Secretary: Wm. S. Stephen

Treasurer: R. H. E. Inkson

Committee: Ina Hogg, Alex Speed, Sheila Wicker.

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FOREWORD

THREEFOLD LOVE

By Essie Wise

It has become traditional to identify three different kinds of love: romantic or sexual love, familial (family) love and charity.
Romantic love or sexual love, usually symbolised by the little Greek God, Eros or by Cupid, his Latin equivalent, has featured in human mythology, religion and literature for many thousands of years. Stories, poems, songs, paintings, plays, novels, motion pictures and interminable soap operas all testify to our obsession with excitement and intoxication of romantic love. Sometimes it is portrayed as a sickness, or a temporary madness or a suspension of reason and common sense, because there is neither rhyme nor reason for the romantic attachments people make. Infatuation is a kind of ecstasy, an enchantment, a seduction which takes possession of a person's whole being and seems to deprive him or her of common sense and self-control. The process is aptly named, "falling in love" because it is something that happens by chance, without deliberation or intention, like tripping over a paving stone. One minute you are upright and in control; next minute you are sprawled on the ground, disorientated and wondering what happened to you.
This is exactly what Nature and Evolution require of us of course. For the survival of the species it is important that two people are brought together long enough to produce offspring and then raise them and support them until they are mature enough to look after themselves. For this to happen effectively, romantic love has to develop into long term filial or family love.
Not only poets and song-writers have been fascinated by this topic, but also the philosophers, who have given much prime thinking time to trying to sort out the tangled skein of emotions and desires that constitute human love. Plato is convinced that sex is the force that generates all forms of love. There is an ancient Greek myth, to which both Plato and Socrates subscribed, that Zeus, the chief God, in early times separated one human creature into two parts and ever since then each person has been engaged upon a quest to find his or her soul mate, in other words to unite with their perfect partner to create once again the perfect unity that Zeus, in a peevish mood, divided. According to Plato and Socrates, the aim of love is to create whatever is beautiful and good and everlasting and sexual love is the desire to procreate what is good and beautiful and thereby achieve immortality by means of offspring. Love is the motivating power behind creativity and also our wish for goodness and happiness.
Interestingly, many modern psychologists, including Sigmund Freud, agree with the ancient philosophers that love is the most important of all the emotions. They say that a baby cannot survive without love, because that is how it develops its sense of self, it is made aware of itself because it is loved, it has significance, it has value and importance. It then becomes aware of its surroundings because there is something loveable in them, that is something that loves it and which it loves in return. Freud believes that the interest we show in our world, in other people, in the things that we do are all aspects of our love and it is essential for our well-being and mental health that we should find something agreeable in our surroundings, other wise we will turn our back on the world, switch off and be lost to ourselves, perhaps for ever. We must find an outlet for our love, as well as ourselves, be the object of some-one else's love. We have to find something lovable in existence to continue to exist as functioning persons. So we try to associate with people we like, surround ourselves with beautiful things, find interesting things to do and focus on pleasant thoughts, wholesome feelings, and enlightened ideals. This may sound complacent, even selfish, the implication being that we are ignoring all the ugliness, pain and wickedness in the world that ought to be heeded and corrected. But it is by emphasising what is good and beautiful that we nourish our faith that virtue in the end will win over vice and will give us the energy and courage to tackle it. We'll return to this theme later.
Nature and evolution tend to work in generalities, in broad strokes. They set the basic pattern and leave individuals to do the best they can with what they have been born with. As we know Nature, having put us here, takes very little responsibility for what happens to us thereafter. In theory, we are issued with the standard package of feelings in order to cope with what nature considers will be our way of life, but things move on and Nature really did not envisage all the complexities of human relationships when our feelings started to evolve.
For instance, out of romantic love develops familial love, the love of parents for each other, love of children for each other and parents and grandparents, and for the members of the extended family and friends to create a caring community in which the young may grow up. That is Nature's intention.
However, as we know, it does not always work out like that. There is often a selfish element in love, indeed some commentators claim that love is a selfish emotion, striving constantly for the happiness of the individual. Even self sacrifice is motivated by a desire for self-satisfaction, some philosophers claim. That, however, is a discussion for another time, and perhaps has more to do with self-love than filial love.
Self may become vulnerable in any loving relationship. It is easy to hurt the one you love. And self, trying to avoid the hurt may become selfish. People who love expect to be loved in return but are sometimes disappointed. Any relationship is a constantly developing experience; it is never static, and it is created from minute to minute, as the people concerned act and react with each other. The essence and aim of any loving or affectionate relationship is harmony, for the partners to feel united in thought and feeling, to be at one. Although people who have been very close to each other for many years have a remarkable sensitivity to each other's needs and moods, it is very difficult to achieve unanimity at any particular moment, because two people might not have similar moods or inclinations at any particular time.
