New Age One

Chapter One A PHOENIX RISES FROM THE ASHES

Chapter Two THE AGE OF POLITICAL INNOCENCE IS OVER

Chapter Three JESUS - FACT OR MYTH?

Chapter Four 'THE MONEYLESS SOCIETY'

Chapter Five 'A BETTER WAY OF LIFE'

Chapter Six THE EVOLUTION OF ETHICS - PERMISSIVENESS INTO PERFECTION

Chapter Seven 'SANCTITY OR QUALITY?'

Chapter EightWE LIVE IN A CHANGING WORLD

Chapter TenGETTING BACK TO BASICS

Chapter ElevenEVOLUTION NOT REVOLUTION

INTRODUCTION

This is a prophetic book which begins by taking the prophecy of Nostradamus, that the world will end in July 1999, seriously. It takes it for granted that there may never be a year 2001.

As it is quite likely that the end of the world will come in July 1999, our thoughts should focus on what we mean by the end of the world, because there are two ways of looking at it. The first, and most optimistic, is that the world of Mammon is coming to an end. This is the world which man has created for himself, the world of man's ambition, authority and avarice, a world controlled by money, by democratic government, by man-made laws, and by the 'principalities and powers'. The more pessimistic view is that the world of our planet, and the ecology on which our survival depends, is coming to an end.

We have reached a point in history where the world of Mammon, a world of flawed human nature, and the selfishness and false values that manifest themselves in the authority of government law and finance, has the power to destroy the ecology upon which life depends, by pollution, overpopulation, or by nuclear war. There may be no other way for us to preserve our ecology than to destroy the world of Mammon. Once the people of this world wake up to the gravity of their situation, and the likelihood that one of these two worlds will end in July 1999, I do not rate Mammon's chances of survival at all high. The destruction of the 'principalities and powers of this world' is a small price to pay for the survival of the human race.

We have recently seen the collapse of Socialism in Eastern Europe. It did not collapse because Marx's philosophy 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need' was flawed, but because that philosophy was forced upon people by politicians who had used Socialism to obtain power, and had used that power to acquire social status and material wealth for themselves. That should have taught us not to trust politicians, and to reflect upon whether the politicians of Western Europe have their future or ours in mind in the creation of a European mega-state. If their dream world is ever created, will it serve the interests of the people or those of their politicians? Is it not true that the law exists mainly for the benefit of lawyers and politics exists mainly for the benefit of politicians? Democracy is described as 'government of the people by the people for the people', but would we not understand it better by differentiating between the people who govern, and who so obviously benefit from the system, and the main body of people who, like ourselves, are governed and get so little from it? Finally, if we believe in self government, do we need to elect a government to make laws to tell us what to do? Should we not assume greater responsibility than we do for ordering our own lives?

The issues that these questions raise enable us to reflect more profoundly on the possible destruction of the world of Mammon, because they help us realise that our own spiritual renewal is essential before it can happen. The perfect human society is a world inhabited by perfect people, and we cannot expect other people to be perfect if we are not prepared to make some effort to perfect ourselves. If we want to break free from the authority of the law, we must earn our freedom by taking upon our own shoulders the responsibilities that selfish people delegate to their 'elected representatives'. When things go wrong, these people blame their 'elected representatives', but, as we have no right to expect our 'elected representatives' to be any less selfish than we ourselves are, we must learn that things go wrong because we have declined to take our share of the responsibility.

The book aims to show that the world of Mammon cannot be destroyed without a complete reversal of the way we look at most things. We have to see everything from the point of view of the responsible individual, and that is difficult for most of us because we are too irresponsible. Above all, we have to stop thinking about human rights and to start thinking about human responsibilities. We can only hope to achieve the freedom we seek if we are responsible individuals, standing on our own feet, unsupported by the crutches of Law and the Welfare State.

This change does not have to be revolutionary. The best approach is evolutionary, and we need concentrate on nothing but our own spiritual renewal, so that, when the opportunity comes, we will be fit to live in the free world of the New Age. While this evolution of human nature proceeds towards its fulfilment, the process of government, as we know it, must go on. This is because we have nowhere to live but in the old world of Mammon until we have constructed a new world to take its place. Our confidence in the competence of those in authority will diminish as our spiritual renewal progresses. Few will bother to vote at elections when all politicians are regarded as equally incompetent. Eventually our confidence in the law and politics will be so diminished that their authority will go by default, and the law will not be enforced.

Evolutionary though such a process is, its progress can be very rapid indeed, because the only obstacle is our reluctance to be spiritually renewed. We have only to recognise the enormous advantages of renewal to lose that reluctance. The process could be completed by July 1999 if it had sufficient public support now. Because there is already a need for the renewal process, it is likely to begin before July 1999, by which time its evolution could reach an irreversible position.

That is why I am reasonably satisfied that the prophecy that the World (of Mammon) will be coming to an end in July 1999 is true , and it is why this book is called 'New Age One'. If such an enormous change in man's social, economic and political outlook occurs near the turn of the century, our present calendar, based on what now seems to have been an inaccurate guess of when Christ was born, will be discontinued. Sufficiently important things will have happened to convince us that we are entering a New Age, and the most convenient day on which to mourn the passage of the old will be December 31st of A.D.2000. The next day will be 1st January New Age 1. This book tries to visualise what life will be like in the New Age.

The last occasion for resetting the clocks of time was the Birth of Christ, but the clocks were not reset immediately. Although Christianity spread rapidly in the first few centuries A.D., it was still a minority religion until the Emperor Constantine adopted it as the official religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th Century. Yet, not even he thought it necessary to alter the Roman calendar, and this raises doubts about whether Christians then still had the means of finding out in which year Christ was born. Several more centuries were to pass before a Christian calendar, which describes the year as Anno Domini, came into general use.

Historians had therefore to grope in the dark to discover in what year Christ was born. The suggestion that the Gospels may be based more on inspired myth than on historical fact is made later in this book. If this is true, A.D 1 would have to be the year in which the Myth was inspired and not the year in which Christ was born, and it is unlikely that such a date can now be identified. This is an added reason for adopting a New Age Calendar in the near future. It would show no disrespect for Christianity, if it enabled the entire Christian philosophy (but not the authority, ritual and dogma of the Church) to be absorbed into the philosophy of the New Age.

That, in its way, would be a case of history repeating itself. Christianity absorbed the entire philosophy of ancient Judaism (but not the authority, ritual and dogma of its ecclesiastical establishment) into its philosophy some 2000 years ago, and then went on to produce a new calendar. This year is recognised throughout the world as A.D.1994. Not many people know it as the year 5754/5, and those who do are Jews. When the time comes, New Age One will be recognised by everyone. It will not mark the advent of a new man of power and authority, but the beginning of an era in which the right of any man to exercise coercive authority over his fellow men will no longer be recognised.

The prophet recognises the history of civilisation as the story of man's progress towards the Wisdom of God. Significant progress has always been inspired rather than taught. Its fresh springs of Thought have been divinely inspired in our minds, and as we grow in wisdom our understanding of the Divine Nature grows. We come to recognise that all religion owes its origin to Divine Inspiration, and we begin to learn from faiths other than our own, so that we are able to expand our knowledge of the Source of that Inspiration.

We cannot escape the conclusion that, as our understanding of the Divine Nature grows, the traditional authority exercised by the ecclesiastical establishments of the different faiths is diminished, because the existence of One Undivided God requires the existence of one undivided faith. Neither can we escape the conclusion that when human authority exercised through the ecclesiastical establishments is diminished, human authority exercised through the political, legal and financial establishments is even more seriously diminished, and must finally reach the point where it ceases to exist, because people will no longer be willing to acknowledge it.

When the human race becomes wise enough to acknowledge Divine Authority only, the exercise of authority by a selfish ruling class, whether it be 'democratically elected' or not, will simply not be tolerated. As this has always been the substance of prophecy, prophets have always had to contend with the powerful vested interests of those in authority in religion, politics, law and finance. Only when the prophet is heard by the vast majority who are exploited by those in authority is he understood. Because the Common Man of today is more sophisticated than he has ever been before, the prophets of today are likely to find a willing audience ready to set in motion a spiritual revival which will carry us into the New Age of Absolute Freedom.

Ironically, this more profound understanding of the Divine Nature is the natural outcome of the dialectic between faith and atheism that has dominated the thinking of the 20th Century. Atheists have shown conclusively that there is no such thing as a 'material' God, that is to say someone who, like ourselves, can be measured and weighed. We have to think of Him as a formless Intelligence, which consciously, or unconsciously through the medium of instinct, influences the behaviour of all living things. If we accept that life proceeds only under His Influence, we can see why the ancients regarded Him as the Creator of all things.

We have to think of Him in these terms because we have not been able to locate this 'Intelligence'. We know from prophets and mystics, who have done their best with the language available to describe their spiritual experience, that It is there, and, if we have experienced It ourselves, we know beyond all possibility of doubt that It is there. We recognise that the ancients lacked our scientific knowledge, and we have to bear that in mind when we interpret their explanations in the light of our more sophisticated knowledge and experience. When we do that we discover that all spiritual experience is remarkably consistent.

The consistency of spiritual experience throughout the ages is the ultimate refutation of atheism. Believers still regard God as Infinite, and therefore impossible to define. If and when human wisdom matches His, definition may become possible, but human association with His Wisdom thoroughly discredits the coercive use of human authority. Atheism is foolish, partly because it denies the existence of what it cannot define, and partly because it has to uphold human authority, presuming that those who govern are wiser than those who are governed. That is the great lie which New Age Faith will expose.

This brings us to the struggle between God and Mammon. Mammon is more than just money. It describes the world of political, legal and financial authority. The profit motive, which lies behind so much of today's activity, is a Law of Mammon, and it is diametrically opposed to the Laws of God. We can say the same about a legal system that protects private property and the political system that created it. It is impossible to justify the present distribution of wealth. We should hold all things in common, share what we have with others, and expect them to share what they have with us, but we should turn voluntarily to this form of communism and not enforce it politically, because the Communist State has proved itself to be just another version of Mammon.

The true versions of Marxism and Christianity have never been tried because both systems have created vested interests of authority in the Party and the Priesthood, but these will not be tolerated in the New Age of Absolute Freedom.

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CHAPTER ONE

A PHOENIX RISES FROM THE ASHES

'God grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can, and

Wisdom to know the difference'

I hope to write a book that will change the world, and, with the Grace of God, I believe that I can do it. Nearly twenty years ago, I had a profound spiritual experience that changed my life. It was an experience of being alone with God, and it convinced me that a sound relationship can exist between God and man without the intervention of the priesthood. The reality of our relationship with God matters more than the ritual.

By building my philosophy on the foundation of this experience, I have come to realise how unimportant human authority is. Within the hierarchy of an authoritarian Church, man's presumption that, through the ritual of ordination or consecration, he automatically lives out the Will of God, is not justified by human experience. The Church has not always been right! We cannot act out the Will of God unless our minds have been reformed, or transformed into His Mind, and that transformation is entirely a matter of Grace. Our fallen human nature has to be transformed into Christ's Perfect Nature, and my experience has convinced me that, as this can happen as much to the laity as it happens to the priesthood, the spiritually transformed world of my vision of tomorrow will not need an authoritarian Church.

My vision is a vision of Freedom, and we cannot have that Absolute Freedom under the Law, because the Law is coercive, and we cannot be coerced into Freedom. Some deep theological study was necessary before I was able to grasp the full significance of the fact that Christianity is fundamentally the religion of Freedom, because it sees the Law as transcended by Grace. There is a Law of Judaism and a Law of Islam, and, unlike the laws of Britain, these are divinely inspired Laws, but there is no Christian Law. This is because Christianity provides us with the Profile of God Incarnate in Man, and it presents Him as the Example we must follow, and, by the Grace of God, become. When this process of spiritual transformation has been completed in all of us, the world is changed irrevocably into a State of Absolute Freedom.

My dedication to the cause of Freedom compels me to allow atheists to disregard the Will of God, the ecclesiastical establishment, and the system of Grace, because it would offend against their philosophy to do otherwise. If, in turn, they are as concerned about Freedom as I am, they must allow believers, and especially Christians like myself who regard the Law as transcended by Grace, to disregard the Will of Man, the political establishment and the laws it makes, because it would offend against their philosophy to do otherwise.

My career in the Civil Service convinced me of the ultimate absurdity, and indeed the selfishness, of this political establishment. Because its laws have become too complicated, it has generated a huge amount of unproductive bureaucratic work that has to be paid for, but it has created so many powerful vested interests in politics, the professions, the media, finance and bureaucracy, that it cannot easily be overthrown without the serious risk of anarchy. The aim of this book is to show that, by the Grace of God, it can be overthrown, and that an ultimate State of Absolute Freedom can be achieved through an evolutionary programme of spiritual renewal which is capable of avoiding anarchy. Nevertheless, the book has taken a long time to write, for reasons which I will now explain.

Disaster struck in the evening of February 10th 1993. For nearly twelve years, I had been working on a book which I had intended to call 'Happiness is Penniless'. The idea that I had a book to write had come to me even earlier, in the mid-1970's, when I was still working as a Tax Inspector. I had suffered from recurring bouts of depression for a couple of years, and while they had been controlled reasonably well by my Doctor who prescribed the appropriate drugs when I needed them, these drugs only seemed able to put me right for a year or so, and then the depression would recur.

This was not an ideal situation, because I feared that one day I would become dependent upon medication, and when symptoms of depression recurred late in 1974, I prayed and it was enormously effective. I still refer to it as my 'D.I.Y. Conversion', because this was a case of faith healing that happened without the medium of a faith healer. I prayed about my condition and felt certain that God responded. Mine was a desperate three point prayer - 'What is Truth? What is the purpose of life? and Is there a God?'. The response was immediate to the last question, because the reply registered somewhere in my mind, 'If there is, He is almighty'. This was not the simple response He gave to Moses, 'I AM', but the sort of response that left me with my free will, to believe or not to believe. What I was not allowed to do again was to treat the subject lightly.

What I was to learn was that if we take God seriously, our belief alters our attitude towards life. I could no longer face life as a convinced believer in quite the way that I had faced it as one who had been taught what to believe by the Church, but who had his doubts about the Church's teaching. Those doubts never wholly vanished in the way that my doubts about God's existence vanished when faith developed into certainty, certainty into loving, and loving into a sense of being with the Eternal Presence of God.

The immediate consequence was the healing of my depression, but it happened in a way that ensured that my faith could only grow, because I was quite convinced that any apostasy would result in the return of my depression. I had a remarkable sense of being outside of myself during this time of healing, of observing myself as God would observe me, as just another human being, no more important than anyone else. The human Ego is so close to our thoughts that it conceals the fact that other people exist who are all as important as we are, and we need to get out of ourselves and into God to cultivate that sense of humility which gives us a God's-eye view of the world we live in.

So I was able to see the human mind as naturally schizophrenic - open to influence both by the selfish Ego and by the Holy Spirit of God, and I was able to see my own depression as a disease of the selfish Ego. Two possible cures exist. One is to repair the Ego, and this is possibly what my Doctor had been trying to achieve. The other is to neutralise or rest the Ego and allow the Holy Spirit to take over the mind. This seemed to be what was now happening to me, and it was certainly more effective than the medical treatment.

Properly developed, this theme could be made the subject of a book, but I realised that the experience of being healed in this way was making me far more perceptive of the reality of what was going on around me. Whereas, in the depths of depression, I had found myself unable to concentrate on my work as a Tax Inspector, I now found myself getting rapidly to the substance of things, and able to do the rather intricate work of looking for evidence of tax evasion and avoidance rather quickly and rather well.

This meant that I was able to get through a day's work in less than a working day and give myself time to think about something other than the intricacies of the file in front of me. I was able to think about the effectiveness of the tax system itself, and to realise that it was far less efficient than it ought to be. Why was the law so complicated? Why did it permit so many legal loopholes? Why did legal procedures have to be so time consuming? Even more to the point, if the purpose of the Welfare State is to restore justice to the underprivileged, why did it not go about it in a simpler way? Would it not be better to change human nature than to subject flawed human nature to the judgment of laws which must be as flawed as the people who make and administer them? The idea that the Welfare State should be replaced by the Charity State was developing in my mind, and that seemed to provide better material for a book than a treatise on depression. This was all part of being certain of God's existence and reflecting upon the rational consequences.

The exact nature of what I was to write about was still unclear. I did produce the manuscript of a book I was to call 'Faith and Reason', but nothing came of it because of a bizarre event which happened to me at the end of September 1978. Because I was finding my work so easy, I went home from work in the evening, knowing that I was so completely on top of my work that there was nothing left for me to do the following day. So I took a day's leave, and decided it was time to have a chat with the Rector of Friern Barnet, whose Church I worshipped at in those days, about my profound spiritual experiences. He concluded that I needed psychiatric treatment and went to great trouble to get a N.H.S. psychiatrist to see me urgently. The psychiatrist turned out to be a lapsed Catholic, who took my explanation that I allowed the Holy Spirit to guide my behaviour as the evidence he needed that I was not in control of my mind, and needed psychiatric treatment.

The upshot was that I found myself detained in the psychiatric ward of Barnet General Hospital under the Mental Health Acts for an initial period of a month, and I was told that I was unlikely to work again. Yet, within a fortnight, I was being treated as an outpatient, and a month later, I went back to work and refused further treatment. There was no follow up. The experience taught me never to take professional competence for granted. The Rector's understanding of God was not what it should have been. Neither was the psychiatrist's understanding of the human mind, and particularly of its relationship with the Divine Mind .

The experience helped me realise that Taxation Law is based on as many false premises as psychiatry is. I could not justify the work I was being paid to do unless I could satisfy myself that Taxation Law was just, and I could see that it was not. In the same way, the psychiatrist could not justify treating the submission of my mind to the Holy Spirit as evidence of insanity without the profound knowledge of theology that he so clearly lacked, and the serious question arises from my experience of whether psychiatry ought to be a medical or a theological discipline, just as a serious question arises of whether the law, by its nature, is so unjust that it should be replaced by the Spirit.

For me, the problem of injustice in Taxation Law resolved itself in April 1980, because I was then due to retire from the service, and was able to devote my retirement to building up the ideas I had about the need for the Welfare State to be replaced by a Charity State and to write a book based on them.

These ideas took on a positive direction about a year into retirement, when I had a sudden inspiration. I was trying to put myself imaginatively into the shoes of a wealthy person who, relieved of the duty to contribute massive amounts in taxation (remember that when I was a Tax Inspector the top rate of tax exceeded 80%), found himself with a moral duty to contribute at least as much through charity. I could see that spending or hoarding the wealth would not give him a great deal of happiness, but, if he was wise enough to see it, generosity would. Then the inspiration came. If he was wise enough to see that, he would be wise enough to see the absurdity of the monetary system. Money is only a token of wealth. It is not wealth, and it is only valuable to the extent that we are prepared to accept that it is valuable. So why should this wise man work to earn money to give away, when he could do the same amount of work and charge nothing for it? He would be making as generous a contribution to society without being troubled by the handling of money, and that would give him even more time to spend on good works.

I knew at once the form my book would take. The Charity State of my vision now became the Moneyless Society. All the world's economic problems could be solved by getting rid of money, by writing off all debts, and by everyone in the world holding all wealth in common. Money, which, in the form of paper and plastic has no intrinsic value, would simply be written off as valueless.

I spent my time reflecting upon everything that happened to me or was reported in the news, and, if it had financial implications, I would work out in my own mind what would happen in a Moneyless Society. Each time I was able to satisfy myself that a Moneyless Society could handle the situation if only human nature could be changed. As it is an essential feature of Christian belief that human nature can be changed, I could see that the change that was needed could come about simply by a matter of spiritual renewal.

As I was writing the book, I was having to do a fair amount of serious reading. I had no experience as a writer, and, so far as I was aware nobody else had ever produced a book advocating a form of civilised society in which the use of money would be discontinued. After several years of writing and studying, I reached the conclusion that the Moneyless society would also have to be a State of Absolute Freedom. This was something I had picked up from Hegel's dialectic of history. The ultimate thesis to which there can be no antithesis, that is to say the perfect form of human society, is a State of Absolute Freedom, because, if it can be achieved, it cannot be improved upon.

There was a need for theological study as well, and for this I was able to use the facilities of the theological library at Sion College, but all this writing and studying required me to keep altering the manuscript. By February 1992 I realised that I needed a Word Processor, and, having made myself reasonably familiar with its workings, I began setting up 'Happiness is Penniless', which was the name I had given to my book, on a floppy disc. The book was nearly finished a year later, and it suddenly struck me that if anything happened to the disc I would lose all the work. I tried to make a copy of the disc, but made a serious mistake, because I managed to wipe the disc clean. That was the disaster. It seemed that 12 years' work was lost.

Then it occurred to me that it was perhaps a blessing in disguise. The title 'Happiness is Penniless' was one I had thought of when I first started to write about the Moneyless Society in 1981. My ideas had broadened since then, and new concepts were coming in which did not sit comfortably with the old. Although I had started feeding 'Happiness is Penniless' into my Word Processor in June 1992, I had had to interrupt the work in the autumn to look after my wife who had been taken ill with cancer. I had just resumed work in the January, and I was not finding it easy to fit in what I was now writing with what I had written some four months earlier. It made sense to make a new start. All the ideas were already in my mind and needed to be rearranged. The book needed a new title too. It would be called 'New Age One'

Then came an even more serious problem. Although my wife was operated on in December 1992, and made an excellent recovery, the cancer returned at the end of July, and, in October 1993 she died. The experience of nursing her through terminal illness, and the wonderful help we received from the North London Hospice, a charitably funded organisation, did much to consolidate the ideas behind this book, but it helps to explain why the book, begun in 1981, took so long to complete.

Some of my reading had introduced me to Nostradamus, and the interpretation of his prophecy which suggests that the end of the world will be in July 1999. As I reflected on the political events of recent years in Eastern Europe and the collapse of Socialism, I realised that the Social Democratic foundations of Western politics also look insecure in the light of my ideas. A general collapse of the 'principalities and powers of this world' by July 1999 is not the unlikely event that some might think, and, if it were to happen, the resultant social, economic, spiritual, and political changes would be as significant as those associated with the Incarnation itself. They would effectively transform our human nature into the Perfect Nature of Christ. Where the Incarnation gave us the Prototype of the Incarnate God, these changes could give us the mass-produced production model, and create Christ's Kingdom on earth by transforming human nature into Christ's Perfect Nature.

