the colors are transformed into "waves of pearly light" (12) reflected off the Cambridge stone. The image suggests that the divine is not to be found exclusively in the chapel but in the world, the space that contains both God's works and man's. Stanza three is a geographical and historical expansion of these images and ideas. Here the poet imagines the tombs that fill churches throughout East Anglia, the effigies of the deceased captured for eternity in postures of prayer: "[...] the clasped hands lying long / Recumbent on sepulchral slabs or effigied in brass" (13-14). The prayers of these dead are a "Buttress" (15) for the vaulted ceiling of the chapel at King's, which, built near the end of the Gothic period, needs no architectural buttresses. In this image Christianity exists because of prayer, not because of aesthetics. The sanctuary is supported by a tradition of faith, not because of the marvels of fifteenth-century engineering. In "Sunday Morning, King's Cambridge" the moment of worship exists out of time as the living and the dead, the choir and the poet, join in the eternal praise of God. The poem has no irony, except perhaps in the last line: "To praise Eternity contained in Time and coloured glass" (18). Here Betjeman illustrates the futility of humanity's desire to share in God's timelessness, all human efforts being confounded by our foolish need to control God and time. Nevertheless, Betjeman's tone in this poem is consistent; there is no ambivalence about faith. "Sunday Morning, King's Cambridge" captures a joyful and spontaneous reaction, albeit an emotionally restrained expression, and a sense of wonder in the celebration of Anglican worship.

"In Westminster Abbey" one of Betjeman's most savage satires, is the tonal opposite. The poem is a dramatic monologue, set during the early days of World War II, in which the persona is a woman who enters the Abbey to pray for a moment before hurrying off to "a luncheon date" (42). She is Betjeman's representative of an entire class, glove-wearing snobs who live in the posh Chelsea neighborhood of Cadogan Square (1, 24). Considering that the poem was published in 1940, just at the time of the Blitz, may temper the satire only slightly, for this woman is not merely a chauvinist but also a racist and hypocrite concerned more with how the war will affect her portfolio than anything else: "So, Lord, reserve for me a crown, / And do not let my shares go down" (29-30). Betjeman presents this woman as a typical case; he sees the British as all too likely to use patriotic zeal to mask a host of sins. For instance, the poems persona believes that doing her duty in the war effort in essence honors Christ's injunctions: "I will labour for Thy Kingdom, / Help our lads to win the war, / Send white feathers to the cowards / Join the Women's Army Corps" (31-34). Her nationalism leads the speaker to pray that the Lord "bomb the Germans" (7), but "Don't let anyone bomb me" (12). She also believes that she has in her heart the best interests of the "Gallant blacks" (15), those subjects of the British Empire all too vital for victory in the war: "Protect them Lord in all their fights, / And, even more, protect the whites" (17-18). The speaker is a figure of the most unutterable loathsomeness, and throughout the poem Betjeman's tone varies from unmitigated contempt for her ethical vacuity to mockery of the ludicrous vanity of her class snobbery. Here she enumerates "what our Nation stands for" (19), by which of course she means the things that make her life a little better: "Books from Boots' and country lanes, / Free speech, free passes, class distinction, / Democracy and proper drains" (20-22). Is Betjeman's satire merely social? First, that the poem's setting is a church indicates that the persona's social and ethical lapses are in fact a product of her spiritual state. Her moral flaws are, in short, sins. And because she speaks for Britain's ruling class, Betjeman, we can infer, believes that social problems are a direct result of a nation's spiritual sickness. "In Westminster Abbey" may satirize Britain's faithful as inveterate hypocrites, but it is satire born in a belief that the tenets of Christianity are true, however rarely practiced by its adherents. The poem does not mourn a lost faith so much as it excoriates a spiritually lazy nation and demands that it take up the Cross. Together "Sunday Morning, King's Cambridge" and "In Westminster Abbey" reveal a poet who believed deeply in Christ and who still held out hope for the Anglican Church.

Although Betjeman was a devout communicant of the Church of England, his faith was not such an easy matter to live out in the quiet of his own spirituality. As his friend and eulogist Auberon Waugh wrote, "I am almost certain he decided to affect a cosy certainty in religion which he was never within miles of feeling." Faith was never simple or easy for Betjeman, and likewise there is nothing simplistic about religion in his poetry. Poems such as "Before the Anaesthetic" "Loneliness," and "N.W.5 & N.6" reveal that he was often plagued by doubts about his own spiritual fitness for Heaven, by a terror of dying, and by an anxiety that Christianity's promises might all be empty. Betjeman tried to overcome his spiritual fears through regular worship. As he once wrote in The Spectator, "the only practical way to face the dreaded lonely journey into Eternity seems to me the Christian one. I therefore try to believe that Christ was God, made Man and gives Eternal Life, and that I may be confirmed in this belief by clinging to the sacraments and by prayer." A practicing Christian who struggled daily with matters of faith, Betjeman used his gift for poetry to describe the parabola of his own religious belief as well as to illuminate the nature of faith and doubt for all of humanity. Because doubts were so weighty for Betjeman, he relied on the traditions of his church to sustain him, and quite naturally the essence of his church infuses his poetry. In this regard Dennis Brown claims that Betjeman's "key religious perception" is less about theology than "a sacred caritas revealed in hallowed places and buildings, consecrated customs and rituals, dedicated music making, flower arranging, days of special observance or celebration, and reverence for time-honoured 'petits recits'--most particularly from the Bible and Prayer Book" (51). Because so much of Betjeman's poetry is constructed with the stuff of English spirituality, it is my contention that his poetry is specifically "Anglican" in nature and, as such, is part of a tradition of Anglican poetry that includes John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, T. S. Eliot, and R. S. Thomas. (5) This poetic tradition is rooted in Anglican spirituality, which is characterized, writes A. M. Allchin, by "the link between grace and nature, faith and culture, divine and human" (316). In short, Betjeman's poetry can best be understood, and indeed should be read, within the context of Anglicanism. Understanding this context will, I believe, create a deeper appreciation for Betjeman's achievement as a poet.