In Virginia Wolf's novel, "To the Light House" there are several descriptions of this situation. The principal characters, the Ramsays, have been married for a very long time and are absolutely devoted to one another and are deeply concerned about each other's welfare and happiness. However, there are occasions when their moods will not coincide and so both feel unhappy, dissatisfied with themselves and each other because neither has responded in the way the other wished. It's twilight, they are sitting in their holiday cottage, looking out to sea where the light house has started to sweep the sky with its yellow beam. Mrs Ramsay is knitting. She has felt uneasy about something all day and she wants her husband to notice this and say or do something to comfort her. She has been anticipating their death and the sudden end of their long relationship. She feels utterly lost and alone and is desperate for him to relieve her anxiety and to make her feel loved and that she exists at all. He, on the other hand, is moved by the scenery, the evening sky and the play of the light on the water. He would like her to drop her interminable knitting, stand beside him and say something for both of them that would reassure him that she also was moved by the beauty of the twilight. Each is aware of how utterly alone. and separate they are and are desperate for unity. Both are reaching out to each other but neither makes contact because their moods do not coincide. Both are disappointed and blame each other for the failure. Being mature people who valued each other their relationship survives, but neither felt that life and love were living up to their promises. Love should unite but neither could bring about that sense of joining, and so each continued to endure that feeling of solitariness that neither could shake off.
A more dramatic account of this appears in the film "On Golden Pond", which stars Katherine Hepburn, Henry Fonda - both of whom won Oscars for their performances - and Jane Fonda. This film is a very perceptive description of filial love and the problems that can arise. An elderly couple, Ethel and Norman, who have been together for more than 40 years are spending the Summer in their cottage on Golden Pond, a lake near the Canadian border. Norman is about to celebrate his 80th birthday. He is moody, suffers from angina and is beginning to be forgetful. He hates the infirmities of old age and frequently loses his temper. Ethel is younger, patient and understands her husband's distress. She cheerfully puts up with his tantrums and tries to comfort and reassure him. Their daughter, Chelsea, who is in her forties is coming to visit with her new boyfriend and his 12 year old son. Chelsea and her father have never been comfortable with each other. They love each other deeply but their wishes for each other never seem to coincide. Because he loves her so much, Norman always wanted her to excel, to fulfil herself and achieve the rewards he thought she deserved. Chelsea saw his concern as criticism, even hostility, and try as she might she felt she could never please him. She wanted tenderness and comfort from him; he wanted her to make him proud of her. As their needs for and from each other never seemed to coincide they spent their lives in isolation, longing for contact, to feel at one, but both feeling the other was cold and distant, each feeling unfulfilled, Norman deciding he was a failure as a father, and Chelsea, as a daughter. There is a kind of reconciliation at the end when Chelsea dives into the lake to please him, a thing her fear would never allow her to do as a child, and perhaps he does recognise that his need for her to be what he wanted, blinded him to her need for him to be a reassuring, supportive father.
Achieving harmony with one person is difficult enough, but achieving unanimity with a whole community pushes us to the very limits of our tolerance and good nature. Yet nature and the evolutionary process expects this of us. Not only are our affections designed to protect the family unit, they are also programmed to care for the whole tribe. A third form of love is traditionally recognised, known as "Agape" in Greek and "Caritas" in Latin, sometimes called "Charity" in English or even enlightenment. This is the love Jesus promotes in the New Testament when he says "Love thy neighbour". It is the love that defines a civilised society, as it implies the care of the sick, the elderly, the weak, the poor and the powerless. It is the love that respects and values each person, irrespective of class, creed, colour or culture. It is the power that inspires people to sacrifice themselves for others to act generously, to put the interests of others always before their own. In religious terms it is the love of God. This love of the tribe or community or species is there, inbred in all of us, another survival device acquired during the evolutionary process but unfortunately all forms of affection, whether romantic, filial or community, are in competition with the selfish gene, which wishes to promote self at any cost, and so we get bitter rivalry, envy, jealousy, frustration and even hatred.
Romantic love is energetic, passionate, unbridled, extreme. It is the force that drives us out of ourselves to seek a mate, to make contact with the world around us, to be creative.
Filial love makes us caring, nurturing and understanding, seeking that unity and harmony that banishes the sense of isolation that annihilates self, by feeling at one with another. This is a mature, stable relationship, based on understanding and on the mutual recognition of needs.
Romantic love creates the family but it is filial love that keeps it together and allows it to endure. Unfortunately, our society at the moment, seems to prefer the excitement and gratification of Romance to the long-term commitment to and investment in family life.
Although there have been many fertility gods and many goddesses of sex and romantic love, Christianity is the only religion that has been created wholly out of love. Jesus perceived the unifying, harmonising instinct that we call love and saw it as the force that brings together not only one person with another, or the members of one family, but has the potential to draw together the whole human race and to extend it to the whole universe. The mystics desire to be at one with God or the whole of creation is another way of expressing the wish to escape from the isolation of lovelessness by uniting with something beyond. The delight we take in Nature, our preference for beauty and goodness, our faith in enlightened values, and our desire for a benign, creative spirit, as Socrates and Plato affirmed 400 years before Jesus are all instinctive, all included in our survival kit to make certain that we work together and protect ourselves from the assaults of a mindless and unknowing universe.
Unity in diversity is a Unitarian claim, finding the way of harmony is our ambition, and the original teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, based as they are on our creative human instincts seem to be as good a road map as any to guide us on our way.

