Part 2 of 2
The Great ReligionsBoth Spalding and Henderson were convinced that men and women the world over suffer from a sickness caused by spiritual deprivation. They were equally convinced that there is a cure for this universal human malaise, and that the treatment of the illness is to be found by turning to the accumulated wisdom of the great religions, 'studied in their ethical, philosophic, devotional and mystical aspects'.
For Spalding, 'the Great Religions' were,Hinduism, its child Buddhism, its brother Zarathustrianism; Confucianism and mystical Taoism; Judaism and Greek thought, and their offspring Christianity and Islam. These nine have been the chief source of the great literature, the great art and the great music of the world. And when they are examined and compared, a marvellous truth stands revealed: while they differ widely on minor and sometimes on major points, they agree or harmonize (vary without contradiction) on broad principles: on man's approach to God and on the Divine Nature Itself, whether regarded as the Godhead as He is in Himself, or as God as He is in relation to His creatures. As the same light of the one sun shines through the many different stained-glass windows, so the same truth of the one God shines through the various colours of different civilizations and different minds.31
The list of the great religions and cultures of East and West lengthened to include representatives from the Far East, China, Japan, India. It extended to include the religions of ancient Greece, Palestine, Slav, Latin and Nordic Europe, North and South America. These sources of wisdom and spiritual insight were to be studied in their independence, integrity, and fruitful diversity. A demanding programme, to be sure, and one for which three lines of approach were suggested. The first was through the study of the religions themselves. The second was through the fostering of mutual understanding between men and women of faith. The third was through the co-operation of religious leaders in making common cause against materialism. The immediate aim was to further the study of the great religions in universities, where the students should obtain an outline knowledge of the great cultures as a whole and a more detailed knowledge of one of them. The studies of a student
would be cultural rather than philological and sound translations will have to be provided where they are not already available.32 Use should also be made of the appeal to eye and ear of art, architecture and music in specimen, picture and record. The importance of studying the arts as a means to the understanding of a religion was stressed by the founders. The recommendations of the Ramakrishnan University Education Committee for India, which have been accepted by the Indian Government, and have commended themselves to high educational authorities elsewhere, are that all university students should study, in their first year, the lives of the great religious leaders; in the second, selections from the scriptures of the world; and in their third, the central problems of the philosophy of religion. This scheme also provides a guide for the ordinary person who wishes to study religions as part of his general education.33
Holy RussiaTo the list of 'great religions' Spalding added the religion of 'Holy Russia'. The Orthodox traditions, especially those of Holy Mother Russia, caught and held his attention, inspiring him to reflect upon the experience to which the mystics of all religions bear common witness. Even so, he detected a fundamental difference between civilizations which are anthropocentric and those which are essentially theocentric.
Hinduism with Buddhism and Orthodoxy [are] at the opposite pole from China and the Nordics, as the other world is at the opposite pole from this. The Chinese and Nordic ideal, being social, did not admit of anything in the nature of a flight from ordinary human experience: as Confucius said, 'absorption in the study of the supernatural is most harmful'. In India and Russia, however, precisely such a flight from experience did take place; and with it came a certain neglect of experience and interest in the world of things and men. If the Chinese and the Nordics are the Marthas among the nations, India and Russia are the Marys; not busy and practical, but on the whole meditative and mystic.34
Spalding described Russia as 'this vast world of resurrection'. He thought of Russia as a huge land-mass of mountain and steppe in which even the dullest observer could not fail to be awakened by the sudden Easter-burst of spring after the long darkness and the bitter cold of winter. For HN the resurrection of all living things to a new life of light, love and rejoicing, was Nature's exemplary response to the Divine Will. Prompted by the sight of such recurring wonders, an Orthodox Christian is helped to glimpse the Unseen in the midst of what is seen. In the Orthodox liturgy the worshipper is led into the very presence of the Unseen.35 Spalding believed that Holy Russia was itself an icon, a window into Heaven, through which streamed the glory of the Divine Vision.