It has often been noted that the Anglican Communion resists definition, that it can only be described. As Stephen Neill puts it, "there is an Anglican attitude and an Anglican atmosphere that defies analysis" (418). (6) Nevertheless, Anglicanism has several characteristic features that clearly mark the Church and that infuse Betjeman's poetry. Notable among these are an emphasis upon community, an acceptance of mystery, a dialectic of absence and presence, and an Incarnational view of the world. An emphasis upon community means that a communal tradition of worship is more important than the sharp distinctions in doctrine that define and divide other traditions. As William J. Wolf says, "Anglicanism, coming from an establishment position as a national church concerned with all types and conditions of people, has always been deeply rooted in a cultural context" (158). This gives the Anglican Church social and cultural significance beyond its spiritual function. The second quality, an acceptance of mystery, necessitates a "conviction that truth is larger and more beautiful than our imperfect minds are able to apprehend or to conceive" (Neill 422). Anglicans are generally suspicious of theologies that are absolutist or that make rigid truth-claims. This stance derives from a certain "humility of awe before the divine mysteries of faith and a recognition of the incompetence of language to define the ultimate paradox of existence" (More xxxvii). What L. William Countryman calls a "dialectic of absence and presence" is a third characteristic (62). The Anglican adherent often finds his or her faith on a spectrum of doubt and belief wherein consistency or certainty is neither expected nor, perhaps, even possible in the search for God. The difficulty in sustaining faith may be caused by a heightened awareness of human limitations, especially sin and death, yet in the struggle with doubt a spiritual encounter is often found. Finally, Anglicanism profoundly emphasizes the Incarnation. Because God is incarnate in the world, not merely in the Church, Anglicans find evidence of the Incarnation in the everyday sphere. This belief leads to a rejection of dualism. As a consequence, grace is unpredictable, a surprising and undeserved gift that can never be obtained through any human effort or found in any consistent place. These four qualities of Anglicanism--community, mystery, dialectic, and Incarnation--are at the heart of Betjeman's verse. Examining their presence in his poetry will show the richness of his talents along with the intellectual commitment of his faith. My analysis will also reveal that religion and culture are intrinsically interwoven. To some extent this is indicative of the Church of England, whose aim has always been to "gather into one all those whom God had united as members of a single nation" (Neill 426). Betjeman's poetry embodies this basic truth of Anglicanism: being English means being Anglican, and thus faith provides cultural identity. (7)

I

The idea of Anglican community in Betjeman's poetry expresses itself in poems that celebrate the communal function of the Church and that mourn the loss of a communal spirit. Betjeman often praises the ability of the Church, with its symbols and traditions, to summon its parishioners to a shared unity of purpose. "Verses Turned," occasioned by a plea for the nation to contribute to the restoration of St. Katherine's, Chiselhampton, describes how the peal of a single church bell draws an entire parish into spiritual and social communion. The poem emphasizes that even an otherwise obscure church is important because its history encompasses that of both an innocuous village and the Church of England? St. Katherine's is worth saving because the Church of England is worth saving. The "plaintive bell" (43) in "Verses Turned" thus appeals to the Anglican's cultural love for the Church.

Elsewhere church bells serve symbolically to unite a disparate community. In "On Leaving Wantage 1972" Betjeman highlights the cohesion created among bell-ringers despite their socially and economically distinct backgrounds: "From rumpled beds on far-off new estates, / From houses over shops along the square, / From red-brick villas somewhat further out, / Ringers arrive, converging on the tower" (7-10). (9) Community is also created across time in "On Hearing the Full Peal of Ten Bells from Christ Church, Swindon, Wilts." Bell-ringing here unites the living, the dead, and the yet-to-be-born, despite the divisive effects of modern technology: "Now birth and death-reminding bells ring clear, / Loud under 'planes and over changing gear" (11-12). "Church of England Thoughts" describes how the sound of collegiate bells, emanating from Magdalen Tower in Oxford, reminds the poet of the various modes of Anglican worship--High, Broad, and Low Church. These divisions are insignificant, however, as worshippers are united by a "multiplicity of bells" resonating a "Church of England sound" that "tells / Of 'moderate' worship, God and State" (11, 16-17). The bells call one to be English as much as they call one to be a Christian. The poem ends with a degree of ambiguity, however. These bells are not church bells, and the sound dissipates, dragging the poet out of an illusory stupor and back into the harsh reality of a modern world oblivious to the capacity for communal regeneration that the Church of England offers:

 Before the spell begin to fail,
 Before the bells have lost their power,
 Before the grassy kingdom fade
 And Oxford traffic roar invade,
 I thank the bells of Magdalen Tower. (36-40)

This same preoccupation appears in a variety of Betjeman's poems, manifesting itself in an almost insistent litany that community must somehow be restored even when churches are lost. In "City" the poet imagines himself sitting in the churchyard of St. Botolph's Bishopsgate, where the tolling bell and scent of incense awaken memories of his grandfather. The physical signs of worship are experienced in the churchyard rather than inside, the service seeming only to awaken ghosts. The church is dying; its bells peal more to the dead than to the living. "St. Mary Magdalen, Old Fish Street Hill" involves a more severe indictment of a church, or more broadly a parish, that is complicit in the loss of community. Betjeman imagines a persona who is very proud of being the rector's warden, even though "our congregation is seldom more than ten" (15). The speaker blames the design of Christopher Wren, who rebuilt the church after the Great Fire of 1666, for the decline: "It is just a box with a fanciful plaster ceiling / Devoid of a vestige of genuine Christian feeling" (13-14). Though there may be a link between aesthetics and faith, the real cause of St. Mary Magdalen's decline is much more complex. The implacable force of demographic change is the historical culprit: there were simply too many churches in the City; people decamped for the suburbs in the nineteenth century, and the City's population dropped dramatically. (10) The poetic culprit is implied in a little fact that the rector's warden drops, though he remains blithely oblivious to its significance: "We haven't the Charity children now to fill / Our old west gallery front. Some new committee / Has done away with them all" (4-6). The decline of this church is attributable to a combination of demography, snobbery, and politics. For years the church was populated by non-tithing poor children, but they were not welcomed, being shunted to the balcony; finally a diocesan committee has recognized that fact and simply made them disappear. The charity children were St. Mary Magdalen's community, but the few remaining oligarchs who yet control the parish deemed them undesirable and thus abrogated the church's mission.

