THE PETERITE FEBRUARY, 1970
Vol. LXI
No. 382
EDITORIAL John Bunyan's pilgrims were shown, in the Interpreter's House, "a man that could look no way but downwards, with a muck-rake in his hand," and the man could not see the crown offered to him because he did not look up. "Where there's muck there's money" is well-known to us, and there can have been few decades that have borne this out more fully than the decade of the sixties now passed. Obscene books, obscene films, obscene "plays" have certainly brought in the money for their unremembered authors, producers and actors. Memoirs of prostitutes and criminals have brought easy wealth; a drug offence has become almost essential publicity for some. Decent discretion is now labelled hypocrisy, and skeletons that used to be in cupboards are now expected to be proudly displayed. Writers of "plays" have turned a quick penny by shooting little arrows at long-accepted heroes; the writers' names are soon forgotten, but those at whom they have shot have had an awkward habit of standing secure, unsullied: Havelock, Nightingale, Churchill, Nelson. Not to be out-done, some churchmen have jumped on the wagon. At first it was to help prove the literary merit of "Lady Chatterley's Lover". Then a new "humanism" became the vogue, and a clerical collar became the badge of the avant-garde, provided its wearer was disproving the divinity of Christ, or "rationalising" the faith by which he is presumed to live. The man with the muck-rake certainly had his head well down. But as the decade wore on: as man's mastery of nature was steadily making him the slave of technology, and as the most agonising dilemma of the century was rending Vietnam and bewildering world opinion, man reached out for the stars. It seemed there was nothing he could not do with rocketry and computers. It seemed almost superfluous that the two great nations who were searching space should need to train a very special type of man; he needed qualities that were elusive because they were innate, and science could not provide them: high intelligence, physical excellence and courage. As for the achievement in space—it was all done by science; or nearly all. When one of the special men was rounding the Moon, he read to the listening Earth words familiar in almost every part of it: "In the begin." Some humanists found it naive or even arrogant to read ning God 1 .
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