At the time when he was writing about these things, Russia was gripped by a political system that actively sought to destroy religion. After the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, Christians were among the first to suffer persecution. The body of Christ was once more suffering crucifixion, but after the crucifixion would come the resurrection. One of Spalding's sonnets is called Christos Woskresse (sic). The title comes from the greeting exchanged by Russian Orthodox believers on Easter Day: Christos voskrese! Voistinu voskrese!, that is, 'Christ is Risen! He is risen Indeed!' The poem shows that, unlike some of his more gullible contemporaries who should have known what was actually going on in the Soviet Union because they had been there, ostensibly to see for themselves, Spalding was aware of the tragedy that was unfolding in that country.Christ is Risen!
Look ye at Holy Russia crucified:
Behold the nails, the thorns, the dying breath;
Hark to the cry of anguish; and beneath,
The passing scoffers, daring to deride.
Wisdom she hath forgot, the Christ denied;
God hath forsaken her, she perisheth;
Great darkness glooms about the cross of death;
She hath put on the mortal, and hath died.
See, from the tomb the stone is roll'd away;
The dark is empty of the dead, and rife
The dawn with Paschal light and Paschal bird:
Lo! Russia risen to Eternal Life,
Ringing the bells of Resurrection Day,
And in her heart the Everlasting Word.36
Seventy years later the Communist system collapsed in the Soviet Union. It remains to be seen whether or not Spalding's words were prophetic, but there are clear signs of a revival of religion in that part of the world. He believed, but could not have known for certain, that in the darkest days of Communist oppression in the USSR there were individuals who strove, often at great personal cost, to preserve the Divine Vision in Holy Russia. The writer of the short prayer that follows experienced persecution, imprisonment, 'internal exile', and ultimately exile from his own country. He was to become famous for novels like In the First Circle, Cancer Ward, and for his meticulous documentation of life and death in the Soviet Gulag Archipelago.
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn speaks of the responsibility that human beings bear for reflecting the radiance of God, however inadequately, a conviction that HN would clearly have shared.
Prayer
How easy it is for me to live with you, O Lord!
How easy it is for me to believe in you!
Whenever my mind is uncertain, or I am consumed by perplexity,
Or when clever people fail to see further than today,
Not aware of what they must do tomorrow-
You send down to me from heaven the clear certainty
That you exist and that you are taking care of me
So that not all the favourable paths for me are closed.
On the crest of human fame, I grow accustomed
With astonishment to a journey
That one is never capable of devising for oneself;
An astonishing journey through hopelessness up to this point,
Whence I am able to send to humanity
Reflections of your radiance.
Yet you will give me the time that is necessary
For me to continue to reflect that radiance.
But as to how much time I have-that you know
And determine-as with everything else.37
Spalding's respect -- one might say, his reverence -- for Orthodoxy was expressed practically in 1948. In that year he provided the funds for a University Lectureship at Oxford, to be held by Dr Nicolas Zernov. Dr Zernov's book, Eastern Christendom: A Study of the Origin and Development of the Eastern Orthodox Church,38 is dedicated 'to the memory of H. N. Spalding, 1877-1953 and of his wife Nellie Spalding, 1876-1957, whose vision and generosity endowed the study of Eastern Christianity in the University of Oxford'.39 Four decades earlier, on the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, Spalding wrote a sonnet with the title Holy Russia.40 Like most of his other poems it was not published until 1952, because of the 'idleness' that the author claimed to have been one of his virtues. Spalding's respect for the Orthodox Tradition of Holy Russia was never to waver, but the horrors of the First World War, the barbarity of the Bolshevik revolution, and the totalitarian dictatorships of atheistic Communism in the Soviet Union and Communist China, changed his understanding of the relationship between Church and State, the meaning of patriotism, and the source of Light from the East. Another of his sonnets illustrates this.