Whereas some of Betjeman's poems lament the loss of community that results from the decline of churches, he reverses cause and effect in "Monody on the Death of Aldersgate Street Station," a poem whose title, together with the imagery in the first and last stanzas, seems to memorialize the end of the steam-train era. Betjeman makes clear, however, that his real focus is the cultural and social blow to British society deriving from the loss of City churches: "City of London! before the next desecration / Let your steepled forest of churches be my theme" (3-4). Here commences a catalogue of churches lost or threatened: "St. Mildred's Bread Street" (7), "St. Michael Paternoster" (17), and "Christ Church Newgate Street (with St. Leonard Foster)" (19). The poem is filled with images of loss. Identifying with that "lost generation" of "the steam and the gas-light" (27), the speaker appears to be sitting in the open ruins of a former church, "Where once I heard the roll of the Prayer Book phrases" (23). Now there is only "Sunday Silence! with every street a dead street" (5). Betjeman renders the missing sound of Sabbath bells as an irreparable loss, for in an earlier time "neighbouring towers and spirelets joined the ringing" of "the roaring flood of a twelve-voiced peal from Paul's" (9, 12). The poems allusions to trains imply that the loss of bells is cultural, not spiritual; the bells of City churches served the same communal function as steam trains and gaslights. Cultural progress consumes the gods of past generations, and the City, with its alien "improvements," now disrupts a once vibrant community. Betjeman creates the ahistorical and perhaps mythical illusion of cultural cohesion, a continuity of ritual and community that survived reformation, civil war, and fire, only to be sundered by the transformation of the City from a home into a mere place to work. While the poem never explains what City churches and steam trains mean precisely, it insists that their loss creates a soulless void. (11)

Only the loss of something vital but irreplaceable can render its value clearly. These poems are united in their appreciation for the basic sense of social cohesion that the Anglican Church offers. At times Betjeman's poetry mourns the loss of community and centers of worship; at other times he seems to hold out hope that the Church will survive. Whether fearing its loss or celebrating its survival, Betjeman's poems make clear that communal identity is a fundamental contribution of the Anglican Church. This is an inherently English idea, one shared even by the admittedly agnostic writer Simon Jenkins for whom churches serve as "witness to the bonds that have brought the English people together in village and town through a thousand years of history [...]. It is through the churches of England that we learn who we were and thus who we are and might become. Lose that learning and we lose the collective memory that is the essence of human society. We must remember" (xxix). The remembrance of churches is, for Betjeman, equally vital to cultural identity. His poems tell us that community is threatened when the Church is threatened, for the Church is a spirit that breathes life into a society. It is a social virtue that must somehow be nurtured, and this will happen, his poems insist, where churches thrive.

II

A sense of community may be the most fundamental quality of Anglicanism, but an equally significant motif in Betjeman's poetry is the embracing of mystery and ambiguity--the refusal to simplify truth into a finality. "A Lincolnshire Church" neatly encompasses both of these two qualities of Anglicanism. Unlike poems previously discussed, where churches were named with marked specificity, this church is unnamed; it is historically and architecturally insignificant, and Betjeman uses only generic identifiers to describe the building. "Lincolnshire Middle Pointed" is the Pevsner-style classifier (9), but apparently the church stands out in no unique way at all: "'Cathedral Glass' in the windows, / A roof of unsuitable slate--/ Restored with a vengeance, for certain, / About eighteen-eighty-eight" (25-28). Instead of rendering the church insignificant, however, the poor restoration and the general homeliness of the place seem to add meaning to the structure by suggesting that it is just a typical English country-parish church. Indeed, the church, whose tower looms on "a gentle eminence" (5), shares in the communal spirit of Lincolnshire's wolds and marshes (2, 3); moreover, it seems to exemplify the larger spirit of "Dear old, bloody old England / Of telegraph poles and tin" (17-18).

Sensing the church's communal aura, the speaker opens the door, stands on the threshold, and instantly senses that community has a much more profound explanation than that of being associated with the people who live nearby. The sense of community comes from the mysterious presence of the divine:

 And there on the South aisle altar
 Is the tabernacle of God.
 There where the white light flickers
 By the white and silver veil,
 A wafer dipped in a wine-drop
 Is the Presence the angels hail,
 Is God who created the Heavens
 And the wide green marsh as well
 Who sings in the sky with the skylark
 Who calls in the evening bell,
 Is God who prepared His coming
 With fruit of the earth for his food
 With stone for building His churches
 And trees for making His rood. (31-44)

The mystery of the divine cannot be explained or defined, but it is, as it was for Herbert, "something understood." It is something that creates beauty, grants life, and even joins people into community. Inexplicably, the mystery is the source of community, for believers will not unite without that mystery to join them: "There where the white light flickers, / Our Creator is with us yet, / To be worshipped by you and the woman / Of the slacks and the cigarette" (45-48). Despite the speaker's desire to distinguish himself socially or spiritually from other English sinners, it begins to dawn on him that all believers are united into a spiritual community whose value overcomes the walls of social distinction that his innate snobbery urges him to build.