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by Rev. Dr. Colin Wicker

by Bill Stephen

Communicating ideas from one generation to the next is a at best a haphazard process. Attitudes change, priorities change, assumptions change, visions change, fashions change, and what seemed to be vitally important to one generation, may very well be ignored by the next. Each succeeding generation tends to pick and choose from the vast legacy of knowledge, experience, reflection and discovery handed on by its predecessors and inevitably many potentially valuable ideas and revealing insights into the human condition are overlooked and perhaps lost for centuries. Such is the capricious and, I suppose, pragmatic nature of the human understanding.
These reflections came unbidden while I was thinking about what one generations owes its forebears, and whether there is a moral duty of gratitude. After all these people are dead and gone, and they can never be aware of anything we do or say to commemorate them. If we choose, therefore, to remember them in some special way, it is to satisfy our own need to demonstrate that we are such a society as recognises great virtue, or outstanding achievement and our debt to individuals who have influenced us for the better or have improved our circumstances or enlarged our opportunities and enhanced our life. Where such an expression of gratitude is genuine and not driven by some political aim, or the megalomania of a Stalin or a Mussolini, is usually regarded as the act of a civilised and enlightened society, but even so the choice is still subject to human fickleness.
A prime instance of this process is James Martineau, whose bicentenary is being celebrated currently by Unitarians but largely ignored by everyone else, a fate he shares with his work which nobody reads nowadays. You won't find any of his writings on the shelves of Ottaker's or Waterstone's and if you request them from the public library, to recover them, the assistant has to descend to the deepest recesses of the basement where they have lain undisturbed for 87 years. During his life-time he was recognised as one of the leading intellectuals of his day, on a par with Cardinal Newman, the great Catholic theologian, Professor Huxley, the Biologist and William Gladstone the Liberal Prime Minister. He produced a stream of books and articles on religion, ethics, social sciences and psychology and was in constant demand to preach, lecture and deliver orations at august gatherings of writers, artists and academics. Towards the end of his life books began to appear discussing his philosophical and religious thought, an indisputable indication of his pre-eminence as a thinker and of his influence upon his younger contemporaries; and after his death in 1900, biographies, books of recollections and commentaries flooded the bookshops. And since then, almost nothing, apart from short pieces in various Unitarian publications, but no modern re-appraisal of his thinking or attempt to interest 21st century readers in his work. All this contrasts dramatically with the fate of an exact contemporary, whose anniversary is also being celebrated this year on an international scale and much more lavishly.
Nineteen days before James Martineau first saw the light of day in the City of Norwich, on 2rt April, 1805, there was born at Odense in Denmark to a poor shoemaker and his wife, one of the world's greatest story-tellers, Hans Christian Andersen. After failing to earn a living as a factory worker, a stage hand, an actor and a singer he eventually discovered, he had a talent for writing poetry and storytelling and a steady stream of poems, travel sketches, novels, plays flowed from his pen and won him acclaim as a popular writer and a steady income. It was, however, his Fairy Tales, so called, or novels for children, such as "The Red Shoes", "The Little Match Girl", "The Tin Soldier", "The Emperor's new Clothes", "The Tinderbox", "The Ugly Duckling", "The Snow Queen" and more than thirty others that gained him an international reputation which has grown steadily since his death in Copenhagen in 1875. Since his children's tales started to appear in 1835, they have never been out of print and nowadays they are available in all sorts of formats at all sorts of prices in every bookshop. The cheap paper-back edition I bought recently was first published in 1993. There are several biographies on the shelves of the public library and the one I borrowed was published only five years ago. There is a Hans Christian Andersen Centre, Hans Christian Andersen International Conferences, a collection of essays and articles called "Anderseniana" published annually since 1933 and of course, the greatest proof of his world-wide popularity, the 1950's all-singing, all-dancing, Danny Kay film, which portrayed his life in glorious Technicolor, as a romantic fairy tale and had very little contact with reality. Hans Christian Andersen is still a celebrity with the man, woman and child in the street, one hundred and thirty years after his death, while James Martineau is totally unknown.
What, you may ask could this popular novelist and this academic theologian have in common, apart from the year and month of their birth? Both men were highly intelligent, extremely sensitive, had a realistic grasp of human nature and a deep understanding of the moral and intellectual attitude of their time. Each tried to portray, as accurately as possible, his vision of society by using the skills and the tools with which talent and education had supplied them. Thus, Hans Andersen communicated through characterisation and narration; James Martineau by means of philosophy and argument. However, although there was a difference in their means, their end was the same, to account for and respond to the existence of evil in their society.