Bolshevik Russia:
Massacre seized me; mad, I swung the knife
And stab'd my bosom -- I the murderer
And I the murder'd! Godless self-slaughter,
Russian and Russian, soul and soul at strife!
Henceforth is the whole earth with horror rife:
Look, young and old, with starving eyes, wander
Thro' cornless Volga's crowded sepulchre,
Then drink the river in despair of life.
Yet have I deeper drunk, yea, deadlier know.
Where love was, hate is; whom I saved before
Now smite I. Still of Hell remains the worst:
Ah, fires of anguish! bottomless pit of woe!
God loved I, now I see His Face no more,
Call me not human; I am the Accurst.41
The brutality of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich was still to come, but by then Spalding had already turned further East, to the ancient traditions of India and China, for confirmation of his belief that the religious insight and the wisdom for which human beings seek (or can be encouraged to seek) is universal, though differently expressed. This common wisdom -- Eastern and Western -- points towards unity, justice, and peace. This is the wisdom that promises renaissance. This is the knowledge that leads to resurrection. As he was to comment later, when his poems were published,
The energies of mankind are at present directed to avoiding a Third World War. But necessary as this is, it is not enough; they must also be devoted to preparing for the first World-wide Renaissance, the true alternative to another war. It is a Renaissance centring upon God, to which East and West will alike contribute.42
Light from Many SourcesThe notion of a universal religion, in which tolerance is the principal article of faith and education the means by which it is to be inculcated, is by no means new. It assumes importance as the extent of religious and cultural diversity becomes more apparent, and potentially more threatening. How are the rights, the needs, the aspirations, of different cultural and religious communities to be recognised (not to say, reconciled) without damaging social stability? How are the convictions of believers, unbelievers, agnostics, and atheists, to be accommodated in a society that may be described with the best intentions, but prematurely, as 'pluralist' and 'multi-cultural'? Secularism, inside as well as outside the different religious traditions, has fostered indifference to the claims of institutionalised religion. It is not that religion has been decisively rejected because of the sophisticated disinclination on the part of modern men and women to accept outdated metaphysics. The rejection of organised religion is often the consequence of an unreflective pragmatism nourished by ignorance. It is widely believed that in order to live a 'reasonable' and a 'reasonably successful' life it is not necessary to consider the claims and counter-claims of any religion. Henderson's hold on institutional religion loosened when he began to feel that traditional religious systems were too specifically prescriptive and constricting. Dauntingly, they presented the seeker of truth with what Dr Carmen Blacker called, 'a number of metaphysical propositions in which to believe and a set of moral principles with which to conform'.43
Light, and the enlightenment it brings, is to be welcomed from whatever source it comes.
Spalding and Henderson acknowledged that many lamps light the path to truth. The religions of India, China, and Japan promise deliverance from darkness to light. Hinduism promises deliverance from ignorance of the real to knowledge of the real, furnishing the seeker after truth with a strategic and a progressive plan of salvation. Siddharta Gautama, the Buddha, with his gospel of liberation from the suffering and the dis-ease of existence, is the exemplary 'enlightened one' -- as his title reveals. In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, light illuminates the path to wholeness, well-being, and salvation. Each of these religions, in its distinctive and particular way, satisfies a universal human need. Does any one religion take precedence over the others?
