The Commentary

Three pieces of recent news have spoken eloquently of the desperate state of our country.

First, the shadow home secretary, Chris Grayling, made a speech comparing parts of Britain to The Wire, a US television drama which portrays the reality of inner city drug gangs and violence. He may have been making a political point, but it resonated with many ordinary people.

Second, at the beginning of September, two brothers, now aged just ten and 12 years, pleaded guilty to torturing two other boys at Edlington in South Yorkshire in an attack likened to the murder of James Bulger. The brothers, well known to Doncaster Social Services, lured their young victims to heathland, promising to show them toads and foxes, before subjecting them to a prolonged and vicious attack which left one of them fighting for his life.

Third came the conviction of three home-grown Al-Qaeda terrorists who plotted to blow up seven transatlantic flights from the UK to the US and Canada over the summer of 2006. If they had succeeded, their suicide attack would have claimed the lives of thousands of people.

We have to face the fact that there are some very nasty people roaming our streets and the problem is not going away. With this and the many other ways in which our country is in disarray in mind, as we remembered the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II on September 3, many of us must have wondered what the men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice in that conflict would have thought if they had known what our nation would become. We can hear them asking, ‘Is this what we gave our lives for?’

The secular cure for a sick society is education, benefits for the needy and the aim of full employment with the prosperity which that brings. Good as these things are, on their own they fail and we are witnessing that fact. But we are not to despair. The answer is in the gospel.

Bunyan’s encouragement

John Bunyan, the famous writer of Pilgrim’s Progress, believed that the greatest sinners make the greatest Christians when met by God’s grace. And in this vein of thought he provides us with a marvellous encouragement to ponder as he considered his own times. Listen to what he says.

‘I have often marvelled at our youth, and said in my heart, What should be the reason that they should be so generally debauched as they are at this day? For they are now amazingly profane; and sometimes I have thought one thing and sometimes another; that is, why God should suffer it so to be. At last I have thought this: How if the God whose ways are past finding out should suffer it so to be now that he might make of some of them the more glorious saints hereafter? I know sin is of the devil, but it cannot work in the world without permission… it would not be the first time God has caught Satan in his own design. For my part, I believe that the time is at hand that we shall see better saints… than we have seen in many a day. And this vileness that at present does so much swallow up our youth is one cause of my thinking so; for out of them… when God puts forth his hand, as of old, you shall see what penitent ones, what trembling ones, and what admirers of grace, will be found to profess the gospel, to the glory of God by Christ.’ Nil desperandum.

Don't despair

Bunyan’s encouragement

John Benton

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