A great deal is already being said about the emerging New Age. Any age in which such profound changes occur would merit the title of a New Age. If, as seems likely, these changes occur about the end of the millennium, the year A.D.2001 is likely to be known as New Age One in recognition of all that has happened.

Renaming the book 'New Age One' has given me the opportunity to rewrite it completely in a new format which gives as much prominence to the other changes that must form part of the State of Absolute Freedom as it gives to the abolition of money and the consequences of that.

An incident of schooldays lends support to my prophetic views. My English teacher in Swansea Grammar School in 1936 was Dylan Thomas' father. The consensus of opinion among boys of the Lower Sixth was that Mr. Thomas was a gentleman, embarrassed by his son's outrageous behaviour. We never mentioned his name in class.

Dylan Thomas' work has never appealed to me, but I have read several biographies, and know that the 'Llareggub' of 'Under Milk Wood' is a code-word for 'Bugger All'. The popularity of this work tells us a lot about the faithless Art World of the 20th Century. A convinced atheist would answer, 'Bugger All' to each of the three questions that changed my life - 'Is there a God?', 'What is Truth?' and 'What is the purpose of life?', because our godless world has no future beyond this century.

The nihilism and atheism, which magnify the authority of man only to find that there is nothing there, will go, hand in hand, into the 'Bugger All' of damnation, where the present Age of Man will end. Only the Eternal God and His faithful have a future in tomorrow's New Age.

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CHAPTER TWO

THE AGE OF POLITICAL INNOCENCE IS OVER

The idea that tomorrow's world would be a moneyless society dominated my thoughts from 1981 onwards. For four years at least I remained puzzled by the problem of how we would make the transition from the politically dominated world of authority in which we live today to the moneyless society of tomorrow's world. The Thatcher government was in power in Britain, and because it was obviously not too well disposed towards the principles of the Welfare State, it was strongly opposed by the Liberal Establishment of the Church, which regarded state welfare as better than no welfare at all, but which had strayed so far from Christian principles that it had quite forgotten that charity must be better than state welfare.

Consequently, the Church failed to notice a significant feature of the Thatcher aim to 'roll back the frontiers of the State' which I, as a retired Tax Inspector, saw clearly enough. The Thatcher government made it possible for the wealthy to make massive contributions to charity both by extending the tax-related methods of giving, so that we have a pay-related method and a Gift Aid scheme as well as Deeds of Covenant, and by making these tax-related methods effective against higher rate taxes as well as against basic rate taxes.

When I retired in 1980, the top rate of tax was 80%, and the basic rate 30%. Anyone who paid tax at the top rate had to pay it whether he supported charities under Deeds of Covenant or not, and there were no facilities which he could use to make substantial 'one-off' payments to Charities effective even against his basic rate tax. So, his ability to contribute significantly to charity was hugely diminished by the requirement that he should pay this absurdly high amount of tax. Because I had worked for forty years in the Civil Service, I knew how inefficiently bureaucracy used the funds available to it through taxation to meet the needs of the disadvantaged, and I recognised at once the significance of this change in Government attitude. Had the Liberal Establishment of the Church recognised it too, it would have preached the Gospel of Charity instead of criticising the Government.

I recognised it partly because I understood the principles of taxation , but mainly because I was writing a book which advocated a Moneyless Society where State Welfare would be superseded by Charity, and this concentrated my mind on the advantages of Charity over high taxation. This brainchild of the Thatcher Government was moving Britain gradually along a path which, if followed to its conclusion, would not only diminish the authority of politicians and bureaucrats, but would also replace taxation by charity as the prime source of funds to meet the needs of the poor and disadvantaged. Thanks to this determination to 'roll back the frontiers of the State' I began to see how the Moneyless Society could be achieved. It would be a society in which there would be absolute freedom, and it would be achieved by a continuous process of 'rolling back the frontiers of the State'. If politicians fail in this enterprise, as they may well do, now that they have rid themselves of Lady Thatcher and are planning even greater control of the individual through the European Community, people will oppose them, as they have done in Eastern Europe, and their scheme to reinforce the political control of people will fail.

The age of political innocence is over. Despite political brainwashing by the Liberal Establishment, it cannot be long before people here in Britain see as clearly as I do that the political, legal and bureaucratic establishments exist for their own benefit, and not for the benefit of the people. Democracy may be described as 'government of the people by the people for the people', but the people who are governed 'democratically' are becoming wise enough to notice that there is a difference between them and the people who govern, and that the principal benefits of democracy go to the people who govern. This political sophistication is essentially the sophistication of St. Paul who made such an issue of the fact that the Law is transcended by the Spirit, or as we sometimes say, by Grace, and that this Grace comes to those who follow and become the Example of Christ. This spiritual transformation of ourselves as individuals into the Perfect Nature of Christ is how we make ourselves perfect, how, by our example. we can make 'the people' perfect, and how, when 'the people' are perfect, the perfect society, which is Christ's Kingdom on earth is created. It cannot be done politically. It has to be done by spiritual renewal. When that happens, politics and law will lose their significance, and those who have struggled so hard to use the political and legal establishment to gain social and economic advantages for themselves will find that those advantages have been eroded.

Fortunately there are few political innocents left these days. The Left has never provided the equality it promised because, as Orwell tells us, in the Socialist State, some are 'more equal' than others. Inequality will always be a feature of every politically organised community which does not begin by changing human nature. The Capitalist Right has never promised equality and its saving grace is that, unlike the Left which does promise equality, it cannot be accused of hypocrisy.

The flaw in Socialism does not lie in Karl Marx's principle 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need'. That principle remains good in the Moneyless Society of my vision. The flaw is not in the Marxist principle, but in the Marxist State. It lies deep in human nature itself, and there can be no political solution to the problems of society until we have tackled the fundamental flaw of selfishness that lies deep within ourselves, and which can only be corrected by Divine Grace.

When a government levies high taxes, as the British government did before 1982, to meet the cost of an expensive welfare system, a number of unexpected things happen. People avoid their taxes by using obscure legal loopholes, and, when they cannot find these loopholes, they evade their taxes illegally. At the other end of the scale there is enormous waste. People do not use their free education, health care and medicine as carefully as they would have done if it had not been free, and a great deal of government expenditure achieves nothing of any value. People claim benefits they are not entitled to. Protected from the need to behave responsibly by politicians who promise anything for votes, people lose their sense of responsibility to the community and degenerate into a loutish vandalising underclass, challenging authority to do something about the problems they cause, and secure in the knowledge that there is very little that democratic authority can do. For the authority of government in a democracy has to be sustained by the votes of all, including the underclass, and politicians are tempted to compromise their principles to earn votes.

The unsavoury and illegal behaviour of tax-dodgers, welfare scroungers and the assorted louts and vandals places an unbearable strain on those charged with the duty of preserving law and order. To create a Welfare State is itself a tricky operation. It brings new laws into existence, and new government departments to administer them. The last thing a government with welfare on its mind wants is an arrogant, unprincipled and selfish population of individuals, some determined to avoid paying their taxes, some determined to grab all they can, and some determined to test whether Authority is capable of handling riots, vandalism, terrorism, and other equally dangerous or absurd behaviour.

The situation is made no better by the attitude of those responsible for making the system work - the politicians, bureaucrats, academics, teachers, lawyers and other professional people, whose efforts create no actual wealth, but who have made themselves indispensable to the administration of this complex system. Like everybody else, their main concern is not so much what they can do to make things run smoothly, but how to preserve their privileged place in the pecking order. Then there is the problem of commercial interests, like contractors and drug manufacturers, who seize a golden opportunity to profit from an open-ended system of state welfare in which the normally stringent rules of the market economy have been suspended.

The people who create the wealth upon which the success of the system depends, people like farmers, miners, factory workers, builders, craftsmen, fishermen and so on, no longer get a fair share of the wealth they create, because so much is absorbed in the complexity of the system. The others who miss out are the unemployed, and to understand their problem, one has to appreciate that they contribute no less to the real wealth of the nation (when we distinguish between real wealth and the fictional wealth of paper money) than do the vast numbers of civil servants, financiers, lawyers and other professional people, managers, media people, academics, politicians involved in running too complicated a system, and one which grows more complicated as these people diligently set up and defend their little empires of job security. Fishermen, miners, nurses, engineers and factory workers may lose their jobs, but lawyers and bureaucrats may not.

So when unemployment is seen as a problem, it has to be recognised that the jobs of many of those who are still in full employment are expendable because their work is unproductive. Productivity would not be diminished by their redundancy, and if the administration of the State were simplified and fewer of them were needed, it would cost less to pay them Unemployment Benefit than it does to pay their salaries and fees. As individuals, they would be worse off, but the nation would be better off, and as the least valuable of them are often the most highly paid, putting matters right would conflict with important vested interests.

As this becomes clearer to the Common Man, he will expect major change because he will have lost his political innocence. Instead of waiting for politicians to change things for him, he will become the instrument of change. He will realise that he will be exploited as long as he accepts the authority of those who exploit him, and he will seek to undermine authority when it is not exercised as unselfishly and responsibly as he would have exercised it if he had been in authority. We must learn to control our selfish and irresponsible behaviour, because it will create anarchy rather than freedom in the State of Absolute Freedom towards which we are moving.

The only way for man as an individual to free himself from the authority of other men is to acquire a stronger sense of his responsibility to others. The enlightenment we seek when we have lost our political innocence is fundamentally Christian. It develops from an understanding of St. Paul's idea that the Rule of Law can be transcended by that State of Grace which exists when we, as individuals, respond freely and willingly to the Will of God. It is an idea whose origin goes back beyond the time of St. Paul. The prophet Jeremiah foresaw that the time would come when the Laws of God would be written in the hearts of men (Jeremiah 31 vv 31/4), that is to say that we then would obey God's Law naturally because it would be part of our reformed human nature to do so. St. Paul was so convinced of the value of this natural behaviour that he saw no virtue in struggling first to learn the Jewish Law, and then to obey it. Unless we had the Grace of God we could not obey God's Law, even if we knew it, but if we had the Grace of God, we would automatically obey His Law whether we knew it or not. When men and women are spiritually renewed they no longer needs the imperfect laws created by men, because the perfect Natural Law of God exists within them.

Christianity teaches that the entire Law is contained in the two Great Commandments of Love - that we should love God, and that we should love our neighbours as we love ourselves.

It then goes on to provide us with the Profile of God Incarnate in man. The Gospels describe with precision the nature of a man in whose heart and mind the Laws of God are written, that is to say, the Prototype of the Man whose existence Jeremiah prophesied. We can accept the validity of this Prototype even if we cannot accept it as the Profile of a Man who actually lived in history, because we regard Him as a mythical character about whom the first Christians were inspired by God to write. This point will be gone into more fully in the next chapter, but the point that concerns us now is that this Profile has been provided for us as an Example for us to follow and become. If, as Jeremiah prophesied, the Laws of God will one day be written in all of our hearts, that prophecy can best be fulfilled if we model ourselves on the Prototype described in the Christian Gospels.

This insight into the real purpose of Christianity is particularly important to us as we lose our political innocence. Throughout history, very few people have been wise enough to overrule man's naturally aggressive animal instinct to protect his territory. This selfish and aggressive human instinct does not sit comfortably with the unselfish humility of divine wisdom that inspires us always to move towards higher things. The pilgrimage of man has always been led by those able to control their lower animal instincts and it leads us unerringly towards a more sophisticated society where everyone is wiser, humbler, and more loving, a New Age of the Common Man where the majority will be as sophisticated as the minority that has always assumed a right to govern, a right which, in this reformed society, will be denied.

The Common Man will grow increasingly distrustful of politicians and professional people as he comes to recognise that they are no wiser than he is, a fact which will become increasingly apparent as he grows in spiritual stature and becomes less selfish, and therefore wiser than those who assume from their qualifications or their social and economic status that they are better than he is. The idea of a New Age alternative to Liberal Democracy and the Rule of Law is likely to appeal to all who form part of the economically disadvantaged majority, even though it will require them to accept the entire Christian Faith and philosophy, if not the ritual, dogma and authority of the Church.

No one can reasonably say that he does not believe in God if his atheism has been correctly challenged on rational grounds. For whatever faith they practise, today's believers all regard God as Infinite, and the Infinite cannot be defined. Only a fool would deny the existence of something that he cannot define. As the God denied by atheists must be a finite god, it cannot be the Real God, and atheism cannot survive a profound and rational study of inter-faith theology. It can only deny the existence of certain aspects of belief which the Churches and the other world faiths are now beginning to reject. It is one thing to dispute the teaching of a particular Church or Faith and to prove it to be faulty, but quite another to proceed from there to an outright denial of the existence of God. Religious leaders, like atheists, are only human. They make mistakes, and they will go on making them.

When Christianity comes to terms with its own Essence, it will acknowledge that there is really no mystery at all, and no need to use ritual and dogma in an attempt to create one. All we need do is to recognise, through our understanding of the Gospels, the Profile of the Incarnate God, and then follow and become His Example. Then all the conflict with other religions will cease. The Essence of Christianity is the Essence of Freedom. The Profile of the Incarnate God is there, and it is left to us to decide whether or not to follow and become the Example that it offers. There is no coercion, although we may come to understand of our own volition that following and becoming His Example is the way to salvation, while other paths can only lead to damnation. We have to decide freely which path we follow, and even if we follow the path to damnation, there will always be a chance to change our minds provided that death does not catch up with us first. Whatever the Church may say, we do not have to be a good Catholic (or Protestant) in order to be a good Christian. We are free not to be a good Catholic (or Protestant), because we can still be a perfect Christian if we eventually follow and become the Example of Christ.

We can also become a perfect Christian without trying to obey the law, whether it be the man made law of the State, or what Jews and Muslims call the Law of God. The man made law of the State is imperfect anyway, and much of it can be violated without sinning (which is what Christ was crucified for. We do it too when we drive a car without wearing a seat belt). The opposite also is true. We can sin without breaking the law, as we do when we are proud, envious, adulterous, greedy, lazy or arrogant. As for the Laws of God ( the Jewish Torah and the Islamic Sharia), St. Paul has already explained that we cannot hope to obey them unless we have the Grace of God, and that, if we have the Grace of God, we will obey them automatically whether we know that they exist or not. The idea that the freedom of New Age Man should be restricted by law is therefore un-Christian, but to escape the slavery of the law, he must enter a State of Grace.

From this, we have to conclude that the perfect state of man is a State of Absolute Freedom, and that even the Common Man can achieve it by the Grace of God. The Age of political innocence is truly over. No smart politician will be able to convince New Age Man that his ideology and party manifesto will do anything to solve his problems. Ironically, as we shall see in the next chapter, it will be equally difficult for the ecclesiastical establishment to retain its authority. Indeed, we can blame the attempts of the ecclesiastical establishment to establish its own authority, when it should have been trying to establish the Kingdom of God on earth, for the growth of atheism, and the decline of the Church's authority in the present century.

Whatever our political view, we cannot escape the fact that Karl Marx's statement, 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need' is so consistent with the Christian Faith that it is prophetic of the kind of society towards which we are moving. Marx would have derived this idea from his religious faith as a young man. His later atheism distorted his vision, and made him believe that this idealism had to be achieved by political means, for it is contrary to atheist principles to believe that it can be achieved by Divine Grace. So Marx held that the old order had to be overturned by revolution. He did not think far enough ahead to recognise that after the revolution there would be a new set of political masters, and, as human nature had not been changed by Divine Grace, they would exploit their fellow men as ruthlessly as the old masters had done before them. We recognise it, because we have lived to see it.

We know that the perfect society will only be achieved when people are perfect, and that can only be when they have been spiritually reformed into the Perfect Image of God, or 'born again'. Then, unlike the leaders of a Marxist State, they will be willing to take no more out of society than they need, and willing to put as much into society as they are able to, not because they are coerced by the Law, but because they are following and becoming the Example of Christ, and entering that State of Grace, which transcends the Law, and which cannot tolerate coercion or human selfishness.

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CHAPTER 3 JESUS - FACT OR MYTH?

We saw in the last chapter that New Age Man will reject the authority of the State because his political maturity will enable him to see that the State is not a superhuman abstraction possessing superhuman intelligence, but a collection of people. These people are no wiser than he is, even though they have a sense of their own importance, and believe that they have a God-given right to tell him how he should behave. As this is not a belief that he can share with them, he will reject their authority, and, since they claim to be Liberals or Democrats rather than Fascists or Autocrats, they will discover that they have no answer to his rejection.

This raises the serious question of whether the people of Europe should go on financing their politicians' attempt to create a European Mega-State when it is unlikely that its authority will ever be recognised. The New Age may arrive before the Mega - State is ready, or the authority of the Mega - State may be so intolerable that its existence will hasten the evolution of the New Age. Another serious question is whether the people of Europe can reasonably be expected to go on accepting the authority of that other institution, the Roman Catholic Church, in the New Age.

The Church faces the task of renewing the world, or at least Europe and certainly Britain, spiritually before the New Age arrives. That may be why, in Britain, this decade has been designated the 'Decade of Evangelism', but as the Church's preaching so far has been noticeably ineffective, we have to ask whether the Church is preaching the right Gospel. As we saw in the last chapter, the True Gospel can be expressed so concisely that it needs no long sermon to explain it. The Christian life is simply a matter of recognising the Profile of the Incarnate God as an Example, and of following and becoming that Example. We do not have to do anything else, because that can be left to God. He will direct others to the Example we are providing, if it is good enough, so that they too follow and become that Example. That way, He will start the Movement which will lead to the establishment of His Kingdom on earth. All that we have to do is to obey Christ's Command to 'Follow Me' when we hear it.

This Movement will make the New Age possible, because the New Age is the Age in which man frees himself from the authority of the 'principalities and powers of this world'. This Age of Freedom is the Age of the Kingdom of Christ. If only this simple message of renewal could be preached with more conviction, the Decade of Evangelism would be a huge success.

Unfortunately, this simple message of renewal is not the Church's message. The Church does not say that Christ will come again in glory to live and reign for ever at the end of this Decade, if only we. as Christians, do what He asks of us and follow and become His Example. The trouble with the Church is that it takes its own authority, its ritual, the symbolism of its Sacraments and its dogma too seriously. The Church has let itself become an end in itself, and it lacks the prophetic vision which not only sees the True End as Christ's Kingdom on earth, but also sees that End as imminent. Bishops and Clergy who fail to recognise, follow and become the Example of Christ, when the laity do, become an obstacle to the laity's spiritual progress. The failure of the ecclesiastical establishment becomes only too apparent when we reflect upon the success of the Charismatic Movement which thrives at grass roots level without any support from the hierarchy.

Where a layman follows a spiritual path which leads him directly to Christ's Kingdom, he is likely to find himself at odds with his priest because the priest believes that the ritual of his ordination has put him in a privileged position with God. He assumes that the layman should follow him, and that he should not follow the layman. Such an assumption will not be tolerated in the New Age. It has its political parallel, because a politician's assumption of authority would also be rejected. In the New Age, reality will be respected more than ritual. The ritual of ordination will confer no more authority on a priest than the ritual of the ballot box will confer authority on a politician. The leaders in the New Age will be those who see most clearly and follow most nearly the Example of Christ. In a New Age of Freedom, their leadership will be given by example because there can be no coercion.

The Sacraments of the Church will lose their significance as the Reality of Christ manifests itself in the replacement of coercive authority by the Authority of His Example. Religion and politics will not be kept in separate compartments. Christians will learn from Islam that Faith and Life are inextricably woven together, and the divisiveness of politics will be removed from both the spiritual and the secular life as the spiritual and the secular merge with each other. The political nature of all the divisions that exist within Christianity, and between Christianity and other Faiths, will be recognised. They have all been caused by religious leaders using religion politically to further their own ends. New Age Man will be sophisticated enough to recognise the selfishness of those who seek to exercise authority by coercion. As he will only accept the Authority of Example, the Christian Profile of the Incarnate God will be more important to him than the authority, dogma and ritual of the Church. New Age Man will be impressed by ideas that unite mankind and dismissive of ideas that divide. There is only One God, and His Purpose is to unite, so how can New Age Man respect religious hierarchies which seek to divide and rule?

Today's Church is in a difficult situation. It has to come to terms simultaneously with the enormous task of spiritual renewal that the advent of the New Age demands, and with its own inevitable redundancy in the New Age. The temptation to delay the advent of the New Age is great, but if God has determined the timing of that advent already, He will proceed with or without the Church's cooperation. We can visualise the possibility of the Will of God being opposed by the Church.

The Church's only solution is to face up to the inevitability of this situation and to remain on God's side whatever the outcome may be. There is no point in trying to preserve its authority by placing emphasis on the importance of tradition, ritual, sacraments, preaching and dogma. The Cross stands before the Church, just as it stands before every individual Christian, as the Altar upon which the Ego has to be sacrificed, whether it be the individual Ego or the collective Ego of the Church, and the Empty Tomb beyond the Cross reveals itself as the Gateway to the Kingdom of Christ.

The lengthy argument over the ordination of women to the priesthood is an excellent example of the inability of the ecclesiastical establishment to perceive its own future. Much of the debate has proceeded rationally on feminist lines. Women have as much right to be priests as men have, and many of them would be better priests than some men are. As the quality of the priesthood is far from perfect, that part of the argument is sound.

However, the fundamental issue is not of gender, but of tradition. The male priesthood, as a tradition, goes back several thousand years to the Jewish roots of Christianity. As a tradition, it is more ancient and respected than the Christian order of Bishops, Priests and Deacons. The fundamental issue is whether such an ancient and respected tradition can be abandoned without prejudicing the authority that rests on it, but the matter has never been seriously argued on these lines.

Perhaps the time has come to abandon this tradition, but if it has, we have to consider whether the time is ripe for us to abandon the priestly tradition altogether. Why should those in favour of innovation stop at priesting women, when they can go on to establish a priesthood of all believers? Will that not be essential in the coming New Age of Freedom? If we are getting rid of the authority of politicians, bureaucrats, financiers, lawyers, and other professions, surely we ought to get rid of the authority of the clergy as well! Ordaining women as priests has made it possible to challenge the validity of the Christian priesthood with some hope of success. Once it is accepted that the essence of Christianity lies in our recognising, following and becoming the Example of the Incarnate God, we may reasonably ask what useful purpose the priesthood will serve in the New Age.