Can any one religion contain the truth for everyone and for all time? It was one thing for Spalding and Henderson to assert -- at a time when it was less common to do so than it is today -- that there are many different ways in which spiritual insight and wisdom is to be attained. This they did, ex animo, but
neither man was ever to be a campaigner for a new universal system of beliefs (whether reformed but 'secular', or reformed and 'religious') based upon the abandonment of doctrinal particularity. This point is worth making if only to refute the charge laid against both men (but especially against HN by Professor R. C. Zaehner during the course of his inaugural lecture in Oxford) that their interest in world religions concealed an attempt to use the study of comparative religion in order to promote a universal syncretism. This, quite simply, was not true of either Spalding or Henderson.44In each case of an experiment with religious truth the test is both empirical and pragmatic. The approach to the claims of a religion is heuristic. What is there to know and learn? What is there to discover and experience? Is a commitment to belief reasonable or absurd? In a more utilitarian vein, and in plain language, Does religion deliver what it promises to the believer? The great religious teachers, among whom are Siddharta Gautama, the Buddha and Jesus, the Christ, issue the invitation, 'Come and see', to the would-be seeker after truth. The claims of religion are thus to be tested only in the crucible of personal experience. The Gayatri Mantra, the prayer to the Sun, is the most sacred of Vedic mantras, repeated three times each day by an orthodox initiated Brahmin, in the early morning when the sun rises, at midday when the sun is at its zenith, and at sunset. In this prayer it is the light of the Sun which provides an appropriate metaphor for the blaze of enlightenment which may come, only faintly at first, when vision is clouded by sin, doubt, and uncertainty. At such times the believer may be compared to one who patiently waits for illumination, knowing that the dim light to be seen is the promise not the fulfilment. That which is just discernible on the horizon before dawn will give way ultimately to the effulgence of the risen sun. So the daily prayer is for light, for liberation, for salvation, for a knowledge of the Truth.
It was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi -- Mahatma Gandhi -- who declared that 'Truth is God'. What we seek in our search for Truth is, according to this view, nothing less than that for which in our present state of ignorance we can only call God.
Om: Let us meditate on
The radiance of the divine
May it inspire and illuminate our intellects. Om.45
The theme of the revelatory power of light is picked up in al-Quran. The Holy Book of Islam is itself the light that is manifest, a revelation sent down by God. The 'convincing proof' of its illuminating truth is given not so much in prepositional statements about doctrine -- though these are important enough -- but in the personal example of the Prophet Muhammad's response in every particular to the divine call he received.
O Mankind! Verily
There hath come to you
A convincing proof
From your Lord:
For We [i.e. God] have sent unto you
A light (that is) manifest. (4.174)46
The twenty-fourth surah of the Quran carries the title al-Nur, 'the Light'. It contains the 'Verse of Light'.
God is the Light
Of the heavens and the earth.
The parable of His Light
Is as if there were a Niche
And within it a Lamp:
The Lamp enclosed in Glass:
The glass as it were
A brilliant star:
Lit from a blessed Tree,
An Olive, neither of the East
Nor of the West,
Whose Oil is well-nigh
Luminous,
Though fire scarce touched it:
Light upon Light!
God doth guide
Whom He will
To His Light:
God doth set forth Parables
For men: and God
Doth know all things. (verse 35)
Then come the lines,
(Lit is such a light)
In houses, which God
Hath permitted to be raised
To honour; for the celebration
In them of His name:
In them He is glorified
In the mornings and
In the evenings, (again and again),
By men whom neither
Traffic nor merchandise
Can divert from the Remembrance
Of God, nor from regular Prayer,
Nor from the practice
Of regular Charity. . . (verses 36-7)47
Opportunity and Responsibility in EducationCould a new universal religion be founded upon human solidarity in the face of cosmic indifference? The prospect of a godless chaos rather than a divinely ordered cosmos offers a bleak view of human existence in a universe from which even the possibility of supernatural intervention is excluded. Spalding and Henderson would have none of that. The denial of the Divine Vision was to be vigorously challenged. The notion that it is the denial of God that is the beginning of wisdom was a poisoned inversion of the truth, which Spalding established the Trust and the Union to counter. At the same time he was fully aware of the fact that two separate groups were brought into a formidable anti-theistic alliance by the secularist tendency. On the one hand were the dogmatic atheists, with their own counter-gospel to propagate. On the other hand were those whose practical atheism had never been subjected to critical scrutiny and whose lives appeared to them to stand in no need of spiritual inquiry, except at infrequent moments of personal stress. These are the ones who are indifferent rather