As the church door shuts behind him, the speaker falls to his knees, aware that he is in "the Presence of God Incarnate" (51). In this sacred place the speaker becomes aware that God is both spirit and flesh; being in the presence of this mystery is not something he can either explain or define. It is not community but mystery that justifies this church. After confessing his sins, the persona then becomes aware of a priest, who has come "from sun glare harsh / Of some Indian Anglican Mission / To this green enormous marsh" (66-68), but mystery overwhelms community: "And why he was here in Lincolnshire / I neither asked nor knew" (61-62). Sharing the presence of the divine with this priest creates a spiritual union: "There where this white light flickers, / Here, as the rains descend, / The same mysterious Godhead / Is welcoming His friend" (69-72). This is the urgency of a personal meeting with God.

A final aspect of mystery lies in what makes the Godhead "mysterious." Alluding to the Trinitarian mystery, Betjeman repeats slight variants of the line "There where the white light flickers" three times (33, 45, 69). Where the light flickers is the place where truth cannot be determined absolutely, yet it is where the known and unknown come face to face. It is where we approach God (or He approaches us), where God becomes incarnate in the elements of Communion. Here mystery creates community. It is the same notion that undergirds the short but beautiful poem "Uffington," which begins with an ambiguous couplet describing the tension of village church bells: "Tonight we feel the muffled peal / Hang on the village like a pall" (1-2). The consonance of "peal" and "pall" suggests the crux of the poem, the fearful and majestic power of divine mystery. The bell serves as a "death-reminding dying fall" (4), yet it seems to summon the presence of God: "The very sky no longer high / Comes down within the reach of all" (5-6). Elsewhere Betjeman has written, "Who has heard a muffled peal and remained unmoved? [...] Some may hate them [church bells] for their melancholy, but they dislike them chiefly, I think, because they are reminded of Eternity. In an age of faith they were messengers of consolation" (An American's Guide 30). The sound of church bells is a reminder of both death and life, and this duality captures the speaker's uncertainty about the nature of the divine and the necessity of embracing ambiguity. "Uffington" ends with a line that consciously eschews metaphor for prosaic simplicity: "Even the trivial seems profound" (8). Betjeman knows that we always live in the presence of divine mystery; he cannot explain it, but he does not doubt that his feeling is based in genuine truth.

The mystery surrounding the "Presence of God Incarnate" is at the heart of the baroque solemnity of "Holy Trinity, Sloane Street" perhaps the most mysterious and elusive of Betjeman's poems. Lush imagery of candles and incense, baroque decorations, and penitential liturgy fill the poem. The religious experience expressed therein borders upon the sexual:

 Light six white tapers with the Flame of Art,
 Send incense wreathing to the lily flowers,
 And, with your cool hands white,
 Swing the warm censer round my bruised heart,
 Drop, dove-grey eyes, your penitential showers
 On this pale acolyte. (2-7)

The speaker's faith, his sense of the truth of Christianity, is found not in the physical features of High Anglican worship but in the mystery symbolized by these features, such as the maternal power of the Virgin Mary. Filial piety is yoked metaphysically with sexual arousal to symbolize the emotional pitch of religiosity commanded by Anglo-Catholicism: "Bronze triptych doors unswing! / Wait, restive heart, wait, rounded lips, to pray, / Mid beaten copper interset with gems / Behold! Behold! your King!" (18-21). Expressions of fervor and intensity are relatively rare in Betjeman's verse; typically his poetry is rational and cool. Anglicans are generally suspicious of emotional expression and understand that such effusions may in fact impede a spiritual encounter. As Neill puts it, Anglicanism is marked by "a certain restrained and sober quality of devotion [...] based more on the direction of the will than on the stirring of the emotions" (418). "Holy Trinity, Sloane Street" is thus highly unusual in its passionate depiction of the pulsating heart of the Christian awaiting God's mysterious penetration of his soul.

The more common rendering of divine mystery in Betjeman's poetry is a restrained anticipation. Thus, the season of Advent is one that evokes from the poet an unambiguous appreciation for mystery and for the fact that we live daily in the presence of the divine. "Christmas," for example, begins with Advent bells reminding Christians to prepare, but as in "Advent 1955" most of the preparations are only vaguely religious and not at all spiritual. The poem's meaning develops from the contrast between the triviality of Christmas and the majesty of its true import--the Incarnation. Betjeman juxtaposes the banality of our celebrations against the metaphysical reality of God's becoming man. In cities and villages, shops and houses, churches and pubs, people celebrate as best they can: "On lighted tenements I gaze / Where paper decorations hang, / And bunting in the red Town Hall / Says 'Merry Christmas' to you all" (15-18). In the midst of such mundanity, however, is the astonishing truth of the Incarnation. To Betjeman the mystery is so profound that he can describe it only by means of a question: "And is it true? And is it true, / [...] / The Maker of the stars and sea / Become a Child on earth for me?" (31, 35-36). Betjeman uses ironically debased language to describe God's gift in order to express the way that all human efforts to celebrate this seminal event or to articulate the wonder of it inevitably fall short. "And is it true?" Betjeman asks, significantly, three times. The poet will not express his belief in absolute terms, for he knows that this mysterium tremendum can never be fully grasped.

III

Betjeman's rejection of certainty and his embrace of ambiguity point to the third fundamental quality of Anglicanism: the principle of dialectic that governs the faith of the believer. Geoffrey Harvey has written of Betjeman that his "poetry of doubt rests on a foundation of Christian faith and draws its restless energy from the perpetual tension between these two poles of experience" (4). Some of Betjeman's poems express a certainty in faith, while others express a profound disbelief, but all of his religious poems are typified by a healthy respect for the role doubt plays in the process of belief. Despite the paradox, even Betjeman's disbelief is Anglican in nature; his darkest poems reveal a desire to believe, a desire for God's immanence, a yearning for the Eucharist to reveal God's love for him. Dead certainty in the absence of God appears only rarely in his poetry, and when it does it fills the poet with a sense of emptiness. In "Good-bye" the poet imagines those final days before he dies, "When food's tasting sour on my tongue" and "lust has gone out" (2, 7). The anticipation of death brings only hopelessness: "More worthless than ever / Will seem all the songs I have sung" (9-10). The meaninglessness that he perceives is heightened by an existential angst--"With judgement or nothingness waiting me, / Lonely and chill" (19-20). Despite the despair the poem still lacks certainty even in unbelief: death may bring oblivion, or it may bring hell.