The problem of evil has troubled humanity for thousands of years; what is it, how does it come about, what can be done to overcome it. Some philosophers suggest that evil is simply an absence of good; others think it is a matter of opinion or a point of view - "One man's meat is another man's poison"; then there are those who believe that there is an ongoing struggle between two supernatural forces, equally matched, Good and Evil, and that there is no guarantee that Good will triumph in the end. This conflict between Good and Evil is referred to in the first Chapter of Genesis where the Devil appears to temp Eve. For traditional Christians the problem poses an awkward question in logic. Christians believe in a God who is all powerful and absolutely good and who created a Universe and "saw that it was good," so why is there evil in the world? If God is all powerful and absolutely good, there ought not to be such a thing as evil. However, there is evil in the world. The consequence then must be that either God is not all-powerful after all and therefore is unable to drive out evil; or that he is all-powerful but not absolutely good, because he allows evil to exist.
Both Andersen and Martineau believe in an all-loving, all-powerful, supernatural Being; Andersen calls him God, and Martineau, Divine Intelligence and Supreme Rectitude. Both also believe that evil is endemic in the world and is in constant competition with the forces of good.
When I was a child I did not care for Hans Andersen's stories because there was so much cruelty, pain, misery, unhappiness, ugliness and sheer malice in them. There was also beauty, kindness and happiness, but the unpleasant elements always seemed to dominate. Certainly it as the malign the features that lasted in my memory and poisoned my imaginings for days afterwards. Later, I came to realise, of course, he was reflecting, as vividly as he could, his own vision of a world in which good and evil are equally balanced and it is a matter of sheer chance which of the two comes out on top in any particular skirmish.
"The Snow Queen" although it ends happily particularly upset me and the first time we read it in class, made me feel quite ill. From the outset, we are told that wickedness pervades the whole earth and is almost in the air we breathe, thanks to the fragments of the distorting mirror shattered in the upper atmosphere by the malice of the demon hobgoblin. Anyone at all may become a victim by sheer accident, and his or her life totally ruined. Misfortune may attack an individual at random, but the original intent to hurt was always deliberate, and as such it is portrayed by Andersen in allegorical terms, through his invention of the wicked hobgoblin. While Andersen deals with evil in emotional terms, Martineau is strictly intellectual.
Maritneau sees evil, in the first place as the denial of the existence of God, as in the work of the sceptics, such as David Hume and the Utilitarians, such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill and particularly of Auguste Comte, the 19th. century French philosopher who tried to create a secular religion, the object of which is the worship, reverence and love of humanity. This was called Positive Religion and its aim was to divert people away from purely selfish concerns and towards the love and care of all men and women. Martineau believed that God was the cause and source of all creation and absolute moral standards, and to replace God was to abandon all spiritual and moral aspirations in favour of a wishy-washy, go-as-you please intent to be nice to other people. By ignoring rigorous moral obligations and imperatives, people were lowering their defences against evil.
Martineau claimed that our knowledge of God was intuitive not rational; we know God exists, instinctively. The intellectualism, therefore, of David Hume, Bentham, Mill and Comte which claimed to prove by logic that it was impossible to say whether or not God existed or created the universe (as it is impossible to prove a necessary link between cause and effect) is a denial of this human intuition and, therefore, a symptom of the evil that pervades the world.
Now strangely enough, Andersen also says that intellectualism is an evil that is destroying humankind. In "The Snow Queen", one tiny fragment of the distorting mirror penetrates the eye and another the heart of Kay, the little boy who is the victim of the story. Kay who has always been a happy, loving, playful child, suddenly changes. All his feelings are frozen: he becomes cold, reserved and indifferent to his playmate Gerda. He becomes quite indifferent to the needs of other people. He regards beauty, warmth of feeling, games, enjoyment, art, music, stories as being totally pointless and a waste of time. He is cynical and suspicious of everyone's motives, believing only the worst of everyone. He spends his time solving mathematical problems and when he is kidnapped by the Snow Queen, we discover that she is obsessed with the geometric forms of snow-flakes and ice crystals. This is not intended, of course, as an attack upon mathematicians. Mathematics is used, here as an image of the intellect, as opposed to the feelings, to make several related points. As we become dominated by the needs of industry and technology, we increasingly lose touch with our feelings and instincts and machines become more important than the people who operate them. As we pursue materialism, fill our lives with the products of technology, become dependent upon them and live in artificial and ever more sophisticated environments, we forget that we also possess a spiritual nature, that we ignore at our peril. Rampant materialism inevitably leads to individualism, selfishness and greed, all evils, which in story after story, Hans Andersen condemns.