Those of us who have reached a position of certainty about the existence of God, not through the Church's teaching, but through our own spiritual experience, find ourselves using the Church's teaching mainly to test the conclusions we have drawn from spiritual experience, while at the same time we use our experience to test the validity of the Church's teaching. The important point is that nobody reaches a position of certainty about God on the basis of the Church's teaching alone. There has to be an element of spiritual experience before that certainty comes. We all need to have our personal experience of God before we can be certain of His existence, and that raises a question of whether those outside the Church can be certain about God..

The Church's teaching tries too hard to make us loyal to the Church, which is not quite the same thing as being loyal to Christ. Christianity holds an almost unassailable position as the dominant world Faith because it offers the believer so much freedom, but this is not the message we get from the various Churches. They exercise a level of authority that the Incarnate God declines to exercise. All He asks of us is that we follow and become His Example, and He does not even try to compel us to respond to that request. He will accept our willing response later, after we have refused Him many a time. There is always the risk, when we refuse, that death may intervene to deprive us of another chance, and it is a risk we must take. That we may choose to follow Him, when we are no longer willing to take that risk, does not mean that He has coerced us. Whatever a Christian does, he does of his own free will, and the Church's reluctance to emphasise that is difficult to understand, because it is the most obvious reason why we should prefer Christianity to any other Faith.

The Church's failure to preach this kind of 'Freedom Theology' causes some people to practice a kind of 'extra-mural' Christianity, expressing faith in a Christ who dwells outside the Church. This answers the question of whether we can be certain of God's existence without help from the Church. Some 'extra-mural' Christians who are attracted to the New Age have found that answer, and we desperately need to start a dialogue with them.

It would certainly be better for us to believe in God than to go to Church if we found that we had to do one or the other, but could not do both. The Church has a mission to encourage everyone to believe in God, but it must not interpret that as a mission to encourage everyone to come to Church. There are obviously more ways of approaching God than there are formal religions if some of us are able to approach God without being associated with any formal religion at all.

So, if the world's religions were to stop conforming us to their authority, dogma and ritual, there would be a cross-fertilisation of religious thought, and a synthesis of belief leading the entire human race into the One True Faith. There would also be a synthesis between theism and atheism, for when an atheist is compelled to define the god whose existence he denies, his definition tends towards the authority, dogma and ritual that divide the Faiths from one another, and which no longer have a place in an Age of Reason. The god whose existence is denied by the atheist is therefore a false god. an idol of ritual, and when the atheist sees this he is half way to discovering the One True God.

Within the Christian Faith, the Virgin Birth and Resurrection have become prime targets for atheist criticism, a fact recognised by David Jenkins, the former Bishop of Durham, when he expressed his own doubts about the historical truth of these two events. Islam, which recognises Christ as a major prophet, teaches not only that He is not God, but also that He was not crucified, and there could obviously have been no Resurrection if there had been no Crucifixion. While Bishop Jenkins has only expressed his views recently, the Islamic view has been known for over a thousand years. As the world's two greatest Faiths say different things about the same event, a rational historian would expect to be able to prove which version is right. It therefore needs to be said that if historical evidence was available of the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection it would have been produced by now.

This explains Bishop Jenkins' doubts about the historical truth of the story of the Virgin Birth and Resurrection. Unfortunately, he has not made the point that the Christian religion is founded on a myth as clearly as he might have done. His comments caused an uproar because he seems to accept the rest of the Christian Gospel as historical fact, and by doing so he implies that the Virgin Birth and Resurrection are not as important to Christianity as the Church claims. Because the Bishop cannot be proved wrong, the best response must be that we do not know where the Gospels merge myth into fact, that we concede that an element of myth is there, but as myth is just another way of expressing theological Truth, we must be willing to accept that it is all myth.

There clearly is a substantial element of myth in the whole Bible. Yet the tendency of believers to regard the Bible as a history book is deeply ingrained. It has been possible to attach a historic date to most of the events it describes, and Archbishop Ussher, in the 17th Century, deduced that the six days of Creation occurred in B.C. 4004. As many Bibles were once printed with dates (including this one) in the rubric it is not surprising that the literal historic truth of the Bible was taken for granted by many scholars right up to the middle of the last century when Darwin's work proved that the world existed before B.C. 4004. At first, Darwin himself doubted the scientific evidence, and when he had to change his mind, the Church attacked him.

The Church had obviously been preaching a false doctrine, as it had done on previous occasions, but it had learned nothing from its error. It had attacked Copernicus and Galileo when their scientific discoveries conflicted with its teaching. If, as I believe, all human progress, such as scientific discovery, is inspired by God (since God is seen as the Source of all wisdom), then God must be on the side of Science, and a Church that cannot see that is bound to lose its credibility.

This has certainly happened in the recent past, but the anti-Church movement went too far when it called the existence of God into question, ignoring the fact that, as a divided Church cannot even produce a correct and consistent theology, the Church's view on other matters, such as moral philosophy, science, economics and politics is likely to be even more confused, some Churchmen getting it right, and some getting it wrong. The Church's theology could have been questioned without calling the existence of God into question

We have to turn to the Prophets, the men inspired by God, for a correct view on these matters, but the prophetic view has always been critical of those who seek to influence, dominate and exploit their fellow men, and prophets are seldom heeded by those who aspire to exercise some kind of coercive authority in the world of religion politics and money.

As recent history has been dominated by the confrontational politics of the power crazy, prophecy has rarely been heard. Prophecy is the still small voice that comes after the storm, the voice of conscience that urges us to draw back from the abyss of selfish confrontation, the Voice of God Which has opted to speak, not through the rich and powerful, but through the meek who are about to inherit the earth. It is a Voice Which has chosen to ignore the hierarchies of Church and State.

That is the fact which atheists have to come to terms with. When they chose God rather than the religious hierarchy as their target, they chose foolishly. They could have had God on their side, and they could have won the day. Now, with the collapse of atheist politics, it is their turn to suffer defeat. The religious hierarchy is still in the fray with a fighting chance. All it has to do is to reform itself by following and becoming the Example of Christ. Above all, it must be unselfish, recognising that when the Kingdom of God is established on earth there will be a priesthood of all believers and the days of Church authority will be over. Despite the fact that this will hasten its own redundancy, the Church must put its whole weight behind establishing God's Kingdom on earth

The Church must accept that its theology may be flawed. To discover that the Book of Genesis was founded more on myth than on fact was merely to see the tip of an iceberg. The point in the Bible where myth ends and history begins can no longer be discerned, and we have to navigate carefully in waters where there is ice, and not rush in headlong as the Titanic did. Because we can preserve the meaningful intent of the New Testament - that we should follow and become the Example of Christ - whether we regard Him as a figure of myth or of history, it is safer to do that than to argue stubbornly in defence of the historical Jesus, possibly to be proved wrong in the end.

The only information we have about Jesus is that found in the Christian tradition. The conflicting Islamic view could not have been derived from historic sources. It can only be an inspired interpretation of Christian sources. Some of the Christian tradition takes the form of legendary uncorroborated hearsay, like the legend that Jesus once came to Britain with Joseph of Aramathea who had business interests here. Some of the legends circulating when the Islamic Faith began may have been forgotten by now. The only important documentary evidence we still have of Jesus is the New Testament itself.

The New Testament takes a positive enough view of the Virgin Birth and Resurrection and leaves no room for doubt. Yet it is an odd feature of the Gospels that, apart from giving a brief account of Jesus discussing the profounder aspects of theology with the rabbis at the age of 12, and a more detailed account of his infancy and nativity, they give no information about him before he began his ministry at the approximate age of 30. As He emerges from obscurity at that age, it is a mystery how the story of his nativity and infancy and an isolated incident of adolescence got into the New Testament. So, while the Resurrection, which immediately follows Jesus' ministry, could be said to be well attested by the disciples who had attached themselves to him, doubts obviously attach to the stories of the Virgin Birth and the Nativity. These things happened long before the significance of Jesus was known. If they had a significance of their own, one would expect to find some mention of them in secular history.

It does seem strange that everyone, including atheists Muslims and Bishop Jenkins, is so willing to accept the historical Jesus when so many dispute the conclusions drawn about Him in the Christian tradition. Yet to regard the life of Jesus as essentially a myth would leave the Gospel Story intact, and not imply that one part is any more credible than another. It would do less damage to Christian belief than the selective doubts expressed by Bishop Jenkins, and we do, in fact, find substantial evidence to support this view in the first 17 verses of the New Testament.

It seems reasonable to suppose that this rarely quoted passage of scripture was given its prominent place at the beginning of the New Testament to alert us to its importance.

Matthew and Luke are the only Evangelists who provide information about Jesus before his ministry began. Only their Gospels tell the story of the Virgin Birth, and provide genealogies of Jesus. Both genealogies purport to show that Joseph, who was the Virgin Mary's husband, was a direct descendant of King David, who ruled the country some 1000 years earlier. This is a fantastic claim because Joseph is portrayed as a simple carpenter. It is as difficult to believe as any claim made today by a simple fellow that he is a direct descendant of William the Conqueror would be, but it is made even more incredible by the fact that the two Gospels trace different lines of descent from David. Both cannot be right, and the obvious conclusion is that neither is right.

We need to ask why these glaring inconsistencies were left in the New Testament. One possible answer is that the first Christians would not have had both Matthew's and Luke's Gospels, but they may have had one or the other, and not been aware of the inconsistencies. When the two Gospels were incorporated in the New Testament, the editors could have edited out the inconsistencies, but they chose not to. Moreover they gave pride of place in the edited version to Matthew's genealogy. This seems such an odd thing to do that it must have had a purpose. Was it known by these early Christians that there was a substantial element of myth in their story? Did they leave the two different genealogies in, and give pride of place to one of them, to warn us to read their work as Scripture rather than history? Was Christian Scripture made to begin with a passage that is demonstrably untrue, to compel the reader to ask why.

The Myth of the Incarnate God is directed at the world of today, as it has been directed at the faithful of all ages, to provide those who seek freedom from the 'principalities and powers of this world' with the Way to obtain it. If we can follow and become the Example of Christ, we can be free. We will find that we cannot follow this Way unless we have the help of Divine Grace, but that comes only when we have the will to follow the Way. This State of Grace is therefore the State of Absolute Freedom that we are seeking as the basis of life in the New Age.

It cannot be proved that the Jesus of the Gospels was a figure of mythology any more than it can be proved that He was a figure of history. The evidence needed for proof has been irretrievably lost, and it will always be possible for the faithful to take either view. If I choose to read the first 17 verses of the New Testament as a coded message, others are entitled to read them otherwise. The important thing is that it no longer matters whether Jesus is a figure of myth or history.

The Profile of God Incarnate in man will be of the utmost importance to everyone in the New Age, because it will provide the means of achieving freedom, not only from the political establishment and the Rule of Law, but also from the ecclesiastical establishment, because we should be able to follow and become the Example of Christ without priestly aid. As we shall see in the next chapter, it will also free us from the financial establishment. By following and becoming the Example of Christ, we will be able to live without money.

From our certainty that God exists, not necessarily through the ecclesiastical establishment, but as a Higher Mind, a superhuman Intelligence, a Source of wisdom, love, joy and peace to be tapped by the faithful, we can reflect upon the consequences of that Source being tapped by all men. Then God will be Incarnate, not only in the Man of the Myth, but also in the whole of humanity. Whether God Incarnate made His entrance into the world as Man or Myth, it was done so that He would eventually become Incarnate in the whole of humanity. This climax can only be brought about by our response to Christ's call to 'Follow Me'.

A little knowledge of French may help us now, because if we respond to Christ's call with 'Je suis' (I follow), the 'Je suis' eventually comes to mean 'I am'. The following is transformed into being as the great 'I' of the human Ego is diminished to become the small 'i' in 'Je suis', and finally vanishes altogether as 'Jesuis' becomes Jesus.

That, fundamentally, is what the New Age is all about - the achievement of Freedom. Freedom becomes anarchy when we do not accept the unselfish responsibility that goes with it, and we best do that by following the Example of the Incarnate God. So we have to interpret the Christian Gospels which tell us how to be 'born again'. The idea of being 'born again' is probably easier to come to terms with than the idea of the 'Son of God'. For how can God, Who is Pure Mind or Pure Spirit have a son? The answer has to be by dwelling in the mind of a man so that he thinks His Thoughts and does His Will. To do that is to be 'born again', because the essence of our being is then no longer the thoughts produced by the selfish Ego, but the Thoughts produced by the Holy Spirit of God dwelling within us. As our human nature is transformed into Christ's Perfect Nature, and we are 'born again', we too become Sons of God, and we all need to do that before we can live in a Moneyless society in a State of Absolute Freedom.

It is quite remarkable, when we stop to think about it, that only Christians believe that, roughly 2000 years ago, the Angel Gabriel announced to the Virgin Mary that she was pregnant with Jesus Christ the Son of God, although she had never had sexual intercourse, and that it is only recently, under the guidance of Bishop Jenkins, that a large number of Christians has ceased to accept that as a historical fact. Today, as we live in a multi-racial, multi-faith society, it would be unthinkable for a modern historian to include the 'historical' aspects of Christian belief, such as the Virgin Birth, Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension in a comprehensive account of world history. Yet it must be logical to assume that, if any of this were historically true, we would read about it in our history books as well as in our Bibles.

Yet no serious modern historian would dispute the fact that, by the year A.D.50, people were actually preaching their versions of the Christian Gospel. History accepts that Christianity began in the first half of the 1st Century, but it does not accept the historical accuracy of the Gospel story. This poses the question of why, if the sequence of events mentioned in the Gospels could have been testified, they were not testified to the satisfaction of all. When we reflect on the content of the Gospel Story, we recognise the Christian Message as one of peace and freedom. It offered the Jews freedom from Roman authority without the need to resort to violence, and it offered the Romans the prospect of peaceful co-existence with the Jews. Yet it was rejected by both Jews and Romans, and its rejection resulted in the disastrous Jewish revolt of A.D.66 and the destruction of the Jewish Temple. A logical explanation of its rejection would be the knowledge of many of the Jews and Romans, to whom it was preached in the locality in which the events were supposed to have happened, that the events spoken of were unlikely to have happened without their knowledge of them. The opportunity that Christianity presented to the Jews and Romans to resolve their differences peacefully was therefore lost because the Gospel Story was not credible as history. The doubts expressed by an Anglican Bishop well versed in theology make it obvious that even the theological evidence of the historical Jesus is inadequate to make the story historically credible in today's world.

We seem to have reached a point in the sophisticated development of man, where those, who take their religious belief seriously enough to seek a rational explanation of belief, are being inspired to recognise that, what may hitherto have been accepted as historical fact in all the world's ancient religions, is just as likely to be divinely inspired myth. This insight requires them to interpret the real meaning of the myth and to express it in modern language, and, when they do this, they discover that their interpretation of the historical elements of the myth helps them enormously to interpret the prophetic elements of the myth.

In the case of Christianity, the prophetic element has to do with the return of Christ in glory to live and reign for ever. The more fundamentalist and evangelical our idea of Christianity is, the more likely we are to be offended by suggestions that the Bible is neither literally nor historically true, and the more puzzled we are likely to be by our belief in Christ's return in glory. Our faith will be strong enough for us to believe that it will happen, but we will be unlikely to have formed any rational idea of how and when it will happen.

If, unlike the fundamentalists, we are able to interpret the Virgin Birth as the conception of God in the womb of the human mind, and to recognise that being a Son of God means thinking with the Mind of God; if we see the Cross as the Altar upon which to sacrifice the selfish Ego before the 'resurrection' takes place within us, as our imperfect human nature is transformed into the Perfect Nature of Christ as we are 'born again', we are learning to speak the modern Christian language. Then we can see the Christ of the Gospels as the Prototype of the Incarnate God and the men and women of tomorrow's world as the production models flowing in their millions from the production line of the enormous spiritual renewal which we recognise as imminent.

We are not impressed by the Gospels as a document of history, and we are not impressed by the literal explanation of Christ's coming we find in the Gospels and which seems to be preparing us for some sort of celestial fireworks display. We are much more receptive to the idea of human nature being progressively transformed into Christ's Perfect Nature by the process of spiritual renewal, and we expect the process to begin at once, if indeed it has not already begun! We may even be tempted to say 'Christ is come again in glory to live and reign for ever' rather than 'Christ will come again in glory to live and reign for ever', and we may believe that the Kingdom of God is almost here.

For we see this return of Christ in glory as the ultimate consequence of an imminent spiritual revival of the whole world in which all human nature will be transformed into Christ's Perfect Nature so that we can live in a State of Absolute Freedom, where all wealth is shared, where money is no longer used, and we are no longer motivated by the coercion of the law and the quest for profit. God's Two Commandments of Love not only comprehend all the Laws of God and the Prophets, but they also challenge and transcend the Laws of Man and the notion of Profit.

This transformation of human nature into the Perfect Nature of Christ is only part of the end story. The rest of the story has to do with the collapse of human authority which began with the progressive collapse of the authority of the ecclesiastical establishment. That led to the creation of a politically motivated Welfare State which had to be created as a replacement, and which took on a variety of forms ranging from Communism to Liberalism. The Communist version has already been exposed as something from which ordinary people gained very little benefit because, like the Church and the Monarchy it replaced, it existed mainly for the benefit of the ruling hierarchy. It cannot be long before the Liberal, Capitalist or Democratic version from which we suffer will be similarly exposed as existing mainly for the benefit of the hierarchy, because it provides lucrative but unproductive employment only for those whom it employs at everyone else's expense. The validity of democratic government, as we know it, is bound to be challenged sooner or later, as indeed must be the validity of all forms of government where some assume that they have the right to govern others.

True democracy means the participation of all in the process of government. Party politics is an abuse of the democratic principle. The ultimate challenge is of man's right to govern his fellow men in God's world, and the Perfect World is one in which the Will of God, exercised through the prophetically inspired, is able to overrule the Will of Man. Just as the right of the Church and the Crown to govern have been successfully challenged, so will the right to govern in the name of democracy be challenged, and so, in God's good time, will the right of Islamic fundamentalists to govern in the name of Islam be challenged. Then God's Kingdom will be established on earth.

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CHAPTER 4 'THE MONEYLESS SOCIETY'

We saw in Chapter 2 that no form of government known to mankind has ever succeeded in distributing wealth fairly. Even in Russia, after 70 years of Communism designed to create a fair distribution of wealth, the distribution of wealth is grossly unfair. True, the Russian currency is virtually worthless and it makes very little difference how many Roubles a Russian has, but some Russians have substantially more than others in foreign currency and goods, and we can assume that wealth held in that form is unlikely to have been earned honestly. Any laws which protect this unfair distribution of wealth have to be denounced as unjust. Justice in Russia would therefore demand yet another redistribution of wealth, but how can this be brought about?

The British Government today is more Capitalist than Socialist. Although it believes in private enterprise and the market economy, and does not see the redistribution of wealth as a necessary function of government, it was not always so. For forty years we endured wealth redistribution through high taxation accompanied by lax and ineffective enforcement. Legal loopholes were left open to allow tax to be avoided legally, and the system was too complicated for Revenue staff to control illegal evasion adequately. The inevitable consequence, after forty years, is that many of the wealthiest people in Britain owe their wealth to their ability to avoid or evade their taxes during those forty years. So arguably, the present distribution of wealth in Britain is unjust, and laws which protect private property and preserve this unjust distribution are unjust also.

The well rehearsed defence of private property by the political right falters when the attempts of the Welfare State to redistribute wealth more fairly have left us with a less justifiable distribution of wealth than we began with. Not even the right can justify the present distribution of wealth after forty years of unfair high taxation have completely distorted the basis of wealth distribution. So the Rule of Law which protects this wealth distribution, and which is now supported by politicians of all persuasions because it protects their interests too, is no longer defensible on ethical grounds.

So what are we to do about it? Much as we know that something must be done, we hold back from doing it because we fear that a change may lead to anarchy. We fear more from the unfamiliarity of anarchy than we fear from the familiar Rule of Law, which, flawed though it may be, still succeeds in preserving some kind of order.

European civilisation has lived with this problem since the 'Enlightenment' over 200 years ago, when revolutionary political ideas gave rise to the French Revolution, which in turn produced the principles of the slogan 'Liberty, Fraternity and Equality'. As events were soon to prove, such high-minded principles are soon forgotten after they have been used to gain political power. To imprison, guillotine and appropriate the wealth of one's political opponents is to behave in contradiction of these principles.

The later Marxist administrations behaved in exactly the same way. They came to power on the strength of Marx's principle 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need'. This principle has been reversed in every Marxist society, where the leaders, instead of setting an example for the rest to follow, have taken more from the State than they have needed and have put in less than they have been able to. Is there any sound reason why a Communist Dictator should not live in a council house and go to work by 'bus?

So the European political debate has, for two centuries, been between the progressive Socialist ideology and the conservative Capitalist ideology, and, as we have seen, the Capitalists have ample grounds to criticise the Socialists, but they too are vulnerable to criticism.

This is because their ideology rests on the assumption that the unequal distribution of wealth in a Capitalist Society simply reflects the ability and the thrift of the wealthy. They deserve what they have, and therefore they have a right to do with it as they please. If only this were true!

Human nature being as it is, the unscrupulous, the devious, and the greedy will manipulate every form of human society - Socialist or Capitalist - if we let them do it. They have even manipulated the Christian Church for their own selfish ends. We need therefore to recognise that the principles of Christianity, which have been taken up by the Socialists, are excellent, and that they should be adopted by everyone provided that they are voluntarily adopted and not forced upon us by the coercive methods of either Church or State.

Christianity has shown its ability to survive without the exercise of papal or episcopal authority, and Socialism must demonstrate its ability to survive without political authority. The problem of our fallen human nature has to be tackled before we try to think up new political ideologies to solve our social and economic problems, because no political solution will ever work until human nature has been changed. Then we will all be able to live in a State of Absolute Freedom because the coercive authority of the law will be replaced by the Authority of Example, as the Example we follow reveals Itself as Christ, the Incarnate God.