"Aldershot Crematorium" describes the ways in which institutionalized religion offers cold comfort to the grieving. The dead are not resurrected, though cremation makes a symbolic gesture heavenward: "And little puffs of smoke without a sound / Show what we loved dissolving in the skies" (3-4). Instead of reminding the poet of Christ's ascension and the promise of eternal life, this image of the dead wafting skyward into nothingness reinforces doubt about Christianity's consolations. "Loneliness" further develops the theme of religion as a tonic to fortify the mind against the fear of death. Subverting the usual associations of spring and rebirth, Betjeman apostrophizes the Easter bells ringing out amid the bleakness of late winter: "You fill my heart with joy and grief--/ Belief! Belief! And unbelief [...] / And, though you tell me I shall die, / You say not how or when or why" (7-10). The earliest signs of spring, echoing Eliot's "April is the cruellest month," mock the illusion of rebirth, for "sure as blackthorn bursts to snow, / Cancer in some of us will grow" (15-16). The metaphor of spring growth as a tumor points to the poem's theme that the rituals of religion mask death's ugly reality and humankind's isolation.

The poem that captures a sense of spiritual doubt most fully is "Before the Anaesthetic." Here Betjeman imagines his terror at facing the unknown as he prepares for surgery, and he comes to realize that his faith may have been unfounded. Throughout the poem we hear the bells of St. Giles ringing, but they fill the poet with only unutterable horror at the absence of God. Like the Easter bells in "Loneliness," St. Giles's replicate the parabola of belief and the dialectic of presence and absence: "Swing up! and give me hope of life, / Swing down! and plunge the surgeon's knife" (19-20). "Is it extinction when I die?" (24), fears the poet. "Oh better far those echoing hells / Half-threaten'd in the pealing bells / Than that this T should cease to be--/ Come quickly, Lord, come quick to me" (27-30). Betjeman once expressed this same sentiment in a conversation with Alan Neame, asserting that "I'd rather Hell than Nothing!" (283). Perhaps his preference for Hell over oblivion is purely hyperbolic, but it illustrates Betjeman's desperate longing for assurance of eternal life. "Before the Anaesthetic" captures perfectly the experience of God's absence in the spiritual dialectic of Anglican faith.

Doubt for Betjeman is not so much the absence of faith as its surrogate. His Anglicanism encourages him to see doubt as an integral part of faith, and this is the essence of the closing lines of "In Willesden Churchyard":

 I only know that as we see her grave
 My flesh, to dissolution nearer now
 Than yours, which is so milky white and soft,
 Frightens me, though the Blessed Sacrament
 Not ten yards off in Willesden parish church
 Glows with the present immanence of God. (30-35)

With echoes of both Sir Walter Raleigh and Thomas Gray, the poem is predominantly an elegiac meditation on the dialectic of England's past and present, of pastoralism and blight, of faith and doubt. As the persona and his beloved read the tombstones of those buried in Willesden churchyard, the speaker is haunted by fears of the decay of his own flesh. In the midst of this meditation, however, the dialectic of presence and absence occurs: the poet moves from a fear of death in the absence of God to an awareness of God's "immanence" or presence in the parish church. What are we to make of this image and the speaker's epiphany? The word "Glows" suggests the vital intensity of God, yet the speaker's spatial separation in the churchyard seems to deny him full communion. The diction and syntax of "Frightens me, though [...]" create the perfect measure of ambiguity necessary for identifying the dialectic of presence and absence of God for the Anglican believer. Perhaps this construction means that the Sacrament ameliorates his fear; on the other hand, perhaps Betjeman means that he remains fearful of death despite the proximity of the Sacrament. The ambiguity of faith could not be rendered more succinctly. Betjeman makes it quite clear that moments of profound uncertainty typify Anglicanism. Rather than rendering Anglicanism as excessively tolerant or relativistic, however, the acceptance of the dialectic of God's absence and presence is the means to a stronger faith.

Betjeman emphasizes this idea in "The Conversion of St. Paul," a poem written in 1955 that describes the "Turning round" of Paul "From chaos to a love profound" (41-42). It was Paul's rejection of Christianity initially that led to his becoming such a committed and effective apostle; he was an extremist in both phases of his spiritual life. Betjeman in fact uses the story of Paul's conversion to turn himself around from the absence of God to His presence:

 What is conversion? Not at all
 For me the experience of St. Paul,
 No blinding light, a fitful glow
 Is all the light of faith I know
 Which sometimes goes completely out
 And leaves me plunging round in doubt
 Until I will myself to go
 And worship in God's house below--My
 parish Church--and even there
 I find distractions everywhere. (62-71)

Betjeman, the tolerant Anglican, knows that no conversion experience can provide a formula for all believers. Nevertheless, most believers, the poet maintains, experience only his own "fitful glow"--the dialectic of absence and presence--in their faith: "But most of us turn slow to see / The figure hanging on a tree / And stumble on and blindly grope / Upheld by intermittent hope" (78-81).

IV

The fourth definitive feature of Anglicanism is its emphasis upon the Incarnation as the central doctrine of Christianity. For William Temple, Archbishop of York from 1929 to 1942 and of Canterbury from 1942 to 1944, the Incarnation was foundational to almost all of his theological and philosophical writings. In Christus Veritas: An Essay he argues convincingly that the Incarnation was the opportunity not only for God to become human but also for us to experience a glimpse of the divine. Taking on the human, Temple asserts, becomes "the means whereby the Eternal Son, remaining always in the bosom of the Father, lays bare to us the very heart of Godhead." Therefore, he concludes, "Even had there been no evil in the world to be overcome, no sin to be abolished and forgiven, still the Incarnation would be the natural inauguration of the final stage of evolution" (144, 139). Thus, for Anglicans the Incarnation is not some consolation for the error of Adamic sin but the very reason for the original Creation from inchoate matter.