He has no doubt as to the anti-dote; it is love and a selfless commitment to a humane and lofty cause. Gerda, for instance, embarks upon a painful and dangerous quest to find and rescue Kay from the clutches of the Snow Queen. The people she thus encounters all display very unattractive characteristics. She receives hospitality from a lonely, old woman, who then deprives her of her freedom by enclosing her in a beautiful garden so that she may enjoy companionship for the rest of her life. Gerda eventually escapes and receives help from a Prince and Princess who are much too concerned with themselves to talk to her but to gain a reputation for generosity, they give her a muff and warm boots and send her onwards in their golden coach. Unfortunately, this attracts a gang of robbers who steal all she has and again Gerda loses her freedom, this time at the hands of a sadistic and vicious robber maiden who carries a long-bladed knife which she will use to kill her, she says, when the mood takes her. However, Gerda's courage, sweet nature and love for Kay impresses the robber and she is allowed to escape with a reindeer, although without her fine possessions.
Everyone, Gerda meets is utterly self-centered, including the few who show her any sympathy. No one respects her for herself; everyone takes advantage of her, to use her for their own purposes. Nature is also presented as being self absorbed. The flowers in the enchanted garden are all much too intent upon looking beautiful to be of any help to her; and the reindeer which shows her the way to the North Pole does so to escape from the Robber Maiden. Andersen seems to be saying that Nature is quite indifferent to humanity and has no part, good or evil to play, in human affairs. Self-survival is the principal aim of the whole of Natural creation, in this story, almost as if Andersen had somehow absorbed Darwin's evolutionary theories.
Gerda, barefoot and chilled to the bone, eventually finds her way across icefields and through blizzards to the Snow Queen's Palace, where she finds Kay, vainly trying to solve a geometric puzzle using irregularly shaped pieces of ice, so that he can escape. Gerda, weeping, holds him in her arms and kisses him, and her tears melt the splinter of ice in his heart and as he too begins to weep, the fragment of distorting glass is washed from his eye, and he again sees the world as it really is. He is saved from a barren and joyless existence by love, not by intellect, which would have condemned him for ever to a lonely and fruitless search for the meaning of life.
Martineau also uses instinct to underpin his rather more sophisticated defence against evil. Conscience, he believes, is not only our link with absolute goodness, but also our only means of combating human wickedness and we are aware of Conscience intuitively. It is there in all of us, an instinctive awareness of right and wrong, good and evil, a kind of receptor that is sensitive to influences from beyond itself, from a higher spiritual power, which he calls the Supreme Rectitude, or God. He claims this because Conscience may be ignored, but it cannot be switched off and when its advice is unheeded, we feel guilt and shame. Conscience is our counterpoise to self-interest, as it constantly reminds us of moral absolutes and obligations which take precedence over our mere selfish ends. Like Hans Andersen, he sees Nature engaged in a savage competition for survival, but human beings, having in them this awareness of the divine, are above this "dog eat dog" behaviour, and while they may be unable to control the great forces that create earthquakes and floods and great storms, they have the knowledge to control their own base natures and reach out in love and compassion to their fellows as equal and respected beings. Intuition gives us knowledge of God, awareness of Conscience and a desire to rise above the mere animal and attain the spiritual purity we are capable of. This, says, Martineau is the way to combat evil.
It would be wrong to suggest that Martineau and Andersen were prophets without honour as both were respected for their work; however, the import of their message was overlooked in their own day and neglected afterwards, because people thought Anderson made-up stories to entertain children and Martineau was trying to rationalise religious belief. Their warnings about growing influence of evil went unheeded. And the twentieth century suffered the consequences.
No-one deliberately set out to make the past hundred years the most evil in human history, it just happened. One age tends to produce its successor largely by accident, according to the random mix of ideas, and technologies that are somehow transmitted into the future where they are used to further the ambitions of the dominant personalities of the time. Thus the materialism, the unbridled intellectualism, the moral relativism and individualism of the 19th century produce the horrors of W.W.I, Naziism, W.W. 2, Stalinism, weapons of mass destruction, AIDS and pollution. The uncontrolled selfishness of one age creates major problems for the following.
It is more than likely that Hans Christian Andersen will continue to be thought of as a children's author and James Martineau to be ignored, but on this occasion of their bi-centenary, both deserved to be honoured for their insight into the springs of human wickedness and how it may be overcome.

