Life After Death

freedom can become the mere power of choice, and that in its exercise we might become less free. The more fundamental freedom lies in the power to choose in the interests of others, not self; in the possession of life and in that love which is the giving of self and the giving of life. Like a gifted painter, Lewis would sketch the lights and the shadows, and encourage us to choose one over the other. The 'right to choose' has become the collective epitaph of the past thirty years. Chesterton knew that, compared with life itself, the liberal freedom of choice - the power of the pike over the minnow - was infinitely inferior, reminding his readers that, "To admire mere choice is to refuse to choose" (G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy).

Value or Price?

The challenge the modern world has set itself is the total secularisation of society and the eradication of the entire Judaeo-Christian heritage. Education, in the school and in the home, is the principal batleground. The teaching of absolutes such as the sanctity of human life has been largely jettisoned. In his Abolition of Man, Lewis graphically describes what happens to a society which abandons the Decalogue and its values: "We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise ... we castrate them and then bid the geldings be fruitful". For the relativist, the men without chests, nothing is absolutely right, nothing absolutely wrong. Lewis called the new educators 'the new Conditioners': "It is not that they are bad men.

They are not men at all ... they are artefacts. Man's final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man." Lewis also wrote that Christianity had not been tried and found wanting, but rather found difficult and not tried. "As Christians," he said, "we are tempted to make unnecessary concessions to those outside the Faith. We give in too much ... we must show our Christian colours if we are to be true to Jesus Christ. We cannot remain silent and concede everything away". Having now conceded everything away, we should look at the human landscape of modern Britain, littered with casualties, and consider the consequences.

Men without Chests In the nineteenth century, Carlyle called it "the Condition of England Question". In what condition do we find our country today? And let us be clear that this is every bit as much a religious question as it is a political one. With what sort of values have these 'men without chests' left us? The conditioners have replaced the Beatitudes with the me-attitudes. Individualism, relativism, syncretism, libertarianism and false liberalism. Their abolition of God - and the man made in His image - have left us poor beyond belief. The abolition of God and the abolition of man are two sides of the same coin. This narrow form of individualism, which encourages us to opt out of communal responsibilites, leads to the corruption of our civic life, to ethical illiteracy, and ultimately to what Albert Camus describes as "the bloody face of history". When a society loses respect for life, it loses everything. In our darkened Britain, where once everything had a value, everything now has a price. Politicians are obsessive about economic indicators and even