That is the nature of our dilemma. The solution of our social and economic problems is so obvious to the wise, but it requires the destruction of our social system and the creation of something new. The New Age will turn the present age upside down, and somehow we have to find the means of doing it in an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary manner.

Much as we would like to remain within the safety of the system we know, we have to admit that there is no good reason why the economically disadvantaged, in Britain or elsewhere, should respect the Rule of Law, and, since British Law is often held out as the best example of what law should be, it follows that the Rule of Law cannot be expected to attract respect from the economically disadvantaged anywhere in the world. As the economically disadvantaged are in the majority, we cannot expect the Rule of Law to survive without drastic change.

Apart from being manifestly unjust, the Rule of Law no longer seems able to handle the problems of crime, fraud, vandalism, juvenile delinquency and terrorism adequately, and one reason must be that our awareness of its injustice reduces our respect for it. Another is that we live in a liberal society which, on the one hand, shrinks from being too harsh on the criminal, but fails, on the other hand, to bring about his spiritual transformation. While the Rule of Law can do little to prevent crime and terrorism, the spiritual renewal of proved or potential criminals can do much.

The Law must wait for the criminal or terrorist to strike before it can arrest, bring to trial and punish. Spiritual renewal, on the other hand, concerns itself only with reform. It does not punish, and everyone benefits from it. It can therefore be applied, with benefit, to the innocent as well as to the guilty. After all, according to Christian belief, we are all sinners in need of redemption. It can be applied to suspects as well as to proved criminals, and, if the suspects are innocent of the crime, they have nothing to complain of, because, as sinners, they still benefit from the redemption. The sad fact is that, as this change will create huge redundancies in the lucrative legal bureaucracy, it will be opposed by vested interests, even though it is in the public interest.

The Christian Faith has never advocated punishment. It advocates repentance, renewal and forgiveness. The Rule of Law, which seeks to punish criminals, is both unchristian in its unforgiving attitude and ineffective in the prevention of crime.

The replacement of the legal approach by a spiritual approach which concerns itself more with sin than with crime effectively answers the question of what should be done about a Rule of Law, which has become so unjust that it can no longer be defended on ethical grounds, but which we are afraid to abandon because of the risk of anarchy. If we take the liberal view that justice must respect the rights of the accused to its logical conclusion, further concessions made to the rights of the accused become further steps towards anarchy. If we disregard the rights of the accused and toughen the penalties, we avoid anarchy but make the law even less just. The only way to avoid both injustice and anarchy is to allow the Law to be transcended by the Spirit.

We have already seen that the Christian Faith provides the Profile of the Incarnate God as an Example we should follow and become. If we do this, we enter that State of Grace which is essential before we can obey the Laws of God. Unlike the laws of men, these are just laws, but our selfishness, or lack of Grace, prevents us from following them. We make laws of our own because we are reluctant to abandon our selfishness. By taking the Christian Faith seriously, we can be sufficiently cynical about the law and lawyers to suggest that the law exists only for the benefit of lawyers. We may know this already, but we put up with it because we are too selfish to want to live in the New Age of true liberty fraternity and equality.

So, if we are searching for the path to social and economic progress, we see that our most recent ventures into a variety of legal and political solutions have led us into a cul-de-sac, and our first need is to retrace our steps away from politics and search for a spiritual solution. If political problems can be solved by getting rid of politicians, legal problems by getting rid of lawyers and spiritual problems by getting rid of clergy, it should not surprise us that financial problems can be solved by getting rid of money.

Since I have been convinced of this for the past twelve years, I have mentioned the idea to others. Only too often their response is, 'What do you propose then - barter?', which goes to show the shallowness of their thoughts. Living in a Welfare State has destroyed the image of Charity in too many of our minds. Few seem able to understand that the perfect man is unselfish and charitable, because he loves God and loves his neighbour as he loves himself. He would not sell or barter anything if he could help it. He would give it away. People who cannot give fall short of that level of perfection. As an optimist, I believe that human nature will improve as we get wiser. The wise are unselfish, and, when we are all wise, selfishness will be regarded as folly. Selfish people, who are unable to change their nature without being helped, will be treated as if they are mentally ill.

This chapter and the next are not about how things are in A.D.1994. They are about how things will be in a New Age of Freedom when selfishness will be treated as mental illness. The selfish ambition which drives people to amass wealth or to become leaders of men will be treated and cured as other illnesses are. Nobody will accept leadership by legal or other forms of coercion any more. Neither will financial profit be regarded as an acceptable motive. Instead of working for our own financial gain, we will all work for the benefit of the community.

When we are sufficiently mature, both socially and spiritually, we will cease thinking about human rights and start thinking about human responsibilities. We will see that, if we are really determined to put the world right, we will have to put ourselves right first. Perfect people have to be formed before we can think about forming the perfect society. When we concentrate on our own deficiencies, we can begin the process of perfecting ourselves, and, if we carry the process far enough, we will form ourselves into the kind of example that others can follow. We can do more good by providing an example for others to follow that we can by making laws for them to obey. Our faith in God will convince us that, as we are conformed to His Holy Will, He will direct others to the example we are setting, and they will be as diligent in reforming themselves as we were.

The Authority of Example will replace the authority of the law. The New Age pattern of life will begin. Ultimately, our world will be one where laws are neither made nor enforced. We will be living in a State of Absolute Freedom where everyone who is not still being treated for selfishness will be unselfish. Because everyone will be willing to share what he has with everyone else, the idea of exchanging things will not occur to anyone. There will be no need for money, and no need for barter either. As money has already evolved from being something with an intrinsic value in the precious metal from which coins were made, into pieces of paper or plastic which have no intrinsic value at all, it will not be possible to exchange this money for anything, and as money becomes worthless, it will be discarded as a child discards his unwanted toys.

Any 'balance' we then have in a Bank, any stocks or bonds, any financial rights, any debts owing to us, will have to be abandoned, while any debts we owe, any mortgage, any financial commitment, any taxes will simply be written off. We will not be paid wages, salaries or fees any more, and all work will be done voluntarily. The general appearance of our supermarkets will change in only one respect. There will be no check out points. We will walk out with the goods we need without having to pay for them.

Whatever we need we will take without payment, with one important proviso. It will never be ours. Whether it remains in the shop or is removed by us, it will remain community property. It did not belong to the shopkeeper when it was in the shop, and it will not belong to us when it is in our home. Even our home and car will be community property. Others will have as much right to use them as we have. Nothing will be locked. Anyone needing a room will be welcome to use our spare rooms. When we park the car, anyone will be able to drive it away, because it belongs to the community and not to us. Conversely, when we need a room or a car, we will take what is available.

Because money is no longer used, and because we live in a State of Absolute Freedom, none of the work activity associated with money, the law, and government will be carried on any more. There will be no Banks, Building Societies, Insurance offices, Government offices, or Accountants' and Solicitors' offices. This will allow us to make more economical use of our resources because, on the one hand, several million jobs will be made redundant, and the people who once did them will be free to work more advantageously for the community, while, on the other hand, the buildings they once occupied as offices will be available for use as private living accommodation. The housing problem, will be solved, and also the unemployment problem. A person's livelihood will no longer depend upon his having a job. The word 'unemployment' will drop out of regular use and the word 'leisure' will replace it.

One does not have to be an economics graduate to recognise that the wealth of a community is related to the natural resources available and the productivity of its members. The 'science' of Economics puts fundamental truths like this into the context of a monetary system which it takes for granted. In this chapter on the Moneyless Society, the monetary system is no longer taken for granted, because an economically sound society which has dispensed with it once and for all is visualised.. The views expressed here will undoubtedly come as a surprise to economists because they anticipate their redundancy. The 'science' of Economics will be fundamentally different in a Moneyless Society.

When, twelve years ago, I first began to write about the Moneyless Society, I surprised myself every time I tried to apply its principles to whatever economic problem I encountered, for all of these problems found a ready solution in the Moneyless Society - provided, of course that there had been a major spiritual revival and human nature had been changed. This chapter simply deals with the basic idea of a Moneyless Society, that is to say a modern society, which enjoys all the advantages of modern technology, and in which people are even more sophisticated than they are today, but which differs from our present society in that the legal and financial consequences of what we do are ignored completely. The profound assumption is made that the spiritual renewal of man will make us all unselfish, so that we will behave so responsibly and charitably towards one another that any kind of legal and financial restraint will be unnecessary

My original plan had been to write a book entitled 'Happiness is Penniless' which advocated the replacement of our present economic arrangements by a Moneyless Society. At the time, I could not see how we might make the transition from our present form of society to the Moneyless Society, but I could see that the Moneyless Society, once established, would be a perfectly practical economic arrangement. My thoughts then were that if I described my vision of the Moneyless Society in a book, enough people would be impressed by it to start the spiritual renewal which was necessary for its accomplishment.

After four years of writing and rewriting, I came to realise that the collapse of political authority and the end of the 'Rule of Law' was an inescapable feature of the Moneyless Society. There could only be a Moneyless Society in the context of a State of Absolute Freedom. The signs of weakness in the political system had not shown themselves at that time (1985), but I already knew that the political system had to collapse before my vision could be realised. When the collapse of the Socialist political system began a few years later, I began to see for the first time that the movement towards my vision of a Moneyless Society in a State of Absolute Freedom had begun, and that it can now be only a matter of a few years before our own political establishment, based on Capitalism, Liberalism, Democracy and Bureaucracy follows its Socialist counterpart on to the rubbish heap of history.

Then, I began to see that, as the authority of the Church had been abused by the ecclesiastical establishment in the past, and could be so abused again, ecclesiastical authority would be no less vulnerable than political authority to New Age Man's quest for freedom. The final stage of man's civilised and sophisticated development is one in which he comes to acknowledge that God is the Source of all his wisdom, and he succeeds in establishing a spiritual relationship with God which does not require the mediation of a priesthood. The previous chapter - 'Jesus - Fact or Myth'- reflects thoughts that are as essential to my vision of the New Age as are my thoughts about the Moneyless Society in a State of Absolute Freedom.

The movement towards this vision has begun in Britain with the determination of the New Age Movement to challenge all forms of human authority, and with the growing popular dissatisfaction with the Rule of Law and with politicians of all parties, none of whom are trusted any more. Indeed, every aspect of the 'Establishment' is viewed with distrust - the professions, and particularly the legal profession, the police, the bureaucracy, our financial institutions, and even the Church, and where the Church is concerned it is noticeable that all the growth occurs in charismatic movements at grass roots level where the influence of the ecclesiastical hierarchy is minimal. It seems that man's final steps towards achieving his freedom from human authority are being blessed by a God Who sees that these steps must inevitably lead to the establishment of His Kingdom on earth. That makes sense, because, in God's Kingdom, God's Authority will replace human authority.

All we need now is recognition by the New Age Movement of the deeply spiritual nature of its own roots, and an understanding of the true nature of the Christian Faith as a freedom-seeking faith which refuses to be hi-jacked by the ecclesiastical establishment for its own ends. Dialogue between Christians and the New Age has become imperative.

That we should hold all things in common in a Moneyless society in a State of Absolute Freedom is as much a Christian belief as it is a Marxist belief, but it is a belief distorted by the power politics of both Church and State. The importance of Christianity to the New Age Movement lies, not in the ritual, dogma and authority of the Church, but in the Profile of the Incarnate God, and His call to 'Follow Me', so that, in the coming New Age, we will all follow and become His Example, thus finding the only escape from the tyranny of the law which does not produce anarchy. As explained in the last chapter, it does not matter whether this Profile ever existed in history, which is what the Church teaches, or whether it was a Myth inspired by God in the minds of those who wrote and spread the Gospel of Christ. The Example holds good either way, and man's salvation comes from following it.

I am hazarding the guess that the Moneyless Society in a State of Absolute Freedom could be in place in New Age One (or as we still think of it today, in A.D. 2001). Whether my guess is right will depend on one thing only - our willingness as individuals to be spiritually transformed.

The fulfilment of my vision requires the whole world to become One Community, made up of people willing to work unselfishly together for the common good, instead of each of us working selfishly for his own material advantage, as we do today. We will have to overcome not only our individual selfishness, but also our collective selfishness, which manifests itself when we group together as Trades Unions, Political Parties and Pressure Groups, Professional Bodies and even Nations in order to protect a collective interest, and to enhance it at everyone else's expense.

To change the world in this way is too great a challenge for us to tackle immediately. We need to begin by forming ourselves into Communities of like-minded people, who are willing to follow and become the Example of Christ, and who are willing to abandon the use of money and the concept of private property within those Communities. They will hold all things in common, but their dedication to this way of sharing everything will be matched by their dedication to Freedom. The Communities will not have rules, and this will be possible because the Example of Christ will be recognisable in each Community as every member tries, with the Grace of God, to follow and become that Example.

These Communities will begin their existence within the framework of today's politically motivated society as an Example for those who remain outside the Communities to follow and become. Since they will be the Prototype of what must be the world's inevitable future, their growth could be very rapid indeed. It will be our own fault for holding back, if this Solution to the social, economic and political problems of humanity is not found by the end of this decade.

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CHAPTER 5 'A BETTER WAY OF LIFE'

In the previous chapter we saw the broad outlines of the Moneyless Society, and we saw that it has to be part of a State of Absolute Freedom. This means that the present system, which requires there to be some kind of ruling class - probably democratically elected, but not necessarily so - as well as coercive laws, must be abandoned before the Moneyless Society can begin. We also saw that the existing system of democratic government and coercive laws is degenerating and that it is probably in a state of terminal decline.

To be able to see this is encouraging, because it makes us conscious of the urgent need for the spiritual renewal of the nation to keep pace with the degeneration of political and legal authority. There still is time for the New Age to evolve peacefully, and, if we grasp the opportunity of spiritual renewal, we can avoid violent revolution.

The most likely form of evolutionary change will be through the creation of spiritually renewed Communities, each made up of like-minded people who are able to live together in a State of Absolute Freedom and Charity, holding all things in common. These Communities will have much in common with the traditional religious communities of the Church, but, being of modern origin, they may be closer to the Kibbutz system of modern Israel. They will encourage their members to be unselfish and charitably disposed towards one another, to work for the common good rather than for selfish gain, and to develop a mature sense of responsibility, not only for their own behaviour, but also for the welfare of the rest of the Community. As Community members should all be mature and responsible enough to enjoy their freedom, the Communities would not need the rules of poverty, chastity and obedience upon which most religious communities are founded. In any case, it would be wrong for Communities, which see themselves as the prototype of a State of Absolute Freedom, to have any Rules at all.

The underlying theology of these Communities would be that of St. Paul, who insists that we should not live under the 'slavery' of the law but in the freedom of the Spirit, that we should not be conformed to the pattern of this world, but transformed by the renewal of our minds (Romans 12 v 2), and who asks the most fundamental question of all in Colossians 2 v 20, 'Since you died with Christ to the basic principles of this world, why... do you submit to its rules?' True Christianity has to be seen both as a challenge, and as an alternative, to the coercive political and legal authority of man.

Despite the need for us to evolve into the perfect society of tomorrow's world and to avoid the upheaval of a revolution, we have to recognise that the change in our way of thinking has to be revolutionary. As individuals, we must submit ourselves to spiritual transformation, but the transformation of society will be a progressive process likely to take some years to complete. While it progresses, we, who have been transformed, will have to go on living in a world that has not been transformed. We must therefore go on submitting, with obvious reluctance, to the rules of this world, that is to say the laws made by politicians, and administered by judges, lawyers, bankers and bureaucrats, many of whom we know to be sadly lacking in spirituality and wisdom. To do otherwise before the spiritual renewal of our country has made substantial progress would lead to revolution and anarchy.

The Gospel we preach must be seen reluctantly to uphold the Rule of Law for the time being only, because it must denounce it in a prophetic proclamation of the imminence of the Kingdom of God in which we are freed from the 'slavery' of the Law. As this freedom will be achieved in the New Age, we can no longer compromise between Christianity and the world of human authority. The prophetic Gospel has always known that the world of human authority will ultimately collapse, but the time is now ripe to proclaim that collapse as imminent. In these circumstances, the preaching of spiritual renewal becomes a matter of extreme urgency, because, when we have such a clear vision of the Kingdom of God, we know that we are entering the transitional period during which we move from the Kingdom of Mammon to the Kingdom of God. As this will be a period of great uncertainty and unrest, it must be made as short as possible. People will find no tranquillity in this period until they have been spiritually transformed and see the Kingdom of God as the solution to the world's problems.

That is why the way forward has to be by way of forming Communities, so that, during this transitional period, those who believe in a spiritual solution can distance themselves from those who still believe in a political solution. Then practical examples can be created to show others the advantages of living responsibly and charitably in a State of Absolute Freedom. These Communities will anticipate the Moneyless Society in a State of Absolute Freedom by avoiding the legal and financial aspects of transactions made between members of the Communities. Community wealth will be held in common because Community members will transfer their wealth to the Community. Creating this Example of Christian living will be more important than preaching the Christian Gospel, for that is how the Gospels have portrayed Christ's method of teaching. He set himself up more as an Example than as a Preacher. His most important sermon was of two words, 'Follow Me'.

Geographical location can be important to the success of these Communities. Communities are more easily created on islands than in suburbs, a fact appreciated by the ancient Celtic Saints. Sark, in the Channel Islands, enjoys an advantage over other islands because of the freedom the inhabitants already enjoy as a result of its unique political situation. The island, with a population of about 500, is virtually self-governing, and what the islanders choose to do cannot be overruled by bureaucratic interference from the mainland. The revolutionary behavioural changes brought about by the spiritual renewal of the islanders could, in such an environment, proceed very rapidly to fulfilment because the vested interests of a political establishment are not threatened. In a short space of time, a spiritually renewed Sark could become a model of Christian living for the larger Channel Islands to copy, because these too are politically independent. As the Example repeats itself on an ever-increasing scale, an irreversible movement towards the Kingdom of God could be started.

Other islands, which do not enjoy the political freedom of the Channel Islands will quickly come to recognise that the process of spiritual renewal could gain them that freedom. Insular resentment of bureaucratic interference is notorious, and, as political and bureaucratic power is weakened in a general process of spiritual renewal everywhere, islanders, living in places like the Hebrides and the Isle of Wight, will discover how difficult it will be for mainland bureaucrats to interfere in their affairs after they have undergone a major process of spiritual renewal. Wherever the Communities begin on fertile ground, they will rapidly achieve a sense of freedom that they did not have before.

In mainland Britain, villages and small towns are likely to provide more fertile ground than cities. The development of communities in the larger cities and their suburbs, and especially in the more cosmopolitan cities of mixed faith, obviously presents more of a challenge, but it is often in these places that the greatest stress is experienced, and the greatest need exists for spiritual renewal.

It is impossible to define the shape these Communities will take before they are formed, especially in cities where people do not have the community spirit that islanders and villagers have. In my own North London suburb, for example, it seems more practical to think of people spread over a wide area having common ideas of spiritual renewal than it is to think of everyone living in the same road having them. An urban or suburban Community could begin as a liaison between a few of the people living in one road and a few of the people living in other roads, but, if a Community is able survive in such a difficult situation, it would become a shining light in the city or suburb, and finish up as one of the larger Communities.

A great irreversible spiritual revival can begin in this way, and gather momentum, the Communities providing the Christ-like Example for the rest of the world to follow. As the coercive legal and political will weakens, the Example will grow daily more inviting, so that a smooth transition may be made from the coercive authority of the law to the Freedom of Christ's Example, lived out in the Communities.

As this happens, opposition can be expected from the vested interests of authority, from politicians, professional people, the media, bureaucrats, academics and the financial world, objecting to the erosion of their authority and the loss of the social and economic advantages which they have secured for themselves at the expense of the Common Man. A more sophisticated Common Man will recognise these objections for what they are - fundamentally selfish - and not only ignore them, but go on to recognise that his own needs are more likely to be met by spiritual renewal than by political promises. Political authority will continue to be eroded.

The wise will quickly recognise that this is how it should be, and that, as the age of human authority is ending and the New Age of Freedom is beginning, life will be most comfortable for those who are prepared to swim with the new tide. Only the foolish will try to preserve their status and authority, and their selfishness will be recognised as folly. Gradually a new attitude towards selfishness will develop among the growing number of people made wiser by the process of spiritual renewal. The time will eventually come when people will not normally act selfishly, and selfish behaviour will come to be seen as abnormal behaviour, and as a symptom of mental abnormality which may, in a severe case, need psychiatric treatment. To become so unselfish that the majority will denounce selfishness, not merely as folly, but as a form of mental illness, will become a feature of the spiritually renewed communities of the New Age.

That is how I visualise the transition from today's society to the Moneyless Society of the New Age taking place. It can be done without violence, and it can be done quickly. It needs Communities to be established all over the country to provide the Example to follow, and it is important that the form of these Communities should be as open-ended as possible, and that the Holy Spirit's Guidance should be sought.

The Moneyless Society will eventually be created by the coalescence of the Communities. The Communities that begin in Britain are likely to be copied overseas long before they coalesce in Britain, so one cannot predict in what country that final coalescence will occur. If Britain is that fortunate country it may not remain long as the only country in which the Moneyless society exists as a reality. Obviously this is not the time to speculate about how long it will take before the whole of Britain becomes a Moneyless Society or how long it will be before the the whole world follows suit. The change will be gradual, and there will be a period of transition between the formation of the first Communities and the transformation of Britain into a Moneyless Society. There will then be another period of transition between the creation of the first Moneyless Nation and the final creation of a Moneyless World, which will be identifiable as God's Kingdom on earth.

During this period of transition, the Communities will have to preserve the moneyless principles of holding all things in common and avoiding legal and financial transactions within the Community, while having to conduct business outside the Community in conformity with traditional monetary and legal principles. The pattern for this way of life is already established in the practice of monasticism. When the Communities coalesce, and a whole Nation becomes a Moneyless Society, a similar pattern would apply to the business which that Nation does with the rest of the world until the whole world becomes a Moneyless Society. There is no point in elaborating on this, other than to say that the practices of monasticism would be broadly followed in the transactions between the Communities and the rest of the Nation, and later in the transactions between moneyless Nations and the rest of the world.