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JAMES MARTINEAU OVERVIEW

James was the seventh son of a Norwich cloth manufacturer, Thomas Martineau (also a seventh son), James was born on 21st April 1805, and at an early age, like his older sister, Harriet, demonstrated his outstanding intellectual abilities. At first he trained and an engineer but recognising a vocation for the Ministry trained as a Unitarian Minister, and served in Bristol (briefly), Dublin and Liverpool before becoming at Manchester New College, at first Professor of Moral Philosophy and then Principal.
He produced an impressive array of scholarly works on social science, psychology, philosophy and religion, including "Endeavours after the Christian Life", "A Study of Spinoza", "Types of Ethical Theory", "A Study of Religion" "The Seat of Authority in Religion" written in his 80th year, and several Collections of Hymns.
He disliked the term "Unitarian" because he thought it too limiting, even exclusive, and preferred "Free Christian". He attempted to set up a "Free Christian Union" of churches which did not wish to be associated with any kind of Denomination, but this failed. However, he succeeded in broadening the outlook of 19th century Unitarianism, which being based on specific Biblical texts, had a narrow point of view. Within the Unitarian movement he was a controversial figure and many felt his reforming zeal to be divisive.
In 1828 he married Helen Higginson and they had two sons, (one died aged 10) and four daughters (one died in infancy). He remained a devoted family man throughout his long life. Helen died in 1877, aged 73, a year or so before their Golden Wedding. In his later years he bought a croft of a few acres near Aviemore and set himself to master the art of subsistence farming and self-sufficiency. Nearby, in the Rothiemurchus Forest, a monument erected by his friends and neighbours, testifies to the respect in which he was held by the local people.
His admirers, writing after his death, saw him as a man of genius, of great spirituality, gentleness, sincerity, optimism and friendliness. In pursuing his campaigns for religious freedom and tolerance he was courageous; and in his struggle against, superstition, hypocrisy and ignorance he was formidable, as a preacher, a debater and as a writer. All his life he was a controversialist, challenging traditional assumptions, prompting debate, demanding a response, and enlivening discussion, thus ensuring that the Unitarian and Free Christian movement was constantly in the public eye.
Our movement has moved on since Martineau's time, so much so that he would scarcely recognise it, but the values which sustained him, conscience, sincerity, truth and tolerance are still the basis of our existence and as long as this remains the case we shall have lived up to his example and kept faith with his great spirit.