Incarnational Christianity imbues Betjeman's poetry from "A Baby in an ox's stall" ("Christmas" 34) to "the Blessed Sacrament" that "Glows with the present immanence of God" ("In Willesden Churchyard" 33, 35). Following the word's definition in the OED, Betjeman uses "immanence" to mean both "appearing in" and "remaining in." In short, God abides in this world. As God became incarnate in the most mundane way by being born to unwed parents in a stable, so God manifests Himself in the ordinary human world. Although Betjeman sometimes finds the Divine in a church, he is just as likely to do so in the most unlikely of places. The surprising rediscovery of God is the essence of looking at the world from the perspective of Incarnational Christianity.

"Wantage Bells" captures the simplicity of suddenly becoming aware of God's creation and His continuing presence in it. The speaker encounters God in a garden, on a spring morning, with church bells sounding. The poem begins with the bells gradually rising into the speaker's consciousness, but he is moved not by this sound but by his garden's bright hues and intense fragrances. The bells remain in the background of his mind, but they subconsciously remind the speaker that this garden's "reckless bestowing" (16) is no accident of nature but in fact the intentional and bountiful gift of a Creator who remains present in the world He created. Betjeman's suggestion that God is perhaps more likely to be found in nature than in church is also intimated in such poems as "Before the Anaesthetic;' where the poet has observed the sacraments but discovered only the absence of God, or "The Conversion of St. Paul" and "Sunday Afternoon Service in St. Enodoc Church, Cornwall," where he indicates that church often distracts the worshipper from God. The point is more fully developed in "St. Barnabas, Oxford)." Here Betjeman describes the displacement of God's splendor by an edifice of Byzantine grandeur and haughtiness: "Where once the fritillaries hung in the grass / A baldachin pillar is guarding the Mass. / Farewell to blue meadows we loved not enough, / And elms in whose shadows were Glanville and Clough" (7-10). Not only has man supplanted God's creation with a monument to the worship of God, but man has also cut himself off from his source of creativity. In a vein of Romantic effusion, Betjeman writes that the best place to find God is in a temple of God's making--"blue meadows we loved not enough."

While reminding us that the Divine is incarnate in the world, these poems do not reveal the poet as searching for God and at long last having his diligence rewarded with the discovery of God. Betjeman instead suggests that God finds us, rather than vice versa, in always surprising ways. This idea is embedded in "Lenten Thoughts of a High Anglican," a poem in which Betjeman describes watching a mysterious and sexually alluring woman receiving communion each Sunday. The minister, perhaps in an effort to increase parishioners' attentiveness, has told his congregation that one should not become distracted during the service, "Or the Unknown God we are seeking / May forever elude our search" (19-20), but Betjeman's point is that God will elude us as long as we are hunting for Him. And just what in this poem causes Betjeman to become conscious of God's presence? It is, strangely, the mysterious and alluring woman, who Betjeman has decided looks too well kept to be anyone's "legal wife" (12): "But I hope that the preacher will not think / It unorthodox and odd / If I add that I glimpse in 'the Mistress' / A hint of the Unknown God" (21-24). What better illustration could one find of the principle that God's manifestations are extraordinary? In the midst of fantasizing about this woman's sexual life, Betjeman suddenly becomes aware of the presence of God. The woman's aura of mystery reminds the speaker that God is mysterious; she is a visible symbol of spiritual mystery: "How elegantly she swings along / In the vapory incense veil; / The angel choir must pause in song / When she kneels at the altar rail" (13-16). Though clearly we are amused by Betjeman's linking spiritual vision with sexual appeal, we are still reminded of the idea that the ways of God are inexplicable.

The issue of growing distracted in church and thereby discovering God is also a key element of "Sunday Afternoon Service in St. Enodoc Church, Cornwall." The poem begins with lush descriptions of coastal Cornwall, as the speaker hikes alongside tidal pools and traverses sand dunes. When he at last reaches the church, the persona's attention is not on preparing for worship; he is not kneeling in prayer but instead contemplating the sticky pews, a map of France, the organ stops, and the church's anachronistic architectural elements. Upon the minister's entering the church and beginning the service, Betjeman's mind immediately disengages: "He [the priest] runs his hands once, twice, across his face / 'Dearly beloved ...' and a bumble-bee / Zooms itself free into the churchyard sun / And so my thoughts this happy Sabbathtide" (78-81). Betjeman's imagination then roams across the gorgeous Cornish coast in lines that echo Edgar's to Gloucester as they approach the cliffs of Dover where Gloucester intends to end his life. Betjeman describes the Cornish cliffs in Shakespearean blank verse:

 Where deep cliffs loom enormous, where cascade
 Mesembryanthemum and stone-crop down,
 Where the gull looks no larger than a lark
 Hung midway twixt the cliff-top and the sand,
 Sun-shadowed valleys roll along the sea.

 And tufts of sea-pink, high and dry for years,
 Are flooded out of ledges, boulders seem
 No bigger than a pebble washed about
 In this tremendous tide [...]. (82-86, 96-99)

The allusion to the scene in King Lear where Gloucester is taught by his son that "Thy life's a miracle" (4.6.55) is not accidental. Does God appear to Betjeman, however, in the church service or in nature? It seems that God's incarnate presence lies in a combination of the two, as "this House of God" (106) and the Book of Common Prayer's liturgical offices are conflated with the wildness of the Cornish landscape. In the service of Evening Prayer, Betjeman is reminded that God is alive in this world and that he himself is an integral part of the long history of God's creation. Despite its vulnerability to the elements, humanity has relied on the Incarnate God for hope, security, and the promise of eternity:

 Oh kindly slate of these unaltered cliffs,
 Firm, barren substrate of our windy fields!
 Oh lichened slate in walls, they knew your worth
 Who raised you up to make this House of God
 What faith was his, that dim, that Cornish saint,
 Small rushlight of a long-forgotten church,
 Who lived with God on this unfriendly shore,
 Who knew He made the Atlantic and the stones
 And destined seamen here to end their lives
 Dashed on a rock, rolled over in the surf,
 And not one hair forgotten. Now they lie
 In centuries of sand beside the church. (103-14)

Simple truths of Christian faith are rendered by Betjeman's poem in stark profundity. Ultimately the Incarnation is remarkable not so much for where God reveals Himself to us but for the fact that He never disappears from us and His creation, even when we stop looking. In this respect one is reminded of C. S. Lewis's confessional reference to "the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet" (228).