The countries most likely to go moneyless first are the countries of Eastern Europe, where the experiment of State Socialism has failed, leaving them in a state of economic turmoil which is unlikely to be remedied by changing to a Capitalist system when the Capitalist world itself is on the verge of collapse. These countries could be the first beneficiaries of the Moneyless system, because, properly administered, it can be a more efficient system than either State Socialism or Capitalism. This is because it limits the parasitic growth of those ruling and bureaucratic classes which make Communism and Capitalism, as well as our own hybrid system of a Liberal Establishment, so painfully inefficient. A problem with former Communist countries is that they are suffering from the determined efforts of the Communists to destroy religious faith, and this faith has to be recovered before the spiritual revival, leading to the Moneyless Society, can begin. On the other hand, the Communists have swept away the rituals, the questionable dogma, the even more questionable ecclesiastical authority and the superstition associated with pre-Revolutionary religion, so the religion emerging today is likely to be reformed and vibrant. Where violence has erupted after the collapse of Communism, this has to be blamed on the lack of popular spirituality. Only a religious revival, which puts God before the ecclesiastical establishments of the various faiths can bring this violence to an end.

A Moneyless Britain may, at first, form stronger links with a reformed Eastern Europe than it can with its closer Western European neighbours, especially if all the political manoeuvring over Maastricht comes to nothing, and the people of Britain reject the authority of their politicians, as the people of Eastern Europe have done, but before the other Western nations do. With links forged between Britain and Eastern Europe through the creation of Moneyless Societies, the other European nations could find themselves in a more critical economic situation than the former Communist nations are in today if they do not accept the spiritual transformation that leads to the creation of the Moneyless Society in a State of Absolute Freedom.

One of the great advantages of the moneyless system is that it recognises the importance of wealth, which is what we get in the way of goods and services, and distinguishes it from money, which is nothing more than a token of wealth, and which only has the value which we are prepared to give it. All the effort we put into the handling of money is unproductive in terms of wealth, as also is all the effort we put into the making and enforcement of the law. In a Moneyless Society people will no longer have to apply themselves to this wasted effort. They will be free to choose whether to do less work and to have more leisure and the same wealth, or to do the same amount of work and produce more in the way of goods and services. Goods produced in Moneyless Societies would be sold competitively to traditional societies which continue to use money, because the manufacture of goods in these traditional societies will be hampered by the demands made by their vast, but unproductive, political legal financial and bureaucratic institutions. Economic competition from Moneyless Societies will lead to a major economic slump in societies which decline to go moneyless. Because the Moneyless Society is likely to have this enormous economic advantage over traditional societies it is likely to be copied quickly on a world wide basis. Once a major trading nation becomes a Moneyless Society, the rapid collapse of the monetary system worldwide will be inevitable.

The Moneyless Society will need some kind of administrative network, the simpler the better, but it will not need management, People whose responsible behaviour has earned them their freedom are likely to object to the loss of that freedom when people try to 'manage' them. In a nation the size of Britain, where there are willing voluntary workers and work to be done, the availability of workers will always have to be matched to the need for them. By making maximum use of technology and by minimising wasted effort on unproductive work, it will be possible for everyone to have ample leisure - more than we have now - and still produce enough by way of goods and services to meet everybody's needs, provided that an efficient administrative network is there to match supply with demand. The attitude towards administration will be different in the egalitarian Moneyless Society because administrators will not have the special privileges they have today, and we would have a much simpler administration system, not made top-heavy by the demands of educated people that administrative jobs, offering both material reward and status, should be created for them.

Workers who can do the job should be willing to go where the work is. Finding somewhere to live in the new locality will not be a problem as anyone with spare rooms in his house will be expected to make them available to anyone who needs them - at no charge of course. The problem we have today, of property prices going up in an area where there is plenty of work, and going down elsewhere, would no longer exist. Anyone who lives in too large a house, and finds it a burden to be always accommodating strangers, would move to a smaller house more suited to his needs, and vacate the larger house when a smaller house is available. He would leave most of the furniture behind, because houses and furniture would be regarded as community property rather than private property. If the furniture he leaves behind is inappropriate to the needs of the family that moves in, or if the furniture he finds in the smaller house is inappropriate to his needs, the deficiencies would made good by a Community furniture store, which would stock both new and second hand furniture, and accept the old furniture that is being replaced. As everything will be free in the Moneyless Society, no charge will be made for furniture supplied, or for transport and storage.

Moving house would not be the problem it is today. Anyone with spare rooms would be expected to make them available to those who need them. Redundant office property would become available for housing. Because of this, there should be a place for everyone to live, but as all living accommodation would be regarded as community property, and not as the property of an individual, there would be no laws to protect individual property rights. Nobody with spare living accommodation could refuse it to anyone needing it.

Very large houses, too large for a family, would make useful homes for those who prefer to live as a community than as a family. They would be particularly useful for retired people whose family have left them, and who can vacate the family home, which would otherwise be too large for them, to spend their last days caring for one another and enjoying one another's company in rather more luxurious surroundings than they enjoyed when they worked. These 'self-care' communities for the elderly would become a feature of the Moneyless Society. With so much less work to be done, retirement from active work would come earlier than it does today. From the age of perhaps 55, people, considering themselves retired, would be likely to form communities of the elderly, where they would live the rest of their lives in the peaceful atmosphere of a large country house where there would be no masters and servants, because the younger and healthier would accept responsibility for the older and more infirm. When these die, they would be replaced by younger healthier people, so there would always be a reasonable age balance which would enable the elderly always to be self supporting.

Anyone who has enjoyed the companionship of unselfish elderly people knows well enough that, even in extreme old age and infirmity, their demands are relatively light. The burden placed on the younger and healthier members of these Retirement Communities would be light enough for them to work out service rotas that give them much more spare time than they enjoyed in their working lives. It is quite true that selfish elderly people are an unmitigated nuisance, but, in this chapter we are considering the post-revival world of a New Age of unselfish freedom. If any selfish elderly people remain in this post-revival world, their place will be in a psychiatric hospital.

The Welfare State, created immediately after the second World war, was an obvious movement towards the Moneyless Society in a State of Absolute Freedom, because it set out to give everyone economic freedom. It offered to provide money to those who had none and who lacked the opportunity or the ability to earn it, and it provided certain things like health care and education absolutely free.

Like many social schemes of its time it lacked vision. It grossly inflated the importance of the free health care and education it provided. It ignored the fact that, while people have lived reasonably well in the past with very little in the way of health care and education, and could go on doing so today, it is impossible for people to live at all without water, fuel, food, clothing and shelter. None of these things, which are immensely more important to us than health care and education, have ever been offered to us free. The cash benefits offered are no adequate substitute, because there can be no certainty that they are adequate or that they are being spent wisely, despite the fact that those receiving them have been compulsorily educated up to the age of 16, and should possess some wisdom.

The Moneyless Society would provide all of these things free, but the kind of health and education service it would offer would depend entirely upon the kind of service that unpaid voluntary workers might feel themselves called by their vocation to give. The question of whether the medical ethic should concern itself with the quality of human life, or with the supposed sanctity of human life is discussed in Chapter 7. In the Moneyless Society, where the Law has been transcended by the Spirit, the volunteer called to be in charge of the patient would let his own conscience, rather than some professionally determined ethic, guide his decision. Above all, he would not be worried, as so many doctors are today, about whether his career might be ruined by the way that the Courts interpret the more difficult decisions he has to make. For one thing, there would be no Courts. For another, he would not have a career, but a vocation. Socially and economically he would lose nothing if his decision resulted in his being advised to follow a different vocation.

It is therefore probable that, in the Moneyless Society, less time will be spent on health care. If medical practitioners are denied the opportunity to make money out of meeting the more selfish demands of their patients, they will be less likely to meet them, and more likely to concentrate on the basic aspects of health care, like good nursing.

Those who devised the Welfare State were quite unable to visualise a world in which human nature had been changed into the Perfect Nature of Christ. Their liberal philosophy was tainted with atheism, so they could not imagine a community in which all authority comes from God, and none comes from man. Yet, to imagine the State of Absolute Freedom is to imagine such a community. Inspired by the Wisdom of God, it does not have to submit to the authority of a ruling class. Our political experience, since the Welfare State was created, should have convinced us that every ruling class, whether it calls itself Capitalist, Communist, Socialist, Liberal or Democratic, will pursue its own self interest at our expense. If we believe in God we can trust Him, but we cannot trust those in authority over us unless they can show that they have been inspired by God to exercise their authority unselfishly. They can show that best by ruling by Example rather than by coercion.

Only the Wisdom that comes from God enables us to see this major flaw in a Welfare State that offers us free health care and education, but which does not offer us free water, food, fuel, or any of the things we need. We can only get these things free by submitting ourselves to the Wisdom of God, that is to say by living according to the Guidance of the Holy Spirit and not under the coercion of the law.

The Wisdom of God also enables us to see that an objectionable feature of higher education is that it creates a hierarchy of privilege for those who are fortunate enough to receive it. As the egalitarian Moneyless Society will, in the future, destroy that hierarchy of privilege, our thoughts about the Moneyless Society compel us to question the value of formal higher education in its present form.

Those of us who can read and who have average intelligence are quite capable of extending our field of knowledge infinitely without receiving higher education. The only advantage of formal higher education lies in its habit of testing us and of giving those who pass its tests some written acknowledgment of the fact that they have done so. Potential employers are inclined to look for this acknowledgement. Were it not for this strange habit of potential employers, it is questionable whether we would bother with formal higher education. It takes up a great deal of a young adult's time, and often causes him a great deal of stress. I did not bother with it myself, and managed in my Civil Service career to get myself promoted on merit into a grade normally reserved for University Graduates. Then, in retirement, I joined a good theological library, to teach myself theology and philosophy, and to avoid being indoctrinated by teachers.

In the Moneyless Society, there would be no need at all for formal higher education, and in a State of Absolute Freedom it would be quite impossible to make any form of education compulsory. Since all work would be done as a vocation rather than as a career, the strange habit of insisting upon qualifications whenever someone offers to do the job for nothing would obviously be dropped. The person who is able to teach himself must surely be at least as capable as the one who could not have learned if he had not been taught! Anyone willing and able to do the job would be allowed to do it. Far fewer teachers and academics will be needed in a society which sees their function as enabling people to learn. We employ far too many teachers and academics because we compel people to be taught.

Any move to make large numbers of teachers redundant in today's world would cause great concern, but redundancy ceases to be a problem in the Moneyless Society, where nobody is rewarded for the work he does, and his social and economic status is not affected by the vocation he follows.

There is an obvious flaw in our work ethic, and the fact that politicians have not spotted it does them no credit at all. Correcting this flaw is a matter of great urgency. Tradition has conditioned us to believe that we all have to work for a living, but our ingenuity, which conditions us to look for ways to avoid work, has produced a technology which does most of our work for us, and promises to do more. Not surprisingly, this has created a major unemployment problem, which our politicians have approached in the most unimaginative way. For them, creating jobs seems to be the only solution to the problem, but as it is impossible to create useful work which cannot be done just as well by the machine, the jobs they create are of no use whatever to the community. These jobs simply keep us busy doing avoidable work, so much of which has been created that wives now have to work as well as their husbands. No economic advantage is gained from all this work, because so little of it is productive of wealth, and most families live under stress because of it.

Now anyone who believes in the Wisdom of God and not in the wisdom of uninspired men will see at once that the politicians who have got us into this sorry state cannot have been inspired by God, although they have an inflated opinion of their own wisdom. It becomes immediately obvious that, if our civilisation is to survive, the political will must yield to the prophetic way.

Believers, whether they are Jewish or Christian gain encouragement from the words of the psalm, 'The Lord of Hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our refuge'. They were used by Jews before the dawn of Christianity to sustain them in their battles with the heathen, and they have been much abused by believers subsequently in their inter-faith struggles. As the God we worship is the God of all faiths, and it is His Will that all believers shall be One with Him, it should be apparent that all inter-faith struggles are led by men who have disobeyed His Will, and that the Lord of Hosts is not with them.

The words of the psalm are nevertheless profoundly rational, because this One True God is a Source of wisdom accessible only to those who believe in Him. It does not matter what faith they follow, provided that they believe in Him, trust Him, and are sufficiently humble to acknowledge that all of their wisdom comes from Him. He is 'with us' and 'our refuge' to the extent that we owe the wisdom of our strategy and our philosophy to Him, and none of this wisdom is accessible to the heathen, however much knowledge they may have acquired at University.

In any battle of wits, the faithful will always emerge as the final victors, even though the battle may take time and the faithful may have to make strategic withdrawals in order to trap the enemy more securely.

That explains my prophetic confidence that the Kingdom of God will come, and why I interpret the progressive collapse of political authority throughout the world as the evidence that it will come soon. It explains my decision in Chapter 3 to make a significant strategic withdrawal, and to concede that the Christ of the Gospels could be a figure of mythology rather than history. That decision was made in the absolute certainty that the Gospels portray the Nature of God Incarnate accurately. Whether He was a Living Example of God, or a Myth inspired by God to reveal His Nature to man, is not as important as the fact that He fulfils our need for God to reveal His Nature to us, and to speak through that Revelation the words, 'Follow Me'. Those are the Words, which in the beginning were God, and which became flesh and dwelt among us. They are the words that transcend the coercive authority of the Law, and give us in this New Age the Authority of an Example to follow and become. They are the words by which we achieve our freedom from the Rule of Law and the domination of a selfish ruling class. They are the true Christian Message, even though theological confusion has prevented the Church from proclaiming it in such glorious simplicity.

The pace of life will slacken enormously as the competitiveness and the confrontational attitudes engendered by the profit motive and the requirements of law and politics disappear. There will be no aggressive marketing, because when we have produced what we need, we will simply stop working. Advertising, as we know it, will no longer be needed, although the media may well be used to correct the false impressions that high powered advertising have created in our minds. We will be told not to waste, not to demand things we do not need, to make things that last rather than build obsolescence into them. The object of manufacture will not be to create jobs for the workers, but to produce the goods we need with the minimum of effort so that everyone gets as much leisure as possible in life. Such advertising as there is would seek to curtail rather than encourage the demand for goods.

The effect of this will be most noticeable on our roads. The need for business motoring will be severely curtailed, and nothing will be done to encourage private motoring, so much of which is done for 'pleasure'. Most people will find something more pleasant to do with their spare time than drive around in a car and we are likely to find that we have an enormous overcapacity of roads. We should reflect on that now, before more roads are built.

As often as not, we travel by car today instead of by public transport because it is cheaper for us to do so. That is something we will not consider in the Moneyless Society. If it is more convenient to use public transport, we will use it. The convenience of using one's own car disappears in a society in which all cars are regarded as owned by the community and not by the individual. When a car is parked, anyone will be allowed to take it, and the person who parked the car will take another car if he cannot find the one he left. So, if a substantial part of a long journey is better done by train, we will leave 'our' car at the station we depart from and take any car we can find at the station we arrive at. We will probably never see 'our' car again. One has only to look at the vast number of parked cars that block our streets to realise that there are enough cars for everyone, and that no-one is ever likely to have to look far for a car to take when he needs one.

This idea of taking a car to the station, leaving it there, doing the bulk of our journey by rail, and taking whatever car is available at our destination to complete our journey will surely be attractive. We cannot do it today because we regard cars as private rather than public property, but we often do go to the enormous expense of using Motorail facilities to transport a car a long distance by rail so that we can use it at the other end.

A feature of the Moneyless Society will be the responsible attitude of every individual. Absolute Freedom is not something we can enjoy unless we are absolutely responsible for our own behaviour and the welfare of the community. So, if excessive use of motor vehicles damages the environment, we will use them more responsibly. We will walk and cycle more, because we will have more time to do so. We may use the sea and rivers more for transport, and even reintroduce a more efficient form of large sailing ship, manned by volunteers for the fun of it, but nevertheless used to convey goods and working passengers.

Our question will no longer be, 'What is the Government (or a particular political party canvassing our votes) doing about the environment?' but 'What am I doing about it?'. As people who have been spiritually renewed, we will respond more and more unselfishly and responsibly to the need for our exemplary behaviour to replace our selfish urge to protest.

We will use our ingenuity to adapt technology to do our less pleasant and onerous tasks for us, but we will expect everyone to lend a hand in getting these jobs done where they cannot be done mechanically. It will be risky to tell someone to work in the sewers, because a new ethical code will require us not to ask others to do what we are not willing to do ourselves. Fools and managers will not be suffered gladly, but inventors will be popular.

Do people still need to be convinced that there will be no shortage of volunteers to do all the jobs that have to be done in the Moneyless Society? We have nearly 3 million people 'unemployed' today even though we are doing all we can to create jobs. That number would be vastly increased if we did all we could to destroy jobs, and that is what we will be doing in the Moneyless Society. Because technology does so much of our manual work for us, a very high proportion of the work we do today is bureaucratic, legal and financial. The Moneyless Society would make all the business done by the Civil Service, Local Government, Financial Institutions like Banking Insurance and the Stock Exchange, Legal Institutions, Advertisers and the like redundant. If sport, entertainment, the service industries, manufacture, wholesale and retail business, agriculture, mining, fishing and transport could be carried on without concern for the legal and financial consequences, the staff employed could be halved, because no time would have to be spent costing, paying bills and wages, collecting money, or understanding and obeying the rules made by bureaucrats. There will not be very much work to do in the Moneyless Society.

The work made redundant will be the most unattractive work. It commands high salaries and fees today because it is so hard and unattractive. Attractive work, creative work in the arts and sciences, religion, nursing, teaching, crafts, travel, sport and entertainment is so vocational in its nature that those doing it would go on doing it without payment, and those drawn from it by the higher fees and salaries offered by other careers would return to it. Instead of doing what we want to do as a hobby, we will be doing it for the benefit of the community. We will be happier doing this work than not doing it.

In the Moneyless Society, the wealth created by the workers, like the natural wealth, will be shared by all, without having the cream siphoned off by those who 'own' the capital, or have the most lucrative careers, but who have probably done the least to create the wealth they consume. Workers may think that they have a justifiable claim to take more out of the economy than anyone else, but we live in an age when technology makes a huge contribution to the creation of wealth, and as that technology gets older and patents run out, more and more of it becomes the inheritance of the Common Man, who can reasonably claim to 'inherit' a fair share of the wealth produced whether he works or not. The growth of technology goes on and, as it makes more and more workers redundant, the answer to the problem of 'unemployment' is not to create unnecessary and unproductive jobs in bureaucracy and management, but to call unemployment 'leisure' and to ensure that the unemployed all have enough to live on. That can best be done if we live in a community which holds all wealth in common, and in which all work is done, not for the benefit of the worker, but for the benefit of the community. As Karl Marx would have put it, 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need'. Marx was not to realise that when his philosophy had restored a reasonable balance between Labour and Capital, Labour's greed would match the greed of Capital. If we are to enjoy the fruits of Marx's philosophy, we have to get rid of both Marxism and Capitalism, and live in God's unselfish World rather than Mammon's.

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CHAPTER 6 THE EVOLUTION OF ETHICS - PERMISSIVENESS INTO PERFECTION

When the 'permissive society' began in the 1960's, my children were too young to be affected by the teenage mood, and I hoped it would all be over before they grew much older. It was not to be, and with hindsight I do not regret it, because I now see the permissive society as the beginning of a process of ethical evolution that will not end until the Moneyless Society in a State of Absolute Freedom has been established. Authority was under challenge, and not without good cause.

When I found time in retirement to familiarise myself with elementary philosophy, I saw at once the relevance of Hegel's dialectic of history. Permissiveness was the correct antithesis to the political seriousness of the time, because the real question we should have been addressing in the 1960's was not whether we needed a left wing or a right wing government, but whether we needed a government at all.

With hindsight, we can see that the 'pop world' held views which needed to be expressed, even though few took them seriously at the time because the 'pop world' seemed to exist only to entertain and to make money. As today's New Age Movement is not motivated by money, its continued attack on traditional authority deserves to be taken more seriously. The real evil is not to be found in any one political party, but in the party system itself, because it distorts the democratic principle and uses it to advance the interests of professional party politicians, the professions generally, and the bureaucracy at the expense of everyone else.

The challenge to tradition, and the support the young gave to it, was important, for all authority has to rest on tradition, and tradition cannot be challenged without calling into question the authority that rests upon it. Even when personal profit motivated the prophets of permissiveness, their challenge to authority was justified and its consequences still have to be faced.

The permissive society followed in the wake of an unprecedented mass of government legislation which was needed to establish the Welfare State, to abandon the British Empire, and to handle the mass immigration of the 1950's. Instead of allowing the British people to find their own solutions to the complex social and economic problems of the time, a reforming Government found it necessary to intervene and to make laws to regulate everything. A wiser Government would have realised that all Government intervention, whatever its intention. will ultimately be resented as a restriction of individual freedom. The 'permissive society' captured this mood of resentment

The Government could, in the late 1940's or early 1950's, have passed laws to prevent the large scale immigration of people of different race, colour, creed and ethnic backgrounds, but it did not. Instead, it found itself overwhelmed by events it had failed to control, because an insular people, like the British who had resisted invasion successfully for 900 years, would instinctively 'discriminate' against those it perceived as 'invaders'. People, who had never previously had to live with neighbours of a different race, colour and culture, felt acute disappointment with a Government, which they expected to protect them from the consequences of large scale immigration, and expressed their disappointment by discriminating against the immigrants. Because of this discrimination, we were subjected to hastily produced laws against discrimination, made by politicians overtaken by the consequences of their own folly.

These laws were supplemented by an enormous amount of propaganda against discrimination. Racial discrimination obviously has to be discouraged in a multi-racial society, but many British people continued to discriminate because they believed that our society had become multi-racial, not by design, but by political ineptitude. Discrimination therefore had to be vigorously attacked, and it became, for a time, the great evil in the evolution of ethics. Before 1950, few people in Britain would have seen anything wrong with discrimination. By 1990, discrimination had become the foundation stone of 'political correctness'.

Obviously only certain aspects of discrimination are bad. We have to discriminate between good and evil, so we cannot describe discrimination as evil. Many people today see 'political correctness' as a false ethic, based on a false assumption that all discrimination is evil. As it may be seen as a greater evil than discrimination, it illustrates how ethics evolve. Political ineptitude causes as many problems as public misdemeanour, but as politicians do not accept that, the more sophisticated public of the New Age will not accept the correctness of political authority.