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COLLECTING THOUGHTS

LOVE & LAW

By Rev. Colin Gibson

By John Robinson

Too young at the time to understand the significance of what World War 2 was all about, I was aware, however, that even a 4-year-old child of below average size could help in the war effort. As part of the 'Dig for Victory' initiative, 40% of farmland had to be cultivated to produce food. On the Northern Ireland farm where I was born, a high proportion of that 40% was devoted to the growing of potatoes. A 4-year-old boy, not yet of school age, was made to believe that being small and therefore close to the ground, had obvious attributes for potato gathering. My abiding memory of war-time potato gathering was hunger. In retrospect, it is obvious now that I couldn't eat enough early morning breakfast to keep me going in the fields for the 5 hours to mid-day dinner. By midmorning I was weak with hunger.
The farm was a couple of miles from Ballykinlar army camp, and like all farms in the area it was regularly used by the army as a practice ground. It was not unusual to find, amongst the heaps of spent bullets left after army shooting practice, live ammunition, yet I cannot recall any parental concern when it was found in my possession. In fact, more concern was expressed about the need to go out and collect, from the fields, the tin-foil-like strips dropped during German bombing missions. These were used to interfere, as I recall, with radar detection. The concern was that they might be eaten by animals and cause illness.
Moving on some 30 years to the summer of 1975, a working visit to the Polish Animal Nutrition and Physiology Institute near Warsaw left me in no doubt as to what World War 2 was all about. Two experiences in particular stand out.
The first was a visit to a Nazi concentration camp near Lublin in Eastern Poland. It was opened in 1941 and held 45,000 prisoners at a time. In all, over 500,000 people from 26 different countries passed through the camp. Of these more than 360,000 were gassed or shot and their bodies incinerated. Walking through the wooden huts filled with the shoes of the small children who went to the gas chambers was such a horrifying experience. To see with one's own eyes the gas chambers as they existed, where women and children thought they were being taken for a shower, to stand alongside all that remains of their bodies, a mound of human ash the size of this church, makes my childhood hunger oh so trivial. Some 30 years on from the war the sense of death was everywhere in that camp. Sightseers didn't speak, the birds didn't sing; the perimeter wire fence enclosed an eerie silence within which I was overwhelmed by sadness. It was sadness so intense it completely obliterated anger. Like all those who passed through the concentration camps I felt broken. Just as there must have seemed no way out for their lives there was no way out for my thoughts.
The same was true of my second experience, a visit to Palmiry cemetery about 15 miles from Warsaw. Here in an opening, deep in the forest, there is row after row of crosses, marking the graves of more than 1700 prominent Polish political leaders, scholars, writers, priests, doctors and lawyers; even Poland's 1932 Olympic Gold Medal winning athlete (Maciej Rataj). They were all marched into the heart of the forest and shot. The only sound that I was aware of there was the wind blowing through the trees - not a wind full of birds' cries, but yes a wind that brought tears to my eyes! A sad wind, a wind that seemed to be saying that it had witnessed such atrocities its sounds were forever programmed to portray disappointment and sadness at man's inhumanity to man.
With me on both of these visits was my Polish friend Jan Kowalczyk with whom I worked at the Polish Academy of Sciences. Having been shot in the leg by a German soldier, Jan, as a young boy, hid himself under leaves deep in the forest in the South of Poland in order to escape capture. There he stayed for 3 days and 3 nights until he deemed it was safe to come out. Despite his injury Jan went on to become a distinguished mountaineer and a personal climbing friend of Sir John Hunt, leader of the successful 1953 Everest Expedition. When viewed with this insight of what was happening to my contemporaries and their family members elsewhere in Europe during World War 2, my childhood pangs of hunger in the potato-gathering fields and my memories of what I thought were personal sacrifices, pale into insignificance.