than hostile to the claims of religion. Both Spalding and Henderson rook a great interest in educational theory and practice. What is the role of education in a pluralist, multi-ethnic, multi-faith, multi-cultural society? If 'God' exists, and if all men and women belong to the same family of created beings, can disagreements about revelation be allowed to obstruct human progress? Can it be that 'God' should wilfully confuse the most important issue of all by dividing those who 'He' has created to be obedient to 'His' will? Such questions often exercised the minds of both men. Much of what they had to say by way of answers focused on education and especially on religious and moral education in schools. Without the adequate preparation of teachers, however, the inclusion of teaching about world religions in the school curriculum is questionable. This was one of the concerns of the
Anglican scholar, Canon Spencer Leeson, whose teaching career took him to the headship of Winchester College, one of England's leading public schools. In 1944 he gave the Bampton Lectures in Oxford. In one of the notes to the published lectures he wrote:
It is hardly fair to confront a child with his mind as yet undeveloped with Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Confucianism, laying them side by side as it were on the table, and inviting him to choose for himself. He is not ready to appreciate either the differences or the common elements, and if told that he must exercise a choice between alternative ideas about God and man, would either feel bewildered or would cease to listen. Those who have had practical experience of dealing with children of that age would not be likely to commend this proposal. As every teacher knows, if any impression is to be made upon children, he must be definite, clear and, above all, concrete. Moreover it is doubtful whether a teacher with any strong convictions of his own could maintain an objective attitude towards these alternatives. He would be required by implication to believe, or at least suggest, that all of them were equally true; this would be impossible unless he was indifferent to them all, and a teacher with an outlook of that sort might well be unwilling to give any religious reaching.
Again, to discover common elements among competing creeds long study of them is necessary, and if possible practical experience of their working in the countries where they command assent. I do not envy a teacher who believes in the value of religious training being compelled by State regulation to extract these common elements at second-hand from books of reference, and then present them to a class of 13-year-olds, implying that they are all of them equally valuable and that they must make their own choice. Children of that age have a right to look to their teacher for guidance; and he, if he has any faith at all, will be eager to give it. If he has no faith, he should not be called upon to teach religion.
There is everything to be said for the conscientious study of comparative religion at a later stage, and it does in fact form part of many sixth form courses ... But no religious teacher worth the name would encourage his pupils to regard other faiths with intolerance or contempt. If he is a Christian, he must believe that his faith is the truth of God; but he must equally certainly hold that wherever there is honest thinking and right action, there the Holy Spirit is working.48
With much of this Spalding would have agreed in principle. A broader approach to religious education in schools was a matter of importance to him. But who was to take up the challenge? Who was to widen the curriculum? Who was to question the established practice, so familiar to members of his own generation and not unknown in his later years, of equating terms such as Religious Instruction, Divinity, Scripture, with a presentation in schools of the beliefs and practices of Christianity? Was this an appropriate task for State schools? Did not such attempts amount to indoctrination? Leeson had given his Bampton lectures in Oxford in 1944, the year in which the forward-looking Education Act, associated with the name R. A. Butler, appeared on the statute book. Butler was Minister of Education from 1941 to 1945 in the National Coalition government, which served Britain during the Second World War. The Act re-organised secondary school education and introduced the II-plus examination for selection to the grammar schools. It also set important guidelines for the provision of religious education in County and Voluntary schools. These parts of the Act were to become so important, so widely discussed, and ultimately so fiercely challenged, that is useful to quote them.
Section 25
(1) Subject to the provisions of this section, the school day in every county school and in every voluntary school shall begin with collective worship on the part of all pupils in attendance at the school, and the arrangements made therefore shall provide for a single act of worship attended by all such pupils unless, in the opinion of the local education authority or, in the case of a voluntary school, of the managers or governors thereof, the school premises are such as to make it impracticable to assemble them for that purpose.
(2) Subject to the provisions of this section, religious instruction shall be given in every county school and in every voluntary school.