V

Betjeman's poetry insists upon the importance of a community of likeminded believers; it embraces mystery and ambiguity in matters of belief; it captures the dialectic of faith as a process of thinking about God; and it celebrates the Incarnation of God and His surprising manifestations in the world. Perhaps no poem more perfectly embodies all four of these traits of Anglicanism than "St. Saviour's, Aberdeen Park, Highbury, London, N." Built in the once-affluent North London suburb of Highhury in 1865-66, St. Saviour's is a masterpiece in the decorated style of the Arts and Crafts movement and was Betjeman's parents' church. Owing to demographic change, the parish began a slow decline after World War II. At last declared redundant in 1981, the church was closed.

In the first stanza Betjeman describes a return journey to Highbury, just after the war's end, to see his parents' church once again. As he approaches the neighborhood by trolley, he glimpses the church spire, distorted now by the view through the maze of streetcar poles and wires but still visible--still "peculiar" as it "Bulges over the housetops, polychromatic and high" (5, 6). The second stanza depicts the poet's astonishment at the change in this formerly prosperous neighborhood. Highbury is now the epicenter of "weariest worn-out London" (8), and St. Saviour's seems to be all that is left of what once was a vital community. Stanza three gives us a vignette of Edwardian Highbury as prosperous and tasteful, if a bit dull. Betjeman then connects the church to its neighborhood by asserting the social function of St. Saviour's when elegantly dressed worshippers "stepped out in flounces [... or] in spats / To shadowy stained-glass matins or gas-lit evensong" (22-23). Now, however, daily attendance at divine service has vanished along with the opulence of Highbury; not coincidentally, the "tall neglected houses" have been "divided into flats" (20), and the shift in demography seems to have resulted in the church's decline. In stanza

five the poet recalls in precise detail the stunning interior of the church and the engrained images of worshipping there. As a flood of ancestral memory washes over him, Betjeman "kneel[s] in the presence of God" (30).

In the sixth and final stanza, the poet reaffirms his faith in a statement so profound, beautiful, and mysterious that it bears quoting in its entirety:

 Wonder beyond Time's wonders, that Bread so white and small
 Veiled in golden curtains, too mighty for men to see,
 Is the Power which sends the shadows up this polychrome wall,
 Is God who created the present, the chain-smoking millions and
 me; Beyond the throb of the engines is the throbbing heart of all--
 Christ, at this Highbury altar, I offer myself To Thee. (31-36)

The poet's devotion to the "Bread so white and small" is part of a larger complex of attitudes that include filial piety, affection for the church and neighborhood, and a grievous sense of the vital past now lost forever. This is not to impugn the sincerity of Betjeman's religious convictions but only to suggest that they are intrinsically bound to his cultural identity. God may be transcendent, "too mighty for men to see," but He is also immanent, the "Power" sending "shadows up this polychrome wall." What this means in practical terms is that God is culturally immanent, integral to the Anglican and English traditions; religion being culturally central, a healthy church signifies a healthy English culture. By the same token, a loss of community deals a dire blow to the survival of the Church--at least to the survival of this neighborhood church, which suffers as faith seems to dry up around it. Of course, one cannot help but notice Betjeman's separation of himself from "the chain-smoking millions." Is this cultural snobbery to blame for the church's loss of significance in the lives of Highbury's newer denizens? If so, that point is far from Betjeman's mind. The poet is asserting that he feels culturally and spiritually disjointed from, rather than superior to, the masses. Even if Betjeman's persona remains mired in social and spiritual distinctions, this does not diminish the validity of what the poem acknowledges. It is the function of the "Bread so white and small" to save souls, not to solve sociological problems. The Eucharist operates not in human time but God's, and its miracle is divine rather than sublunary. This is the true "Wonder beyond Time's wonders." (12)

The greatest feature of this poem, however, lies not in its remarks about community and the dialectic of faith but in the mystery of the Eucharist and the Incarnational nature of God. The mystery, or wonder, arises from Christ's presence in the bread. It is veiled from our eyes, which adds to its mystery and our wonder, but it is present nonetheless for us to receive and with it the gift of salvation and eternity. God is incarnate not just in the bread but in the church itself, where the poet kneels, and even beyond the church, which cannot contain God. If one listens, despite the noise of modern technology one can hear the pulsations of God's love. In a metaphor that neatly echoes and overturns Henry Adams's rejection of the Virgin as he kneels before the dynamo, Betjeman finds that no machine, no creation of man, can shut God out from human life: "Beyond the throb of the engines is the throbbing heart of all." This rediscovery explains the poem's last line, which is a clarion statement of Christian commitment: "Christ, at this Highbury altar, I offer myself To Thee." What the poet implies is nothing less than a total offering of himself. Such Anglican piety, writes Wolf, "must seek to incarnate something of the deeper joy of Christ's sacrifice and the willingness to die to self for the glory of God" (178).

In this poem St. Saviour's is at the point of abandonment; Betjeman would have been disheartened, though not surprised, to see its eventual closure. It is therefore appropriate that his clearest assertion of faith is made in a church on the verge of redundancy since his spiritual commitment to Christ is intrinsically connected to his intellectual commitment to England's past. "St. Saviour's, Aberdeen Park" functions as so many of Betjeman's poems do in celebrating England through the medium of its established Church. This is an England and an Englishness worth conserving, traditions worth defending. Larkin astutely observed that Betjeman, perhaps more robustly and realistically than any twentieth-century poet, captures what it means to be English and to live in England: "Betjeman's poems would be something I should want to take with me if I were a soldier leaving England: I can't think of any other poet who has preserved so much of what I should want to remember, nor one who, to use his own words, would so easily suggest 'It is those we are fighting for, foremost of all'" (32).