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by Terence Skene

The BBC radio programme, The Moral Maze, in which several well known thinkers argue about the rights and wrongs of particular actions, demonstrates how difficult it is to achieve a fair, clear-cut answer to many moral problems.
The basis of morality is our awareness that our actions affect the lives of other people. From our earliest years we are taught to think before we act, so that we do not harm other people or damage their property or infringe their rights or do them an injustice. As we assess the results of our intended actions we quickly become aware of an internal battle between our own instinctive urges and feelings which we wish to indulge on the one hand, and our obligations towards other people, which we have been taught ought to take precedence in our decision-making, on the other. As we grow in moral stature we acquire a set of values which we try hard to live up to and so impose yet another set of curbs upon our behaviour and further complicate the process of decision-making. Finding a route through the moral maze has become even more confusing over the past fifty years or so because it is increasingly difficult to reach agreement about what our moral values are. The problem is made more complex by the fact that we are a multi-cultural society which includes many large minorities, each committed to its own closed, ethical system, described in ancient writings which have unique access to the mind and intentions of a Supreme Being, and which are frequently at odds with today's secular mind-set and, indeed, with each other
Those of us brought up in the traditional Christian faith are aware of the strengths and weaknesses of such a closed system. It is based on obedience to the word of God and as long as we obey the' Biblical scriptures, we should be free from all moral doubt and live a good life. It is a system that looks after us from cradle to grave, and beyond, and in addition, gives life purpose and meaning, as obedience to God is mankind's chief end. Such an absolute, universal system assumes that nothing ever changes, that what was true of a nomadic, desert tribe 3,000 years ago, is equally true today. However, human experience, knowledge, understanding, values, technology, aspirations and circumstances do change and moral~ systems must adapt to these changes if they are to be effective.
For instance, Biblical tradition asserts that women are genetically sinful (Eve disobeyed God), inferior to men and must be subject to and governed by men; slavery and capital punishment are accepted without question, while usury (charging interest on money borrowed) is strictly forbidden. Such views clash violently with our present day standpoint on these topics.
Closed systems are also likely to confuse ritualistic rules and religious taboos with morality. Some religions, for instance, prohibit the eating of pork, but there is nothing intrinsically immoral in doing so. We do not harm another person, if we eat a bacon sandwich! And the reason for the taboo is no doubt now lost in the mists of antiquity.
By means of confining people to very narrow limits', of action, Authority places restraints upon their freedom to fulfil and express themselves as human beings with 
one life and to experience that life to the full.
Traditional Christianity, for example, sets powerful taboos upon the sex act, permitting it only within marriage and for the sole purposes of procreation. Any other form of sexual indulgence, including homosexuality is declared to be sinful, that is, it is a flagrant breach of God's law. However, where the sex act is conducted with the free consent of both parties, it is not immoral in itself, as no one is being harmed by it. An act which may be condemned as sinful (a religious concept) therefore, may not be considered immoral, in modern terms. Personal freedom is valued very highly in our secular society and so a system of ethics which . restricts it without any clearly argued reason, except referral to a supernatural power or tradition or ritual, is likely to be rejected.
Any moral code depends upon the consent of the people who live by it. Once it appears to be out-of-date, irrelevant to current behaviour, and no longer enjoys the loyalty of the majority, it will lose its power to influence people who will then seek to replace it with something else. The moral system based on traditional Christianity has been undergoing this process for more than a century and we now find ourselves involved in trying to find a viable replacement. And so, it appears, we are wandering aimlessly in the moral maze searching for some vestige of moral truth. What is good and what is evil and who decides between the two?
Some pessimists claim we are lost in a relative wilderness, where the Truth is the same as whatever the individual believes. In other words, as there are no absolute standards any longer, it is up to each one of us to decide what is good and what is evil. Good and evil mean whatever anyone person wants them to mean at anyone time: "One man's meat is another man's poison". It is true that where consent rather than supernatural authority is the operating basis of an ethical system, there will be differences of opinion about what is right and wrong, but it need not degenerate into total licentiousness.
The vast majority of people accept the need for a set of universal values such as compassion, generosity, kindness, human rights, the right to life, honesty, justice, tolerance, personal freedom, etc. those indeed enshrined in the UN Charter on Human Rights, and are prepared to observe these in their day to day relationships with each other. These universal values, then, provide us with a structure which saves us from a complete moral free-for-all. From time to time circumstances will change and some of these values may have to be revised but as long as changes have the consent of the majority they will have the power to influence people's behaviour.
This means that there will never be a finalised code of morals, a list of 'Thou shalt nots....' Instead there will be an on-going debate about how to respond fairly to the ever-changing needs of a living and developing society. This is already happening, as we wrestle with major problems, such as euthanasia, genetic engineering, racial discrimination, religious strife, world poverty, pollution, global warming, a process which reveals many opposing views. Take for instance, the case of abortion. One view claims that to take the life of an unborn child at any stage of foetal development is clearly wrong; another says that the woman's freedom to choose is paramount. Both views wish to do what is right; neither is motivated by evil; but neither can have its own way without sacrificing the other. The debate about the a foetus may be considered to possess moral rights at conception, at 14 days, at birth continues and until medical science can finally find a solution that is acceptable to the majority, it will continue.
However, it is to be hoped that the extremists of both camps will accept that there is a genuine moral dilemma here, for which there is no easy solution at present, and have regard to Aristotle's principle of "the mean". Aristotle taught that evil was the result of excess, and virtue was the result of sensible moderation. A little wine is beneficial; too much wine leads to drunkenness, lack of control and possible harm. The same may be said of drug-taking, sex, politics or any other human activity.
Moderation in all things, including moral debate, leads to harmony and contentment.
The practice of Ethics, it must be agreed, outwith the closed, religious system, is not at all clear cut and exact. When people have a choice, they usually find it impossible to agree on every occasion on what is good and what is not. Ethics may become a matter of negotiation, of give and take, almost like politics, because there is no one single system that will satisfy all demands made upon it. However, systems based on humane and enlightened values and subject to revision and free debate are more likely to prove acceptable to the majority of people than one imposed upon them from above. The way through the moral maze may still be full of twists and turns and blind alleys, but at least we shall all have our fair say in deciding which direction we should be taking. 

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Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.
Charity suffereth long and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil, rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
Charity never faileth; but where there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face; now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known; And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

(St. Paul. In Corinthians Chapter 13.)

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