(3) It shall not be required, as a condition of any pupil attending any county school or any voluntary school, that he shall attend or abstain from attending any Sunday school or any place of religious worship.
(4) If the parent of any pupil in attendance at any county school or any voluntary school requests that he be wholly or partly excused from attendance at religious worship in the school, or from attendance at religious instruction in the school, or from attendance at both religious worship and religious instruction in the school, then, until the request is withdrawn, the pupil shall be excused from such attendance accordingly ...
Section 26
Subject as hereinafter provided, the collective worship required by subsection (1) of the last foregoing section shall not, in any county school, be distinctive of any particular religious denomination, and the religious instruction given to any pupils in attendance at a county school in conformity with the requirements of subsection (2) of the said section shall be given in accordance with an agreed syllabus adopted for the school or for those pupils and shall not include any catechism or formulary which is distinctive of any particular religious denomination.
The importance of religious education was thus recognised, and the position of the 'subject' in the curriculum ensured. Within a short period of time, however, the unique status of religious education as the only school subject to be made compulsory began to be questioned.
An approach to religious education, which focused almost exclusively on Christianity, became more controversial after the end of the Second World War, when immigration to this country increased the numbers of adherents of other faiths. The situation was further complicated by the rising secularism in a country that was now being described as 'post-Christian'. If religious education was to survive it would have to be re-designed in order to meet the needs of a pluralist society. The changes were not long in coming. In the 1960s moves to broaden the content of religious education in schools and to redefine its aims and objectives were being made.
Perhaps the most far-reaching of the changes now being advocated was that which called for the inclusion of teaching about religions other than Christianity.
The phrase 'teaching about' is important because it reflects a growing insistence that State schools are not places in which religion ought to be taught. Religious beliefs and practices may legitimately be described but not taught in a confessional way that may be appropriate in a synagogue, a church, a mosque, or a rationalist ethical society. A more important place in the school curriculum for a descriptive, phenomenological, approach to the great religions (not excluding Christianity) was thus envisaged and designed. This was a development for which Spalding had argued, but he did not live to see the formal introduction of world religions as an integral element of 'the new religious education'.
Among the most prominent advocates of this change were the members of the Shap Working Party on World Religions in Education, led by Professor Ninian Smart of the University of Lancaster and Professor Geoffrey Parrinder of King's College, London. 'Shap', as it is popularly known, combined theory with practice (as it continues to do), offering teachers and educational administrators practical help in the planning of syllabuses and the preparation of materials about different religions, suitable for use in schools.Henderson welcomed the new developments and for several years was a member of the Shap Working Party, so called because the early group of enthusiasts first met for discussion at the Shap Wells Hotel, in a remote part of Westmorland (now in Cumbria), near the village of Shap. His enthusiasm waned somewhat with the onset of age, when he noted that the emphasis of the innovators did not appear to be the same as he and Spalding had expected. He felt, probably mistakenly, that in what was becoming known as the New Religious Education, the approach to world religions was too studiously descriptive. There appeared to be little room for encouraging an awareness of the Divine Vision that is our common spiritual heritage, and no place for encouraging the search for Truth. He thought that the approach to religious studies (and, hence, 'to the teaching of religion in schools', as he still preferred to call it, was becoming too reductionist, too self-consciously 'neutral', and sadly, too superficial. He no doubt misunderstood what the innovators were attempting to do, but he feared that religion and religions might be trivialised in the process. He also feared that, by simply presenting facts about different religions to immature minds in a way that could hardly be other than selective, the unfortunate result might be an induction into agnosticism -- unintended, perhaps -- about the worth, not to speak of the truth, of any religion.