A similar challenge to the authority of the Church of England priesthood is bound to follow the undignified debate within the Church about the priesting of women. The real issue has never been the obvious sexist one. It has been about whether the ancient tradition of a male priesthood ought to be abandoned because, if it is abandoned, the ultimate question of priestly authority, which rests on that tradition, will have to be faced. There will be a continuing need for Christianity in the New Age, and a need for some kind of unified and reformed Church, but the need for priestly authority in a State of Absolute Freedom, where the only Authority will be the Authority of Christ's Example, has to be thought through. If Christ, in the Glory of His Kingdom, becomes our Great High Priest, through Whom we can approach the Throne of Grace, will we need other priests?

Just as the permissive society's challenge to tradition will lead ultimately to the rejection of legal and political authority, so the rejection of the tradition of a male priesthood will lead ultimately to a rejection of priestly and episcopal authority. This situation has not arrived before time, because it is unlikely that man, in his increasingly urgent quest for his ultimate freedom, will tolerate the Church in the New Age unless it abandons priestly authority and preaches the true Christian Gospel of Freedom.

The permissive society challenged traditional attitudes towards sex and the institution of marriage. Any authority based on these traditional attitudes has been allowed to evaporate. Meanwhile, a great deal of misery has been caused by unwise experiments with alternative sex. It is time for us to learn from our mistakes, and to rediscover the satisfaction of mating for life. The permissive society has only taught us that the ceremony, which traditionally precedes this life long mating, is less important than the loving couples' attitude towards one another.

The advantages of life long mating make the perseverance needed to overcome the minor irritations of married life worth while, but these advantages do not justify the making of hard and fast rules. The example of a happy marriage is an example to be followed, if at all possible, but who can judge whether there are marital relationships which are better broken, and a fresh start made? Hard and fast rules will not be made in a State of Absolute Freedom, because when people decide, in the wisdom of complete unselfishness, that something is right, they will act accordingly without the need for further guidance.

When we look at marriage from this angle, the permissive society raises an important question. What is the point of formalising a sexual relationship and giving it a legal status? To survive and flourish, it needs more love and less law. It ought not to begin without love, and love alone should suffice, either to make the relationship a life long one, or to enable the partners to part amicably if that is what they both want. It is unthinkable, when people love each other, for one to ignore the profound feelings of the other. The concept of a State of Absolute Freedom rests on a belief that human nature can be changed so that we all love one another. Complete love for one's sexual partner can therefore be assumed when this State is achieved.

When sexual relationship is formalised, and the parties need to change the form, there are legal implications and legal fees to be paid. These can be avoided when the relationship is informal. We have to ask why all human relationships are not informal, and what is wrong with us if we cannot trust one another.

If we abandon the formality of marriage, we must consider abandoning the formality of baptism, the eucharist, and the funeral in our religious life. What matters on these occasions is not the formality but the reality of the relationship between the infant child and God, the reality of our own relationship with God, and of the deceased's relationship with God. Provided the cadaver is hygienically disposed of, little else seems to matter provided that the right relationship with God is always there on these occasions. We only have to resort to ritual if the reality of a an active and continuing relationship with God would otherwise be missing.

If we can abandon the ritual formulae of religious life, we must abandon them in our social, economic and political life. The formality of a legally binding agreement, of a financial transaction, and of the Ballot Box must be abandoned before we can enter the Moneyless Society in a State of Absolute Freedom. These formalities restrict our freedom far more than do the superficial formalities of the monarchy, and it is more urgent that we dispose of them than that we dispose of the monarchy.

There was a danger that the permissiveness of the 1960's would go too far and lead to anarchy. It did not, and this should assure us that dropping formalities will not lead to anarchy either. It is more likely to lead us directly into a State of Absolute Freedom, which, when we think about it, is the Perfect Society which Christians anticipate as Christ's Kingdom.

When we challenge political correctness, we challenge the exercise of political authority, but we challenge most earnestly the authority that most threatens our freedom. If the Church and the Monarchy would abandon their pretence of authority, they could make common cause with us in our assault on political correctness. The vision of Crown and Altar allying themselves to the people's pursuit of freedom, in a kind of Civil War of ideas in which the Parliamentarians are defeated is wonderful to contemplate.

We must challenge the principle of democratic government. If we see ourselves as a self-governing people, to whom freedom is important, it make little sense to jeopardise that freedom by voting for politicians whose function it is to legislate to curtail it. We have to be as wise as they are before we can challenge their authority in this way, but politicians, judges and bureaucrats do come in for severe criticism these days for their lack of wisdom and the ineptitude of their behaviour. Many of us are wise enough already to need more than good oratory and debating skills to inspire us with confidence. New Age Man will see through the form of words and recognise the lack of substance that lies behind them.

There has never been a time in history when the gap between the wisdom of the Common Man and the wisdom of his government has been as narrow as it is today. This gap will go on getting narrower until it vanishes altogether, and the Common Man will have the wisdom and integrity to run the country as well as the politicians do. Then government will become superfluous and nations will be left to run themselves with God controlling things through His inspiration of the faithful. Meanwhile, human society is better left ungoverned than governed incompetently. The perfect society can only be created if the incompetent can be prevented from assuming authority, and that can only happen when the people are wise and strong enough to oppose incompetent authority.

Competent authority is derived from wisdom, and this is not necessarily gained from academic study or training for a professional career. Wisdom flows from man's relationship with God. Professional and academic qualifications may be an indication of the knowledge we possess, but they say nothing about our wisdom, and they are no substitute for wisdom. While we should respect the wisdom of the wise, we should have only limited respect for the qualifications of the merely qualified. Qualifications only enhance technical skill. The technical ability of the merely qualified has to be respected, but not their philosophy of life and ethics. Prophetic vision is needed before we can understand the progress of ethical evolution from the permissiveness of the 1960's right through to the ultimate perfection that will be be found in the New Age State of Absolute Freedom. There will be no such thing as 'political correctness' then.

Prophetic vision is needed to recognise the foundation upon which the New Age must construct its ethic of Absolute Freedom. If anarchy is to be avoided, this ethic must be built on a foundation of unselfish responsibility. The individual must put the needs of the Community before his own, and his mind must be open to the Inspiration of God always. The Community he lives in must make no other demands of him, because, if it does, it will destroy the freedom he has earned through his unselfish responsibility and his devotion to God. The New Age ethic has therefore to be built on this foundation of faith, and on a modern interpretation of the Commandments of Freedom - that we should love God and our neighbour, because on these Commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets. That, and the need for us to live by following the Example of the Incarnate God is all that theology needs to say to us. By the Grace of God dwelling in him, New Age Man will be able to work out his own salvation from there.

The Roman Catholic Church's teaching on sexual morality, the vows of celibacy, the dogmatism, the condemnation of contraception and abortion have all to be seen in the light of the Freedom of Christ's Kingdom on earth, when the authority of the political and ecclesiastical hierarchies have to submit to the Ultimate Authority of the Incarnate God Himself. Regardless of what the Roman Catholic hierarchy teaches, it would seem that God intended us to discover contraception, so that we may keep the human population of the world in check, as we respond to our God-given natural instinct to enjoy sex. As has been the case on previous occasions, when the Roman Catholic hierarchy was wrong, this change in human attitudes is triggered by scientific discovery. Those who attribute scientific and ethical progress to Divine Inspiration are more inclined to identify God's Will with Science than with dogma peculiar to one of many branches of Christ's divided Church.

We must act responsibly in our sexual behaviour, and one of the most irresponsible forms of sexual behaviour in this already overpopulated world is to have too many children. If we can accept that the vision of a Moneyless Society in a State of Absolute Freedom is a vision of tomorrow's perfect world, then it follows that everything in the world has ultimately to be shared by everyone. We will all be equal. There will be no rich and poor in our own nation or community because we will hold all things in common and live in charity, but ultimately there will be no rich and poor nations. Before this can happen, the principal cause of poverty in a nation - the abuse of political authority, which often leads to conflict - must be eliminated, and every nation must be a nation of free people, responsible only to God. But these free people must be sophisticated enough to behave responsibly, and to recognise that the overpopulation of their area of the world is as much a cause of poverty as inept government. In a State of Absolute Freedom, they cannot be compelled to restrict their families, so they must have the wisdom to see that the quality of life in their community depends upon their unselfish acceptance of the fact that they must have smaller families..

We, in our more sophisticated society, have to take a less emotional and more practical view of Third World poverty. In the days of Empire, we were responsible for the welfare of many of these people, because we presumed to govern them. Because we no longer have that responsibility, we have lost the means of intervening successfully in their lives. Their own leaders, however incompetent they may be, have that responsibility, and, until there is an admission of incompetence and a submission to wiser leadership, there is not a lot we can do to alleviate the poverty which incompetent leadership has caused. If we feed the children, they will grow up and want more food, and, as parents, they will go on to have more children. So, if we are going to preserve the future quality of life in our own Community, by voluntarily restricting the size of our families, and by ridding ourselves of inept ecclesiastical and political leadership, we must expect Third World countries to do the same before we send them aid. It is surprising how a vision of what the world ought to be like concentrates the mind on the negative aspects of our paternal attitude towards underdeveloped countries which have rejected our authority, and which may also ignore our advice and our example.

Major changes in ethics are brought about by circumstances which challenge the prevailing ethic. We have seen that the ethic of 'political correctness' began with circumstances which led us to condemn discrimination on ethical grounds, although it had never been condemned before. Today's economic difficulties are likely to bring about a major change in ethics, because they focus attention on the exercise of human authority in political, fiscal and ecclesiastical matters.

In the past, most of the smaller homes in Britain were rented. As legislation to protect tenants from rent increases caused landlords to lose money, they sold to owner occupiers whenever possible. Instead of protecting tenants, the legislation, which was fundamentally unjust, forced home seekers to buy, because there was no longer an open market in houses to let. By 1988, the value of houses reached a peak figure, and few people could buy a house without taking out a mortgage of up to 90% of cost. The subsequent fall in house prices has left many people owing more than their possessions are worth. Their problems are aggravated by loss of work and lower wages, because wages are needed to reduce their debts.

The severe financial problems of these people, who have worked hard and lived prudently, focus attention on the unsatisfactory ethics of the entire social, economic and political system. Their problems would be solved by the creation of the Moneyless Society in a State of Absolute Freedom, and here we find the ultimate irony. This Moneyless Society has to be seen as an ethically superior society to our own. Yet it will be a society in which nobody will have any respect for the law, in which we will take what we need without paying for it, in which we will not pay our debts or our fares, and in which we will take any parked car we take a fancy to if we need it.

This ironic situation raises serious doubts about today's ethics. Today's ruling class is completely different from yesterday's. It is professional and academic rather than aristocratic, but it still expects us to live by a code of ethics which requires us to respect it and to grant it privileges. Human nature, being as it is, our professional and academic ruling class is as eager to put its own interest first as was the old aristocratic ruling class. It may enthuse even more about its own self interest because it does not know the tradition of 'noblesse oblige'.

From a purely ethical point of view, when the ruling class bends the system to serve its own ends, it is not easy to fault others who do the same. Bending a system, that is already so bent that it needs to be straightened out, has to be seen as an ethically neutral operation. The ethical question only arises for those who have been able to squeeze the bent system for their own profit. They cannot fairly claim to have earned that profit, whatever side of the law they happen to be on. Ethics require them to use it for the benefit of the Community and not selfishly for their own benefit. This important ethical point is illustrated by the legend of Robin Hood. Robin Hood was the outlaw, and the Sheriff of Nottingham the officer of the law. The legend proves that the outlaw's ethics were superior to those of the officer of the law. An even clearer example of this is found in the Christian account of the Crucifixion. This shows how man, loyal to his own law, crucified God because God refused to obey man's law.

The distribution of wealth and the exercise of authority in today's world cannot be ethically justified. It cannot even be justified within our own country, but we have to put up with it for the time being because some kind of order can still be maintained through it. It is of prime importance that we continue to live in an orderly society, but we cannot go on doing so in a society where the ethical foundation is demonstrably flawed.

The political experiments of this century have proved that the perfect society cannot be created simply by replacing the people in authority. If human nature remains unchanged, the replacements will also use their authority for selfish gain. We have to change human nature to the point where the leaders are able to recognise that they should only exercise authority through the example they provide. New Age Man will reach a level of sophistication at which he will no longer accept the authority of coercive laws, and example will become the only acceptable form of authority.

Until that perfect society is achieved, we should go on challenging the validity of political and legal authority, and pressing for the spiritual renewal of man, but, as we do so, we must be careful to temper our challenge with the meekness of our own spirituality. Otherwise, we run the risk of bringing the whole edifice of law and order tumbling down before we are spiritually prepared to live in a State of Absolute Freedom. This prophetic view of ethical perfection should encourage us not to expect any significant improvement from a change of Government and to work instead for the spiritual transformation of the Nation that will make the State of Absolute Freedom possible.

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CHAPTER 7 'SANCTITY OR QUALITY?'

In the last chapter we considered the evolution of ethics. Our concept of ethics is continually changing and evolving, and our hope is that it improves as it evolves and will ultimately become perfect. As nobody would be so rash as to suggest that today's concept of ethics is perfect, it follows that what is 'politically correct' today will be ethically flawed when compared with tomorrow's more perfect ethic.

In this chapter, we consider what has for some time been regarded as the ultimate moral principle - the sanctity of human life. The suggestion is made here that we should concern ourselves more with the quality of life. This ethical problem arises from the advances made by medical science in recent years. It is now possible to keep seriously ill patients, who are incapable of feeding themselves, alive for long periods by artificial means. This is valuable where there is reasonable hope of full recovery, but where there is not, the awkward question arises of whether the withdrawal of support amounts to murder, because it offends against the ethic of the sanctity of human life.

This question was recently put to the Courts for a ruling, and each Court ruled that there could be circumstances in which the quality of life mattered more than the sanctity of life, and the particular case before them came within those circumstances.. However, as the issue is so sensitive, the Courts felt that they could only rule on the individual merits of each case.

While cynics would argue that the Courts made this ruling in order to give the legal profession a further source of paid employment, the more serious thinker would ask why the legal profession has to arbitrate on what are strictly medical ethics. Legal training does not seem to equip the profession with the right judgment in these matters. Medical or theological training would be more valuable.

If we consider recent history, we find the liberally minded legal profession in two minds over the sanctity of human life. After the second world war it set up Courts to judge Nazi war criminals, many of whom it sentenced to death. When, a few years later, the death penalty was abolished, it seemed to approve the ethics of abolition without repenting of what must, by this new ethical principle, have been the sin of judicially 'murdering' senior German politicians, officials and members of the German armed forces.

It can be argued on strictly practical grounds that the human population of the world has reached a dangerously high level and that we should rethink the moral justification of the sanctity of human life. We should not go out of our way to prolong the lives of those for whom life no longer has any quality, because, if the world becomes overpopulated, the quality of life will be diminished for everyone. A new ethic, based on the quality of human life, would be more critical of a sentence of life imprisonment than it would be of the death sentence, because life imprisonment prolongs life lacking in quality for the prisoner, and wastes human resources in guarding him and keeping him prisoner. The classic example of the absurdity of life imprisonment is that of Rudolf Hess, imprisoned for life by those who set themselves up as judges of the Nazi leaders, because his offences were less serious than those of the leaders they sentenced to death. Yet, because of the judges' lack of wisdom, he suffered the most, being forced to take his own life after over forty years of solitary confinement.

In the recent case, where the Courts had to consider the ethics of discontinuing the life support of a patient for whom life no longer had any quality, that patient was using medical facilities, and denying their use to other patients who may have needed them. Problems of this nature will always arise when we accept the sanctity of human life as an inviolable ethic. Although we live in a Welfare State, the State's resources are finite, particularly in health care. The State cannot be expected to provide a cure for everything, and a major limiting factor is money. Until we have created a Moneyless Society, funds have to be found to finance the National Health Service even though treatment is free, and if those funds are spent, not only in keeping patients unnecessarily alive, but also in arguing the ethics before the Courts, fewer patients who need treatment will get it.

This sensitive ethical question could not arise in the Moneyless Society of the New Age, because the job of caring for people would be a voluntary one. Those doing it would do it on their own terms. They could not be threatened with dismissal because their livelihood would not depend upon their keeping the job. Ethical decisions would be made instantly by the man on the spot. If he thought fit to switch off the life support, he could only be prevented if someone who thought otherwise voluntarily took it upon himself to do the extra work of caring for the patient.

As the Moneyless Society would also be a State of Absolute Freedom, one of the things we now regard as vital to civilised society would be missing. That one thing would be human authority. Under Divine Judgment only, each individual would be his own judge of ethics.

The striking thing about such a New Age society will be its informality. There will be no formal education. While children will obviously be encouraged to accept a basic education up to the approximate age of 14, they will be free afterwards to decide whether, where, how and when to proceed with their higher education. There will be no formal qualifications and no formal employment. Anybody will be allowed to do any job provided that he is willing and able. Having a job will no longer be an advantage, and, while everyone will be guided by a sense of duty to the community, nobody will do anything which he regards as unnecessary or unethical. If work seems fun, it will be done, but if nobody wants to do it, it will not be done.

There will be no formal religion, no formal marriages, no formal legal agreements, and no compliance with financial requirements. So a young couple in love would be under no pressure to delay setting up home together until they have completed their higher education, obtained their qualifications for a career, or acquired enough money.

While this will go a long way towards solving the problems associated with sexual perversion, it is likely only to exacerbate the problem of overpopulation. When couples start living together at an early age, and are under no financial pressure to limit the size of their family, the size of families is likely to increase, but there are only two ways to prevent overpopulation. One is to avoid being born. The other is to shorten one's life.

In a State of Absolute Freedom, we have always to bear in mind that restraint must be imposed by the individual on himself. There will be no laws to restrains us, and everyone will have to to behave responsibly, and recognise the need, if not to abstain from sexual pleasure, at least to abstain from having too many children, or, at the other end of life, to abstain from having too much medical treatment.

The idea of abstaining from medical treatment conflicts with today's politically correct view that education and health care must be freely available to all, but the weakness of this politically correct view was exposed in Chapter 5, where it was shown that there are more important things in life than medicine and education.

It is impossible to achieve a balanced economy in a society in which some things are free and others are not. When formal educational qualifications are recognised in the world of careers, and higher education is free, we spend a disproportionate amount of our time being educated and acquiring those qualifications. The well paid job we get as a result then becomes a vested interest, and we do all we can to preserve the social, economic and political circumstances which provided the job, and which we hope will keep it secure.

In doing so, we conveniently overlook the fact that this well paid job was obtained at the expense of those who have no job at all in a world in which the work ethic requires everyone to work for a living. While they do not have enough to live on, we have more than we need. The only way to put that right is to guarantee a living to everyone, regardless of what he does to earn it, by creating an egalitarian society in which all work is done voluntarily. The Moneyless Society in a State of Absolute Freedom will achieve this.

The unfortunate consequence of having a free health service is that we pay more attention to the health of the poor than we pay to their food, clothing and shelter. Yet proper food clothing and shelter will do more for their health than medicine. A free health service creates powerful vested interests, and, to the extent that it prolongs life that nature unaided would curtail, it contributes significantly to the problem of overpopulation. If we can assume that the danger of overpopulation will soon be recognised, we have to ask whether medical procedures to promote fertility or to prolong life would continue if medicine became an unpaid vocation rather than a well paid career.

The ethical stand on the sanctity of human life seems to have been made because those who make it profit from it. By making it, they make jobs more secure in the professions they follow. The liberal professional establishment may pay lip service to free thinking, but it continues to influence and control our thoughts so that we continue to contribute to the salaries and fees of the liberally minded experts and media people who form public opinion. In the New Age, we will all be free thinkers who do not allow our opinions to be formed by others and who accept only the Divine influence on our minds.

In the absence of formal laws and formal ethics people have to respond instinctively to problems as they arise. They will not create laws which try to anticipate those problems. They will have learned from the law's failure to create a just society that the problems which the law tries to address often change their character before the law becomes effective, and that laws reflect yesterday's ethics in a world of evolving ethics. Man's progress accelerates this ethical evolution, and tomorrow's ethics will make today's laws obsolete

Up to now, the world's population has tended to divide itself into a working class and a ruling class, but recent technical developments have significantly reduced the need for a working class. The machine does what the worker once did, and the resultant unemployment forces the working class to merge with the educated class to form a classless society. Otherwise the working class would become an underclass whose existence would be an embarrassment in the New Age.

We can see the value of an educated class when we read that passage of the 38th Chapter of Ecclesiasticus which begins at the 24th verse, 'A scholar's wisdom comes of ample leisure. If a man is to be wise, he must be relieved of other tasks'. The passage goes on to explain how those caught up in the business of manual work cannot find time for profound reflection of the kind that leads to communion with God. The needs of the community require the work still to be done, but we see that every community needs its thinking class as well as its working class. Since the thinking class has the wisdom to guide the working class to work effectively, the thinking class becomes the ruling class.

As technical development begins to make the working class redundant, it causes unemployment, and large scale unemployment forces us to change our attitude towards work. We must recognise the word 'unemployment' as another word for leisure. Instead of thinking of the employed and the unemployed, we should begin to think of the 'unleisured' and 'leisured'. The 'leisured' then divide into two categories - those who use their leisure to think profoundly and those who do not. The thinkers can then think of themselves as part of the thinking (or ruling) class, while the non-thinkers ( who cannot any more think of themselves as workers) must think of themselves as the underclass.

As technology makes more and more workers redundant, the working class will grow smaller and the thinking class, and the underclass, will grow larger. Eventually our attitude towards class must change. The position of those who have traditionally seen themselves as the ruling class will be challenged by the vast intake of new thinkers to that class. The amount of work which the working class once did will go on diminishing as the size of the 'thinking class' reaches the point where there are so many thinkers, and so little thinking to be done, that the thinkers have time to do their own work. When that happens, the working class will vanish altogether.

We will still be left with the underclass, those who neither work nor think. We will be living in the 'end of the world' situation of the parable of the sheep and the goats. There will only be two types of human being - the wise and the foolish, and this will be a society in which fools will not be suffered gladly. In today's society, it is not politically correct to discriminate, so these fools are suffered gladly, but we will evolve out of that.