NOTES

(1) In excess of three million copies of Betjeman's Collected Poems have been sold in various editions since the volume's initial publication in 1958. In contrast, only a handful of substantial critical essays have been published on Betjeman (see Auden, Bergonzi, Wiehe, Mills, Larkin, Thomas, G. M. Harvey, Ruddick, Schroder). Monograph-length studies include those by Stanford, Brooke, Press, Taylor-Martin, Geoffrey Harvey (chs. 1 and 4), and Brown.

(2) Chief among these was the preservation of Britain's architectural treasures, especially the once-maligned buildings of the Victorian Gothic Revival. Betjeman made numerous appearances on television panels and authored several screenplays, including Metroland, a tribute to and history of the first underground steam railway and the Home counties served by the train: Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, and Middlesex. The Internet site Metroland has links to Betjeman, his documentary, and the history of the Metropolitan line of the Underground.

(3) All references to Betjeman's poems are from the 2001 edition of his Collected Poems, which includes the Uncollected Poems previously published in 1982.

(4) The wandering or distracted mind of a worshipper is a favorite motif of Betjeman; rarely are his worshippers attentive to their services (cf. "Sunday Afternoon Service in St. Enodoc Church," "Lenten Thoughts of a High Anglican," "Verses Turned," "St. Saviour's, Aberdeen Park," "The Conversion of St. Paul"). Such wanderings usually lead the worshipper to insights more profound than what the sermon or liturgy normally provides. In a letter to publisher John Murray, Betjeman justified the religious emphasis of his natural descriptions: "When I am describing Nature, it is always with a view to the social background or the sense of Man's impotence before the vastness of the Creator" (qtd. in Hillier, John Betjeman 399).

(5) Cf. Countryman and Allchin, the latter of whom poses the question: "What is the root of this persistent capacity to stimulate the creation of works of art directly linked to the prayer of the Church?" (319). It was perhaps Alan Neame who first posited that Betjeman was not just a poet and an Anglican but in fact an Anglican poet.

(6) The vagueness of Anglicanism can be frustrating. "The non-Anglican Churches," Neill admits, "are sometimes driven to distraction and infuriation by the uncertainties of Anglican action and the indefinable quality of Anglican thought" (387). For instance, the Anglican Communion is catholic but reformed, and it is non-confessional but creedal; its traditional sources of authority--Scripture, tradition, reason (and some would add experience)--are no less seemingly exclusionary and mutually contradictory. A. R. Vidler explains that these paradoxes speak to the very nature of Anglicanism: "Anglican theology is true to its genius when it is seeking to reconcile opposed systems, rejecting them as exclusive systems, but showing that the principle for which each stands has its place within the total orbit of Christian truth, and in the long run is secure only within that orbit or [...] when it is held in tension with other apparently opposed, but complementary principles" (qtd. in Wolf 151).

(7) Taylor-Martin has argued that the "Englishness" of Betjeman's religion was more important to the poet than its catholicity. Betjeman's church was "a social and spiritual entity rooted in the English soil. [...] It was the national religion and, as such, demanded his allegiance and loyalty" (50).

(8) Betjeman's conservatism is not retrograde but, according to Geoffrey Harvey, quite forward-thinking: "Betjeman's concern for the preservation not merely of fine buildings but of the human frame of things which they represent is not reactionary but, ironically in modern society with its commitment to size, growth and change for their own sakes, economically and politically subversive" (74). Bevis Hillier makes much the same point, though more succinctly: "Buildings were [for Betjeman] the spoors of human beings" (Young Betjeman 85).

(9) In another work Betjeman refers to church bell-ringing in England as "a classless folk art which has survived in the church despite all arguments about doctrine and the diminution of congregations" (An American's Guide 28-29).

(10) The City refers to the original square mile of London that was the Roman city of Londinium and is now the financial sector. Anchored by St. Paul's Cathedral, it is bounded by the Inns of Court to the west, Smithfield Market and Liverpool Street Station to the north, and the Tower to the east. Within the walls there were once 97 parish churches, but a mere 38 now survive, and many of those have been declared redundant and leased for other purposes (cf. Betjeman's The City of London Churches and Cobb's London City Churches).

Figures accounting for the population of the City and of greater London vary widely, but both before and after the Great Fire of 1666 it is quite possible that more than 100,000 souls resided within the walls of the City. As late as 1861 an estimated 129,128 people lived in the City out of a total population of nearly three million (Hollingshead). The massive migration out of the City occurred in the last three decades of the nineteenth century (see Weinreb and Hibbert 612-14). By 1951 the City could claim only 5,324 residents ("London's Political Subdivisions"), although in the 2001 census that figure had risen to 7,185 ("Census 2001").

(11) Betjeman makes a similar point in An American's Guide to English Parish Churches when he laments the social and ecclesiastical changes wrought by technological development: "They have been brought about by the change in transport from steam to motor-bus and electric train. People are moving out of the crowded early Victorian industrial lanes and terraces, into little houses of their own, each with its little patch of garden at the back and front, each isolated from its neighbour by social convention, in districts where miles of pavement enlivened by the squeak of perambulators lead to a far-off bus route and parade of chain stores, and a distant vita-glass school, used as a Community Centre in the evenings. To these places, often lonely for all the people in them, is [sic] the new mission Church" (82). Though the diatribe is conservative in tone, Betjeman retains hope that the Church will serve to reunite a disparate community.

(12) According to Derek Stanford, Betjeman's poetic vision "recognized the present inequality of men before men and their final equality before God. It would posit a world where men were separated by the marks of their upbringing, station, and calling; but a world where they, too, were brought together in a communion of worship of God" (58).

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Kevin J. Gardner

Baylor University