The irony of an approach to religious education, which might well result in the rejection of a personal commitment to any form of religious belief, was not lost on him. Although he made his personal reservations known, however,
he commended the Shap initiative in such a way that the Spalding Trustees were able to support it for several years with an annual grant. HN cannot be said to have appreciated the problem of preparing teachers to deal effectively with religious education in schools. In Henderson's time the problem was becoming acute, and he did understand what was needed. In his twilight years, however, he was obliged to concede that the educational renaissance for which he and Spalding had laboured in their different ways was not about to occur. In education there were other priorities of a less than spiritual kind. To
the claims of religion and religions there was growing indifference and apathy rather than real curiosity and sustained interest. The comparative study of world religions seemed to him to be increasingly remote from the needs of most people. Despite the efforts of enthusiastic teachers to ensure that this did not happen, he felt that the 'subject' was not being taught in a sufficiently imaginative way. Furthermore, there seemed to be little evidence to show that religious belief and moral action were being significantly improved by the teaching of a subject that still had to fight for survival in the curriculum. Old age and infirmity did not extinguish his idealism, although towards the end he was clearly tired of life. The gleam in his eyes and the sound of his laughter still evoked the love and enthusiasm of family and friends. His death in 1988 marked the end of the partnership in the service of Spalding's ideal, but it did not mark the end of the work with which both men had been so intimately involved.
_______________
Notes and References1. CEW, pp. 293ff.
2. H. N. Spalding, 1958, The Divine Universe or the Many and the One: A Study of Religions and Religion, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, Prologue. pp. 10-11. The book was published posthumously.
3. HNS, TDU, op. cit., p. 11.
4. Isidore Epstein, 1959. Judaism: A Historical Presentation, Penguin Books, p. 217.
5. I Peter 3.15. For the word translated here as 'reason', the Greek text has [x], 'a reasoned (and reasoning) defence'.
6. Obituary notice of HN in The Brazen Nose, A College Magazine, Oxford, 1954, pp. 342-3.
7. The point is one of historical interest. See Appendix I, Directions to Trustees.
8. Letter to Dr Carmen Blacker, 26 October 1967, HFP file F2/6.
9. USGR, number 32, Summer 1975, p. 14. The reference in the last line is to the English poet and Anglican priest, George Herbert (1593-1633), who spent his last years serving the parish of Bemerton in Wiltshire, not far from Henderson's house in Steeple Langford. Herbert's poem 'Love' (III) ends with the lines: 'You must sit down', says Love, 'and taste my meat' / So I did sit and eat.
10. This extract from Robert Speaight's article 'Liturgy and Language' appeared in NUSGR number 30, Summer, 1973, p. 5.
11. See above, page 10, for the lines of Spalding's sonnet that contains the words quoted here.
12. A comment of Spalding, recalled by Henderson, NUSGR, number 26, Summer 1969, p. 6.
13. K. D. D. Henderson. 1976, 'Is Religion Necessary", Occasional Papers 1976-1986, edited by Edward Hulmes. Farmington, Oxford, p. 11.
14. Huston Smith, 1958. The Religions of Man, Mentor Books, The New American Library, New York, p. 20. The last sentence in this quotation is from the Katha Upanishad, I, iii, 14.
15. Kathleen Bliss, 1969, The Future of Religion, The New Thinker's Library, C. A. Watts & Co. Ltd, London, p. 2.
16. See W. Cantwell Smith, 1964, The Meaning and End of Religion, New York.
17. John Hick, 'Towards a Global Theology', in Theology, September 1970.
18. Huston Smith, op. cit., 1958, p. 19.
19. Martin Buber, 1961. Between Man and Man, translated by R. Gregor Smith, Collins Fontana Books, p. 24.
20. The incident in Henderson's life, which convinced him that missionary efforts to convert Muslims to Christianity were not always well-advised, was recalled by his son David during K.D.D.H.'s funeral service in All Saints' Church, Steeple Langford, Wiltshire, on Wednesday, 30 March 1988. See below, page 168.
21. See Appendix 2.
22. Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, 1958, in his foreword to Spalding's TDU, op. cit., p. vii.