Then, we will distinguish between necessary work (work we have not been able to avoid by the application of technology), and unnecessary work (work - like legal and bureaucratic work - which was unnecessarily created in misguided attempts to solve the 'problem' of unemployment by creating jobs). Doing only necessary work, we will maintain today's level of wealth creation, expending only a fraction of the effort we spend today, and we will use our ingenuity to keep looking for technical solutions to the problem of necessary work, and especially to the problem of the work we find most onerous. If we cannot find technical solutions, we will expect the underclass to do this work, but we cannot expect those who are fools to remain fools all their lives. Having to do this work will concentrate their minds on finding technical ways of avoiding it. The ability to think like this will both qualify them for membership of the 'thinking class' and make the work they do redundant.

To the extent that the underclass becomes useless to society, it will have to be eliminated. Remembering that Hitler once used language like that about the Jews, I must hasten to reassure the reader that there are two ways of eliminating both Jews and the underclass. The one, which Hitler tried and found ineffective, is extermination. The other is assimilation, where those who are 'different' are encouraged to become as everyone else is instead of letting themselves be seen as an obstacle that stands in the way of world harmony. When Jews lose their Jewishness they are eliminated as Jews, and it is unfortunate that Hitler lacked the wisdom to see that. Similarly, when fools loose their foolishness they are eliminated as fools.

Those conscious of the potential risk of overpopulation may be tempted to suspend judgment on the sanctity of human life, and suggest that the underclass, responsible for so much vandalism, terrorism, cruelty, rape, drug and alcohol abuse, and destructive pointless crime, should be exterminated. That would kill two birds with one stone! - a reduction in world population and a reduction in serious crime.

Even if we regard the quality of human life as morally more important than its sanctity, we must resist that temptation. To be a fool who is not suffered gladly cannot be a happy experience, and we may be confident that, when placed in that situation, instead of being pampered by the Liberal Establishment, the underclass will reform itself, and, when it has done so, it will accept as willingly as the rest of us that something has to be done about the problem of overpopulation.

When the New Age egalitarian Moneyless Society, living in a State of Absolute Freedom is formed, it will soon become apparent to everyone that the only way to increase an individual's share of the finite resources of this world will be to reduce the population of the world. It will have to be done voluntarily by denying ourselves large families and the kind of medical attention that prolongs life beyond the point where living is fun. We will not keep people alive just to satisfy a flawed ethic. We will see that there is something more sacred than human life, and that it is found in our spiritual relationship with God.

Those who truly believe in God cannot avoid being influenced by the more profound spiritual insights, not only of their own faith, but of other faiths also. They will know that the more profound thinkers of all faiths have always regarded this life as a vale of tears. We should be more sorry than we are that we were born, and more willing than we are to die, because death provides the opportunity of eternal life.

At this point the various faiths diverge, but they all take the view that, if we are blessed, our future after death is blessed. With some faiths, that blessing means that we avoid the damnation of Hell. With other faiths, that blessing means that we avoid being thrown back into the cycle of reincarnation. Instead of being reincarnated, we go straight to Nirvana. The view that life goes on after death is held by the mystics of all faiths.

My own belief is that we can only acquire wisdom in this life through our communion with God and our obedience to His Holy Will. When that communion has been established, life does, in fact go on for ever. I accept Descartes' philosophy, 'Cogito ergo sum' - 'I think therefore I am', and I believe that this State of Being, or what we know as 'Life', continues as long as we think, whether we think in this life with our own minds assisted by God, or in the life to come, with the Mind of God. The contact we make with the Mind of God lasts for ever. Therefore, if our life has any sanctity at all, it is the sanctity of God, and it does not end when our body loses its life, but when we stop thinking, which, if we are blessed, is never. To want to go on living after the quality of life has been permanently impaired is foolish if we have that kind of faith in life after death.

What then are the ethics of survival? Should we replace our attachment to the sanctity of human life with a new ethic based on the quality of human life? To do that would replace an absolute ethic by an ethic of degree because it is impossible to define in advance at what level of quality the support of life may be withdrawn.

That does not have to be a problem. Our attachment to the Law is the problem, because the Law demands that that kind of definition must be made. If we live in a State of Absolute Freedom where the Law is transcended by the Spirit we do not have to define the quality of life at which life support may be withdrawn in advance. That is determined entirely by the circumstances of the case and the attitude or conscience of those involved with it. The quality of life that determines the medical effort to save life in cases of serious illness or injury may vary according to the global strategy at the time to keep the world's population within reasonable limits.

This global strategy will be influenced, in turn, by whether there are adequate resources to relieve the needs of the victims of famine. We would not be encouraged to use sophisticated medical procedures to keep people alive in a world that does not have sufficient food for everyone, because, unless the food shortage is a local one, so exacerbated by war or weather that we can do little about it, the existence of famine proves that the world is overpopulated already.

Nevertheless, a reasonable compromise can be reached between a survival ethic based on the sanctity of human life and one based on the quality of human life when we move away from a Rule of Law which requires us to enshrine guidelines of behaviour in carefully defined laws, which fail ultimately because of their inflexibility and the inability to predict the future circumstances in which they are expected to operate.

We are able the more easily to discriminate when we move away from laws which frown on all kinds of discrimination. We can discriminate between that part of us which remains true to the Image of God, and which most certainly is sanctified, and that part of us which does not and is therefore expendable. We can suggest, as a guideline, that suicide would not be approved in our new ethic without being drawn into arguments which require us to define or expand the meaning of the word 'suicide'. To refuse treatment for a fatal condition which could be cured by the treatment is not suicide, but that view is based on the guideline of the Crucifixion. Jesus did not defend Himself against the charges brought against Him, although a spirited defence could have saved His Life.

Ironically, when we attempt a synthesis between the ethic of sanctity and the ethic of quality, we find ourselves condemning the practice of medicine in a National Health Service compelled to accept the fiscal restraints imposed by finite resources. We need to get back to the basics of medicine, and to recognise that the doctor's job is not to play the part of God, but to do all he can for his patient's suffering. The length of the patient's life is for God to determine. It is not for the Doctor to determine. All that we can ask of the Doctor is that he gives his patient all the comfort he can offer in his suffering.

If the Doctor's scope for activity is limited by finite resources, he must use those resources for the maximum care of the maximum number of patients, and not try to prove his ability by attempting to work life-saving miracles. He must humbly accept that the patient will die when God wills it, and think twice about resorting to costly sophisticated medicine and surgery which will impair the quality of the patient's life, and cause unnecessary distress to the relatives, if it does not restore him to perfect health. Faith in God, and a humble recognition of the Doctor's own weaknesses, should be essential features of good medical practice. Then the National Health Service will no longer spend vast sums of money it can ill afford on costly treatments that only distress the patient and his relatives because they do not heal.

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CHAPTER 8 WE LIVE IN A CHANGING WORLD

'Change and decay in all around I see

O Thou who changest not, abide with me'

I have lived through 'life's little day' of Socialism. As a teenager, I saw the 'New Dawn' in the 1930's when the atheist intelligentsia saw the Soviet Union as their promised land; then came the high noon of postwar Labour Government, the eventide of the Thatcher and Gorbachev years, and I have lived to see the sun go down on the fallen idols and toppled statues of Eastern Europe. Earth's proud empires quickly pass away, and today even the speed of change is changing. We are experiencing the acceleration of change.

When I accidentally destroyed my first book on the Moneyless Society I saw that the political scene had changed so much since I had started it that a different presentation was called for. The exposure of political corruption in Eastern Europe focussed suspicion on the motives of all professional reformers who follow the political path. Sophisticated observers recognise today that professional politicians of all parties in the 'Capitalist West' are just as motivated by personal ambition, and therefore just as vulnerable to corruption, as the Communists. The suggestion made throughout my writing that the public ought, in their own interest, to undermine the authority of the State, is daily becoming more credible, as is the warning that, unless we have an immediate spiritual revival, we will have anarchy.

My theme, before I retired from the Inland Revenue in 1980, was that the Welfare State could even then be seen as a failed enterprise. It had to fail if human nature could not be changed. Flawed human nature caused abuse at all levels. Everyone was primarily concerned with what he could get out of it rather than with what he could put into it. As a Tax Inspector, I had a valuable insight into the widespread evasion and avoidance of tax, and as a member of Her Majesty's Association of Inspectors of Taxes, I had a valuable insight into how this highly professional association was transformed into a trades union by the greed of members willing to put their demands for better pay and conditions before the professional status of the Tax Inspectorate.

It would be unfair to my former colleagues to suggest they were the only public servants to put career before the public interest, because everyone engaged in the public sector was doing it, from politicians seeking to make every controversial issue a source of party advantage, down to those who were supposed to be unselfishly providing a caring service, but who took strike action to press their own selfish demands. Human nature being as it is, we can also expect workers and management in the private sector to be flawed in the same way.

The Welfare State was not only abused by the tax dodgers who were supposed to pay for it and the workers who were supposed to provide it, but also by its beneficiaries who took more from it than they needed, often fraudulently. The only solution to this problem of abuse is to change human nature by a process of spiritual renewal. As I thought through the consequences of renewal, I was able to see that, when human nature has been changed, the Welfare State will not be necessary. Everyone will be unselfish, willing to share with others, and high taxation will be replaced by charity. People with high and unselfish moral standards do not have to be coerced into supporting a compulsory welfare plan. They are capable of creating a voluntary plan of their own, which will owe its success to their dedication to it.

The concept of a Moneyless Society came as a natural successor to these thoughts, but it did so at a time when the top rate of Income Tax had been over 80% for over forty years and all charitable giving had to be made out of incomes that had already been taxed. Because the State laid first claim to the treasure chest of the wealthy, the prospect of changing the Welfare State into a Charity State seemed remote in 1980, but the Thatcher Government made significant changes which enabled the wealthy to give substantially to charity in a tax deductible way. Charities were at last able to compete with the State in the welfare business, and the first step had been taken to transform the Welfare State into the Charity State of my vision.

Soon after I realised that the Welfare State must be transformed into a Charity State, the Government moved significantly in that direction. The next step should have been a positive declaration that this was a step in the right direction, and that ultimately the Welfare State will be replaced by the Charity State. Since Christianity encourages us to use Charity rather than legal coercion, the Churches should have made this declaration and gone all out to encourage a higher level of charitable giving in order to complete the transformation as quickly as possible. Their criticism of the Government's policy of reducing taxation and State aid, while it did so much to make charitable giving easier and more effective, showed a remarkable failure of the Churches to have any sort of prophetic understanding of what Christianity really means. Church leaders lacked the faith to believe that human nature can be transformed into the Perfect Nature of Christ, even though that is the only way, both to establish the Kingdom of Christ on earth, and to replace State Welfare by Charity!

The Welfare State of Britain, like the Communist States of Eastern Europe, relied on the principle that only the State knows how to care for the disadvantaged, and both set out to replace and destroy the charitable alternative. Although, by 1980, few intelligent people saw the Communist experiment as a success, the closed minds, natural successors to the atheist intelligentsia of the 1930's, still believed in a world order based on State Socialism. The collapse of State Socialism during the 1980's finally destroyed their illusions. Marx's inspired ideal, 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need' still holds good, but it can now seen as an ideal that has to be achieved by Charity. It cannot be achieved by State Socialism because of the perversity of human nature.

Socialist leaders and their immediate underlings have always taken out more from the State than they need, and put in less than they have been able to, thus showing people how not to live by Marx's principles. The importance of transforming human nature through spiritual renewal can be more clearly seen now that the alternative of State Socialism has been proved unworkable. It can only be a matter of time before we, in Britain, realise that little of any value ever has been or ever will be accomplished by State regulation, and that the power of the political and legal establishment will have to be as drastically curtailed here as it has been in Eastern Europe.

During the 1950's and 1960's, politicians thought the time right for Britain to abandon her Empire. Other European politicians had similar ideas. Former colonies were given their independence, and anyone who challenged this action was discredited by the media. A generation later, television brings us distressing pictures of famine and suffering in these former colonies. Overzealous and sometimes prejudiced reporting has tried to persuade us that our greed is somehow responsible for this distressing situation, and our consciences have been manipulated to make us think that the responsibility to relieve the suffering is ours. Now we realise that much of the aid we send falls into the wrong hands. The responsibility for the tragedy is not altogether ours. Most of the blame should fall on those who filled the vacuum of authority left when independence was granted. Had colonial rule remained, authority would not have been as selfishly abused as it has been by so many Third World leaders.

Third World problems cannot be solved without a change of leadership. The pathetic concern of Third World leaders, who were democratically elected, to preserve their own status at the expense of their subjects, makes us think twice about the benefits of democracy. We need to ask whether 'democratic government' is what it claims to be, or whether it is a device used by party politicians to preserve their status at our expense, not only in the Third World, but also here in civilised sophisticated Europe.

These Third World problems of inept authority are now becoming the problems of post- Socialist society in parts of Eastern Europe, where people misguidedly give their loyalty to the leaders of warring factions. There is little practical help we can give to countries like Yugoslavia until its people solve their own problems in a responsible manner. Responsibility is fundamentally a matter of changing human nature into the Perfect Nature of Christ, so that we accept God's Rule and not that of the 'principalities and powers of this world'.

It has long been the custom of the atheist/academic wing of the Liberal Establishment to infer from the disasters of war and nature that there cannot be a benign God, for if there were, He would do something about them. It is not enough to counter this specious argument with a vague 'God moves in a mysterious way', or even 'God's ways are not our ways'. We have to be more explicit because we are dealing with people whose subconscious fear of God has closed their minds against Him. They are unbelievers, willing to believe anything except what we, as believers, tell them. Lack of inspiration is their problem. As God is the Source of all wisdom, the heathen deprive themselves of that inspired Source. As God cannot achieve His Purpose through them, they fear Him because He eliminates them by conversion or by condemnation.

We can be more explicit when we develop our vision of the perfect world as one in which human nature is changed into Christ's Perfect Nature, and we live under a system of love rather than under a system of law. This vision creates the picture of a New Age in which we no longer have to be manipulated legally and financially by those in authority. When we are sophisticated enough to shoulder the burdens of responsibility formerly delegated to the Government, we can safely ignore the Government's attempts to manipulate us. When we are transformed into caring loving people ourselves, we recognise that that manipulation is not done for our benefit, but for the benefit of those in authority. They enjoy exercising authority, and appreciate the social and material benefits that go with it.

Establishing a global egalitarian society will solve the problem of famine more effectively than government regulation and financial adjustment, but the solution requires there to be enough food to go round. There will not be if the world is overpopulated. Inept government is one cause of Third World famine. Overpopulation is the other, and that being so, it is not easy to see how sending aid can solve the long term problem. If aid saves a few lives, what kind of life will these people have in the future? If overpopulation and inept government are the cause of famine something must be done about both before there can be a long term solution, but how can the overpopulation problem be solved other than by birth control or the process of death?

These remarks may be offensive to the atheist/academic wing of the Liberal Establishment, which arrogantly believes itself to be wiser than God, and so mismanages the world that these terrible problems arise. This arrogance and ineptitude cannot make things easy for a benign God who has to find the least offensive way to control a population growth which our liberalism and our paternalist intervention with medical care has allowed to get out of hand. This lengthy explanation has been needed to explain why God has to move 'in a mysterious way', and why He must long for the 'principalities and powers of this world' to be removed before they make things even worse. For disasters like famine occur when men, who are no longer inspired by God, behave as if they have been given the Authority of God.

As the world continues to evolve and change before our eyes, the message comes through with alarming persistence, that all of the world's problems can be blamed on the arrogance and incompetence of the people in charge, and on the failure of ordinary people to recognise how inept their leaders usually are. To recognise this is to recognise the need to transform oneself spiritually so that one can take on more responsibility, and eventually transcend the need to be governed at all.

Diplomatic courtesy requires heads of government to deal with one another on terms of mutual respect. This prevents ordinary people from learning the truth about the world's leaders until they have been deposed or their country goes to war with them. Many people in Britain respected Hitler when he came to power in 1933, and for some years afterwards, because he was a head of state. Stalin was warmly accepted during the war by the British people, not only because he was a head of state, but also because he was a wartime allied leader. Our opinion of him fluctuated with the propaganda fed to us.

We are therefore likely to form a false impression of the competence of foreign political leaders, most of whom are likely to be less reliable than they are made to appear. We do best by being critical of the principle of government itself, by preparing ourselves spiritually to live in a future State of Absolute Freedom, and by observing from the vantage point of our growing spirituality the flawed nature of those in authority both in Britain and elsewhere. We would be foolish to suppose that we may be more sensibly governed if we submit to the authority of a European or One World political order. The One World idea can only be a good one in a world that has freed itself from political authority.

Fortunately there is now a growing public awareness of shortcomings in political authority, due no doubt to the growing intrusion of government into our lives. The more intrusive government is, the more staff it has to employ; the more staff it has to employ, the less selective it can be in choosing good staff.

When I joined the Civil Service in 1937, it was a struggle to get a job even in the basic clerical grade. When I returned to it in 1946, after wartime service in the Royal Navy, it had been forced to recruit anyone it could get, both to replace those who had joined the armed forces and to service the expanding wartime bureaucracy. The further postwar expansion to service the bureaucratic needs of the Welfare State made it impossible for the Service to rid itself of its low quality wartime intake. The high prewar standards of the Service had gone for ever, and it was in those circumstances that I, and most of my prewar colleagues, found it easy to gain promotion from the basic clerical grade to administrative grades or senior departmental grades like H.M.Inspector of Taxes.

Most of my colleagues in the Tax Inspectorate were University Graduates, but, here again, quality was diluted by postwar expansion in Higher Education. My prewar colleagues and I were convinced that we did the job as capably as those who had graduated at University. We had not been disadvantaged by our limited education, although we had all left school at the age of 16. Perhaps a prewar Grammar School education was an adequate foundation for a Higher Civil Service career. The advantages of Higher Education may be illusory.

So there seems to have been a general lowering of standards to make more room at the top of a society destined to have more 'experts' and fewer workers. It should surprise nobody if the stature of those in authority is diminished or if scandal, maladministration and fraud become commonplace, but it does mean that we are subjecting ourselves to the judgment of people whose judgment is likely to be no better than our own. As this evolutionary process continues, we will reach the point ultimately, where it becomes better to work ethical problems out for ourselves, than to submit ourselves to the judgment of others.

From the time, over 12 years ago, when I was first inspired to write about the Moneyless Society towards which I believed we would inevitably move, I have seen this evolving world evolve towards the ultimate goal of my vision. That has dominated my thoughts for the past 12 years, and it has made me quite certain that my vision is a true one. After a few years, I came to realise that a Moneyless Society can only operate in a State of Absolute Freedom. That additional insight was helpful, because it enabled me to see that the rule of law is only needed to defend private property and wealth, both of which would vanish, together with the law, in a Moneyless Society in a State of Absolute Freedom.

For some years, therefore, I have seen the authority of government and the rule of law as major obstacles to man's progress towards the perfect society, and I have been supported in this view by a simple Christian Faith which sees Christ as the Example of God Incarnate in man which we will all one day follow and become.

If we do that, I believe that others will follow us, and that we will set in motion a movement in which Absolute Freedom is achieved, because authority then ceases to be exercised by coercion and comes to be exercised by Example. We will be free to follow or not to follow that Example, but by then we should be wise enough to see that the Example of Christ is the only way to achieve a State of Absolute Freedom.

I visualise a future in which we will all become wiser, and that gives me the confidence to predict the inevitability of this State of Absolute Freedom, and the Moneyless society that must accompany it. My problem before the end of the 1980's was common with that of other visionaries like Simone Weil, who recognised the evil of coercive authority, and Teilhard de Chardin who saw the future in evolutionary terms, with man evolving into the larger entity of human society, held together in absolute harmony by love rather than by law. For Simone Weil and Teilhard de Chardin, and for myself before the end of the 1980's, this was little more than a pipe dream. It would happen, just as Christ's Kingdom would come, but there was no sign of it happening in the foreseeable future.

The success of the Solidarity Movement in Poland was the beginning of the end of human authority. At last, man's ultimate state of Absolute Freedom became foreseeable. We all feared that this great Freedom Movement within the Socialist World would be crushed, but it was not. The police of the Police State were proved ineffective against inspired humanity. What happened in Eastern Europe could happen in any sophisticated society. It is bound to happen here. Parliamentary democracy and the Rule of Law cannot withstand the pressure of a spiritually renewed British people determined to follow the example of Solidarity in their quest for Freedom, in the certainty that the Authority of Christ's Example will transcend and replace the Law.

The British people only need a catalyst to bring this about, and the Maastricht Treaty may provide it. Even without Maastricht, the Rule of Law would eventually lose its credibility, but all credibility is lost with the creation of a European Supreme Court which no European in his right mind would take seriously as an organisation able to administer justice, because the the ability to implement the decisions of the Court depends upon the integrity and the ability of the police and the bureaucracy and this varies from country to country.

That wise and politically incorrect politician Enoch Powell once quoted, 'Those whom the Gods will destroy, they first make mad'. The collapse of Socialism in Eastern Europe would have deterred wiser politicians in Western Europe from proceeding with plans to build a Federal European State on a Liberal political foundation, which is obviously as unstable as a Socialist foundation.

Unemployment is a problem that affects the whole of Europe. It is a problem that can be solved in a Moneyless Society in a State of Absolute Freedom, because wealth in such a society is willingly shared and work is willingly done without reward. It is a problem caused by the ability of modern technology to do our work for us. Its cause, therefore, is not political. Neither is its remedy. The only remedy is to change the work ethic so that we no longer have to work for a living. Instead of working in order to live, we must live in order to work, and serve others through our work. That is precisely what would happen in the Moneyless Society in a State of Absolute Freedom.

So, despite the efforts of liberally minded politicians to convince us that their opponents are responsible for unemployment, and that they can solve the problem, we know that this is a problem that all politicians have faced for fourteen years without even the hint of a solution. Yet it is a problem whose solution even we can see.