23. See page 28.
24. Martin Corner, 1995. in his Introduction to The Works of Matthew Arnold, Wordsworth Poetry Library, p. v.
25. Matthew Arnold, The Buried Life, lines 45-54, first published in 1852.
26. Professor Robert Slater of Harvard University.
27. Professor W. E. Hocking of Harvard University.
28.
Sir Richard Livingstone died a few months before on 26 December 1960. He served as Chairman of the Union for the Study of the Great Religions from 1953. In tribute, Henderson wrote, 'What strikes us is the power of a liberal education to make England's greatest and most distinguished classicist work for the extension of the western classical tradition, [and] to embrace the cultural heritage of India and China'. NUSGR, number 14, February 1961 p. 1.
29. NUSGR, number 15, October 1961, p. 7.
30. Spalding wrote many poems, mostly sonnets, for which he claimed no special merit. They were not, as he put it, 'for the fashion of these times'. As for criticism, he added in Greek, 'the author doesn't care!'
31. H. N. Spalding, TDU, pp. 1-2.
32. The Trust encouraged the work of providing such translations by supporting the commissioning and publication of Ethical and Religious Classics, published by George Allen & Unwin.
33. From a leaflet about the USGR drafted in June 1954, by the General Secretary, KDDH, pp. 1-2.
34. HNS, 1939, CEW, p. 190.
35. Ibid, PP. 232-54.
36. HNS, IPL ([952), p. 88. In a letter (dated 28 April 2001) to the present author by JMKS, Spalding's son, there is the following note: 'HN wrote and published anonymously Russia in Resurrection. I do not have a copy, but it was published while we lived at Shotover Cleve, probably about 1926-30. It had no index because it was published in a hurry for some reason which I forget'. In this case JMKS was probably correct to attribute the omission of an index to the need for hasty publication, but this cannot be said of his father's other published works. One of Spalding's major publications contains an index. In his review of Civilization in East and West G. Stanley Whitby suggested a different reason for the omission: 'An index is desirable, although with such a wealth of scholarship to be catalogued one can forgive a compiler for shrinking from the task'. The review of CEW was published in the American journal Ethics.
HN typed the review (undated) from a handwritten transcript sent from Oriel College, Oxford, on 15 March 1941 by Jim Kincade. HN pasted his typescript into a copy of CEW that is now in my possession. On the last page of the same copy of the book H wrote the three words 'Add an Index'. He never did.
37. The Russian text of this 'Prayer' (Molitva), written in 1962 by Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, was sent to me, typed on an old fashioned machine, from his home in exile in Vermont in 1981. Here I have included my English version of the Russian text.
38. Published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1961.
39. The lectureship was originally called The Spalding Lectureship in Eastern Orthodox Culture. It was subsequently renamed The Spalding Lectureship in Eastern Orthodox Studies, after it was felt that the word Culture in the original wording was too ambiguous.
40. HNS, IPL, p. 7.
41. HNS, IPL, p. 31.
42. HNS, IPL, pp. viii-ix.
43. Dr Blacker's comment was made in her Charles Strong Memorial Lecture in Melbourne, Australia, in July 1968.
44.
The charge against Spalding, the founder of the Chair to which Zaehner had just been elected, was made in the new Professor's inaugural lecture, 'Foolishness to the Greeks', to an audience which included H and his wife. Zaehner also used the occasion to make the same criticism of his predecessor, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. The ensuing hostility between HN and Zaehner, which arose not only as a result of Spalding's objection to Zaehner's election but out of the latter's declaration of intent to change the emphasis of the work of the Chair, is considered in chapter four, pp. 114ff.[/size]
45. Rig Veda, 3.62.10.
46. The English versions of the Arabic original are those of A Yusuf Ali, in The Holy Quran: Text, Translation and Commentary, Dar al Arabia, Beirut, Lebanon, 1968.
47. Ibid
48. Spencer Leeson, 1947, Christian Education, being eight lectures delivered before the University of Oxford, in the year 1944, on the foundation of The Rev. John Bampton, Canon of Salisbury, Longmans, Green & Co., London, p. 24.