If these politicians cannot identify the cause of unemployment, let alone solve the problem, should we really allow them to intrude further into our lives by creating an over-politicised European super-state with Courts of Law which have the power to overrule our own Courts? At a time of growing redundancies in all forms of productive employment, we can see that these politicians intend there to be no bureaucratic or legal redundancies in the European super-state, but will the European public tolerate this costly form of democracy any more than the Eastern European public tolerated Socialism? Eurocrats may covet their safe jobs, but will the people of Europe, in their depressed financial circumstances, be willing to fund their salaries? Maastricht may be the final nail in the coffin of Parliamentary Democracy and the Rule of Law.

It would be irresponsible to write like this without the conviction that there is an alternative to the political solution to man's problems. The vision of a perfect world made perfect because the Law has been transcended by the Spirit, and because the restrictions imposed by the monetary system no longer exist, points the way to the spiritual alternative in which there is perfect freedom.

It is not immediately available to us. We must first undergo the process of spiritual renewal, and it is important that we get this world of rapid evolutionary change into its proper perspective. The failed system of Socialism was an early stage of the evolutionary political process. Our own Liberal Establishment is a more advanced stage, but we have reached the point where political developments of this kind no longer carry the promise of progress. Our future hopes of progress must be based on spiritual rather than political developments.

Nevertheless, this vision of the future, whether or not it is the immediate future, is still the future. It is a future that we are not spiritually prepared for, and we have to start preparing ourselves for it now because we cannot depend on a future of political stability. We cannot live in a perfect society until we are perfect. So long as we are imperfect, we need to live under regulation. What matters is not the form that that regulation takes in the present, but what we have to do to escape regulation altogether in the future. The collapse of Socialism, and the obvious ethical objections to its replacement by market forces, expose the flaw in all possible forms of regulation. Regulation is flawed by the selfishness of the regulators.

It would therefore be foolish to underestimate the problems of transition from a governed to a free society. This transition will cause less pain if it proceeds on an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary basis, but we must interpret evolution carefully. We want the Liberty, Fraternity and Equality sought in the French Revolution, but we want it without revolution and we want it without government.

At the same time, we must recognise that unless government is firm it is ineffective. We should not allow the nature of government to evolve into a more liberal form which destroys the effectiveness of the law, for, if we do that, an uncontrollable underclass will emerge, and we will not have freedom, but anarchy. It is not the government, but the governed who must evolve into a state of perfection. Laws cannot be passed compelling us to be free. Because we must achieve Freedom through the Spirit, we must learn to live in the Spirit.

While it is perfectly true that an idiot can always be found in charge of something, it does not follow that all who try to preserve order in this transitional period will be idiots. The idiots are those who seek position, not because of their competence, but because of the social and material benefits they get from it. These are the people who promise freedom and a better world, without the need for spiritual renewal, but the freedom they offer is limited by their insistence that, despite their incompetence, they remain in charge.

We need good strong government in this transitional period, but, because of the quality of our politicians, we are unlikely to have it. Because we cannot depend upon it, we have to prepare ourselves for a collapse of law and order which may come sooner than we think.

That is why we need a powerful spiritual renewal movement now to underwrite the risk of a premature loss of government. That renewal will start the evolutionary process we need, and we cannot escape our personal involvement in it, because the renewal must begin within ourselves.

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CHAPTER 9 AUTHORITY

No New Age can reasonably assume that name unless it has adopted an entirely new attitude to authority. Earlier this century, Socialists believed in their 'New Dawn', and no-one would deny that the authority of Socialist Government has been vastly different from that of any other form of government. It was, nevertheless, just another form of government. The change to Socialist Government was not as complete a change of attitude towards authority as a change to a social pattern that excluded the concept of government altogether would be.

Today we live in the post-Socialist world. Socialist Government has been a failure, and, when we seek to identify the cause, we can identify it in the word 'Government'. As the early Socialists could not conceive of a world without government, they could not conceive of Socialism in any form other than a form of government. In the post-Socialist Age, we know that Socialism can only survive in a non-governmental form. If we can no longer expect the law to be just, we cannot expect Socialism to produce just laws. While there can be no future in Socialist Government, there can be one in Socialist Freedom. Tomorrow's New Age has to be an Age of Freedom, an age in which the transition has been made from Government to Freedom. The New Age may or may not incorporate the idea of Socialism, but it cannot incorporate the idea of Government

The idea of Freedom is enormously attractive to ordinary people. Offer them freedom from both financial and legal restraint, and they will see at once that that kind of Freedom matters more than Socialist Government. They have been misled into thinking that that kind of freedom can be achieved through Socialist Government, but it is the freedom they want, and not the Socialist Government. Introduce them gently to the truth of the matter - that they can only have that kind of freedom by becoming less selfish, and by taking full responsibility for their own behaviour and the welfare of those less fortunate than themselves, and they can be persuaded that the end (their ultimate freedom) justifies the means (their spiritual renewal).

As the objection to Socialist Government is not necessarily an objection to Socialism, it is an objection that can be made to all forms of government, including Democratic Government. Here again, the objection is not made necessarily to democracy as such, but to the principle of government. In the case of democracy, the objection would be to the way in which professional politicians have modified the democratic principle to suit their own purposes. As no parliamentary candidate who does not have the support of one of the main political parties has any hope of being elected, only professional politicians can be 'democratically elected'. There are probably over 200 'safe' constituencies in Britain where any candidate fortunate enough to have been selected by the right party is certain of being elected. In these constituencies, the Ballot Box has become a farce.

The ancient Greeks may have invented democracy, but the ultimate authority in the ancient world was that of Imperial Rome. Like all of earth's proud empires, the Roman Empire eventually passed away, but the Roman idea that civilised nations are better governed by a strong Emperor than by a Committee held firm throughout the civilised world for a thousand years after the fall of Rome.

The Christian Faith has always had misgivings about all forms of human authority. Prophetically, it looks forward to the time when Christ will come again in glory to live and reign for ever, and this will be a time when the 'principalities and powers of this world' will get their ultimate 'come-uppance'. Primitive Christianity confused Myth with Fact, and many Christians today are so confused about what is meant by Christ's coming again in glory, that they fail to grasp the fact that it could happen quite soon.

The Christ of the Gospels is supposed to have been fully human. like us, but He differs substantially from us in several ways. His mother became pregnant with Him as the result of a spiritual encounter. Other mothers have only become pregnant as a result of a sexual encounter. His Body vanished completely from the tomb three days after He was buried. This has never happened to anyone else. He lives eternally, and one day He will return to live and reign for ever. We, as Christians, have to accept the profound Truth of the whole story or we must reject it. We cannot pick and choose, believing some parts of the story and rejecting others, and we cannot hope to find historical proof for the story, because none exists.

As we saw in Chapter 3, we can get over the problem of credibility by regarding the story as Truth expressed by Myth, rather than Truth expressed by historical sequence. The object of the Myth is to create the Profile of God Incarnate in man, that is to say the profile of a man like us in all respects, but who thinks with the Mind of God, and therefore behaves as God would behave. The closer we follow His Example, the more like Him we become, until eventually we may also find ourselves thinking with the Mind of God and behaving as God would behave. The Authority of Christ's Example is an alternative to the coercive authority of the law.

The crucifixion and resurrection narratives describe how the mundane ecclesiastical and political authority (the Jewish High Priest and Pontius Pilate) tried the Incarnate God according to mundane law, condemned Him, executed Him, and found that He lived on to become their judge. The popular reaction to propaganda is dramatically exposed in Mark 15 vv11 to 14. The crowd that shouted 'Crucify Him' was the victim of propaganda. So was the crowd that 'democratically elected' Hitler! Our vote in favour of human authority is our cry of 'Crucify Him'.

The return of Christ in glory may therefore be anticipated, not in terms of the return, alive, of the Body that vanished from the tomb nearly 2000 years ago, but in terms of the transformation of our corrupt human nature into the Perfect Nature of Christ. The whole human race will, one day, be 'indwelt' by the Holy Spirit. We will all think as God thinks, and, as nobody will have any selfish thoughts ever again, Democracy and the Rule of Law will become superfluous to human needs.

When that happens to us, we will all obviously be wiser than the High Priest and Pontius Pilate were in the crucifixion narrative, but. if we see them as typical of the world's ecclesiastical and political leaders, we will also be wiser than the people we accept as ecclesiastical and political leaders today. We will certainly be too wise to accept the authority of people like them.

As these thoughts enable us to contemplate a future in which man no longer needs to be governed, they offer us an entirely new way of thinking about human authority. Up to now, our thoughts have been dominated by the idea of finding a political solution to our social and economic problems. From now on, we can begin to think more of looking for a spiritual solution because we cannot any longer believe that these problems can be solved politically.

When the Welfare State was created, it was recognised that something had to be done about poverty. Poverty is what happens to people who have no money to buy things with. The Welfare State was created to give them money, but it was made to operate under the Rule of Law. Laws were therefore made to stipulate in what circumstances money would be given, and how much. It has become more important that these laws be obeyed, than that the poor shall all have enough. In some cases, people are given too much money, and in others, people are not given enough. The remarkable thing is that it has never yet occurred to anyone to ask why money has to be used in the relief of poverty. Money, after all, is quite unimportant. It assumes importance because we are misguided enough to believe in it.

It is only pieces of paper, all of which are pretty useless. People who commit massive financial frauds may not be as evil as we suppose. They may be more enlightened than the rest of us, because they have come to terms with the absurdity of the monetary system. To acquire, by fair means or foul, 20,000 of the pieces of paper we call '£50 Notes' is to acquire a quantity of paper which cannot be worth more than £10. Yet, most of us seem willing to believe that this paper is worth £1 million.

So, if those who created the Welfare State had stopped to think more profoundly about the monetary system, they would have recognised that there are better ways of solving the problems of poverty than giving money to the poor. The problems of poverty can be just as easily solved by ceasing to use money, and by ceasing to believe that it is valuable. Nobody would then be regarded as poor, simply because he had no money, because poverty is not created by our lacking something which has no value. In the Moneyless Society, authority no longer rests on a financial foundation.

As we have seen, authority in such a society would not rest on a legal or political foundation either. Man has progressed from living in a society governed by an Absolute Monarch or Dictator to live in what he perceives as a 'democratic' society, because he aims ultimately to live in a State of Absolute Freedom. He believes in 'self government', but he has not yet fully grasped the fact that he cannot govern himself so long as he goes on electing professional politicians to govern him. The laws made by these professional politicians not only restrict his freedom, but they also uphold the financial system based on the use of money. So, the perfect society can only be created by getting rid of democratic government and by getting rid of money at the same time.

Those of us who are interested in the prophetic aspect of Christianity are obviously interested in the 'last days', or 'end of the world' situation in which all human authority ceases to exist, but we have to recognise that Christianity also has its 'present day' philosophy which sees the importance of preserving the social order, and avoiding anarchy. This 'present day' philosophy is supportive of the 'powers that be', because they are responsible, until Christ comes again, for preserving the social order.

The theory of the Divine Right of Kings emerged from this 'present day' philosophy of Christianity during the long period of civilised man's history when Kings and Queens exercised absolute authority. The theory is quite sound, so long as the Monarch accepts that Divine Support for his authority is conditional upon his exercising that authority in accordance with the Divine Will.

History has shown how this Divine support for the 'powers that be' is normally conditional upon the reciprocation of the 'powers that be', whether authority is exercised by a monarch, by a dictator or by a 'democratically elected' government. This can be illustrated by the recent history of government in Russia. The political philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov, who died at the end of the 19th Century, could be studied with some advantage today.

We, in Britain, have benefited considerably from the tension that exists between Parliament and the Crown. Each exerts such a restraining influence on the other that neither can become a tyrant. Parliament normally restricts the authority of the Crown, but, if it should ever become necessary, the Crown is able to restrict the authority of Parliament. The democratic electoral system contains no inbuilt safety mechanism to prevent a tyrant from being democratically elected. This happened in Germany when Hitler was elected, but, if it should happen in Britain, the Crown would become a rallying point for popular anti-parliament sentiment. This state of tension between Crown and Parliament makes for stability, but it has never existed in Russia, where the Tsar ruled autocratically until the Revolution, after which there was no Tsar to restrain the tyranny of the Communist Party.

Solovyov made his appearance in the pre-revolutionary Russia of Tsar and Church. Although there had been a long tradition of influence by the Church on the Crown, the Church had become too power-conscious to be able to exert proper spiritual restraint on the selfish ambitions of the Crown. Solovyov obviously recognised that, despite the theory of the Divine Right of Kings, and despite the Church's claim to represent the authority of Christianity, both had developed into organisations which exercised authority coercively. Both therefore needed to be informed and reformed by prophecy, and anyone familiar with Solovyov would regard him as the prophetic figure.

Both Tsar and Church had to be reminded of the Two Great Commandments. They had to put their love of God before their selfish ambition, and they had to show their love of their neighbour by loving the people they ruled, using the authority of Example rather than the authority of coercion. They had to be reformed in the Image of Christ.

Sadly, the prophet's warning is rarely heeded. Solovyov was censored for his troubles. That is why we know so little about him, but the painful consequences of ignoring prophecy are only too obvious. Just 17 years after Solovyov died, both Tsar and Church ceased to exist in Russia.

The message which Solovyov has for all who exercise authority is that stable society has the stability of a three legged stool. Tsar and Church, or Dictator and Party are not enough. For God's authority to be felt in the world, the secular authority has to be informed and reformed by prophecy. The Prophet is the third leg of the stool that gives it its stability.

The importance of Solovyov's philosophy is that it modifies the Divine Right of Kings in such a way that it only justifies royal authority to the extent that it is guided by prophecy. The underlying Will of God is essential to the exercise of all authority, whoever the agent of God may be. While atheists may reasonably question the authority of the religious establishment, which does not necessarily reflect the Will of God, they should no longer question the Authority of God, when the validity of man's attempt to exercise authority over his fellow man is so open to objection. Whether those in authority try to justify themselves by heredity, democratic election or professional qualification, those who are subject to that authority can always find reasonable grounds to dispute that justification. We have become too sophisticated to take a man's word that God or the Ballot Box has authorised him to be in charge of things. The Incarnation shows that the prophetically inspired do not exercise authority through the coercion of the law. They exercise it by following and becoming the Example of the Incarnate God. Theirs is the Authority of Example, and that will be the only form of Authority acceptable to New Age Man.

Ironically, the 19th Century example of Solovyov has been repeated in 20th Century Russia by Solzhenitsyn, the prophet of the downfall of Socialism, who was rejected by the Socialists and sent to the 'Gulag'. Once again the Prophet was right. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics has collapsed just as the Tsarist Empire collapsed. In both cases the Prophet saw it coming, and he was silenced and ignored.

If we keep an open mind on the question of whether the Jesus of the Gospels was a figure of history or a divinely inspired myth, we find it easier to think of Him as the Prototype of the Incarnate God, and the Example we must follow and become, because we no longer have to think of Him as a Person. He becomes a philosophical Figure, the Word, or the Thought of God - the Word made Flesh, initially in the Myth of God Incarnate, but ultimately in the whole of mankind. It becomes easier for us to see ourselves in His Place. Our old Ego is crucified, and He is risen within us. We become changed people as we begin to think with the Mind of God. We see why it is necessary for man to be 'born again', because we have experienced spiritual rebirth and know what it means. We see the Reason for the Myth, and it has to do with the ultimate Freedom of Man as our imperfect human nature is transformed into His Perfect Nature. Then the Law is transcended by the Grace of God and the coercive authority of the law is transcended by the Authority of Christ's Example as we enter into the Grace of God. We begin to understand the Nature of God's Authority, as we learn the language of Incarnation.

We have to be quite certain of God's Existence before we can begin to see Jesus as an Inspired Myth, because there can be no inspiration without an Inspirer. When we recognise God as the Inspirer, we can see why Solovyov was so concerned to give prophecy a place in the exercise of authority, for God is the Inspirer of all the Prophets. We can see, as he did, the importance of both Church and State being continually informed and reformed by prophecy, and with our broader vision, as we approach the New Age, we recognise that Prophecy has never been confined to Christians. The Christian vision of the Incarnate God as the Authority of Example is vital to New Age Freedom, but we must not scorn the mysticism of other faiths. The Church may lose its authority in the New Age as newer insights produce a synthesised spirituality, but the Authority of Christ's Example will still be seen as the only way to Freedom.

If New Age Freedom allows us to draw our own conclusions about God, He becomes easier to believe in, because He does not have to be the God of the ecclesiastical establishment. We can think of Him as One God uniting all the faiths, taking the essential ingredients of spirituality from every faith and discarding the inessential ritual and dogma so dear to the ecclesiastical establishment. We can think of Him as the God Whose Service is Perfect Freedom, through Whom we find our own freedom.

All of history is God's Story. The Prophet's job is to see the end of His Story, and recognise the last chapter. The New Age, the Moneyless Society and the State of Absolute Freedom belong to the Great Author's next book. They are not part of this age of human authority. They follow what Nostradamus describes as the 'end of the world', but which is only the end of the 'principalities and powers of this world'.

So let us not delay the advent of the Great Revival, or the creation of those loving communities where all things are held in common, love replaces law, rules give way to freedom and we work freely for the benefit of all, without the expectation of reward. Let these communities grow and flourish until more of us are in the communities than outside, and the authority of the law can no longer resist the freedom of the communities which will coalesce until the whole world is One Community in the Kingdom of God. And let us pray to God that His Will may be done on earth as it is in heaven, a prayer that He will surely answer.

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CHAPTER 10 GETTING BACK TO BASICS

The New Year 1994 came in with the new hope that we would all be 'getting back to basics'. The idea of getting back to basics is not new, but when the Prime Minister suggested that that was what we should do, it was treated as news, because it is an idea that can be interpreted in so many different ways, most of which are embarrassing for politicians and the political establishment generally.

We got back to basics in the permissive society of the 1960's, when traditional ethics and traditional forms of authority were challenged in the most fundamental way. Getting back to basics in the 1990's is essentially a matter of challenging the new ethics and the new concepts of authority that have filled the vacuum. The philosopher Hegel would see it all in the context of his dialectic of history. The permissive society was the antithesis to the postwar thesis of authority, and the synthesis became the thesis of the immediate pre-Thatcher years. Thatcherism became the next antithesis, and the synthesis with Thatcherism has produced the thesis of these post-Thatcher years. The obvious problem is that no satisfactory thesis of authority has emerged from the changing political scene since that enormous challenge to authority was made by the 1960's permissive society.

The permissive society challenged traditional Christian belief, and its moral teaching in particular, and while much was done in the Thatcher years to restore this moral teaching, other aspects of Christianity, such as the need to love one's neighbour and to share what one has with the needy, were not emphasised nearly enough. It had been naively assumed that the political opponents of Thatcherism, and particularly the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, took more interest in these aspects of Christianity, but when these regimes collapsed their political hypocrisy became only too obvious.

So there is a growing public awareness of the hypocrisy of politicians. Different political ideologies may seem, on the surface, to uphold different aspects of Christian morality, but political morality lacks profundity, and it is certainly true that no political ideology has ever existed which upholds every aspect of Christianity. To advocate a policy of 'back to basics' was therefore a dangerous thing for any politician to do, because to get back to basics, given the 'politically correct' thesis of today, invites an antithesis that uses Christianity to challenge political authority itself. If getting back to basics exposes a vision of what a truly Christian Society would be like, a growing number of ordinary people will be eager to sacrifice their politicians on the altar of Christianity, so that they may enjoy the freedom of living in a truly Christian Society.

Our so-called Christian country has abandoned its Christian ethics in favour of the politically correct ethics of what might be called the academic and professional ethical consensus of the Liberal Establishment. These ethics are derived from people who have lost their faith in God and have assumed that the highest wisdom is human wisdom. The highest human wisdom is seen as that of those with academic or professional qualifications, or of those who have made their way to the top in their field of endeavour, whether it be sport, the media, entertainment, finance or politics. It should not therefore surprise us if the ethics of Islamic fundamentalism can capture the moral high ground, because Islamic ethics, like Jewish ethics, are based on God's Law - the Islamic Shari'a, or the Jewish Torah. Anyone who believes in God should recognise that God's Law is morally superior to laws produced by politicians, and administered by judges, lawyers and bureaucrats, many of whom do not believe in God, and all of whom have an inflated sense of their own importance. To criticise Islamic Law because it does not conform to the heathen concepts of political correctness, democracy and liberalism is an absurd thing for a Christian to do.

Christianity is able to capture the moral high ground from both Islam and Judaism because St. Paul consistently teaches that 'The Law', that is to say the Torah, and by implication the Shari'a, is transcended by the Spirit of Grace. Christian Authority is essentially a matter of recognising the Profile of the Incarnate God in the books of the New Testament, following His Example, and ultimately becoming His Example, so that the Nature of His Example is made clearer in the modern world, and the whole of humanity is able to follow it. Then the coercive authority of the law can be transcended by the Authority of Christ's Example.

However carefully we peruse the New Testament, we will find no Christian Law. Instead of telling us what to do, Christ said 'Follow Me'. Getting back to basics reminds us of that essential point, because living in the Spirit in a State of Grace, and following and becoming the Example of Christ is not an ethic we live by any more. We have allowed ourselves to be politically brainwashed into abandoning the Spirit of Christian Grace for the law, but, unlike the Torah and the Shari'a, this law is not the Law of God, but the law of man.

We recapture the moral high ground from Islamic fundamentalists by living in that Spirit of Grace and Freedom, Which transcends the Law. We should not condemn Torah and Shari'a because they are illiberal, undemocratic or politically incorrect. We should condemn them because, as Christians, we condemn the coercion of all law. We do not need laws when we live in the Grace of Christian belief, through which we can become the Example of the Christ we follow.

This prophetic vision of a New Age, when the law's coercion will be transcended by the Freedom of Grace, as humanity gains its freedom by moulding itself on the Example of Christ, reveals what is wrong with the professional and academic base upon which the 'politically correct' ethic is based today.

We live in an age when atheism has had a profound effect on the intelligentsia. Where a significant number in an influential professional or academic group doubt the existence of God, it is impossible for that group to reach a consensus view of ethics based on faith within that group, and, as it is probably true that all such groups have their doubters, a professional ethic, acceptable to all, has to ignore the spiritual dimension. So, if we make the mistake of giving these influential groups authority over us, because we lack their professional and academic qualifications, we have to accept laws and ethics based on the consensus view of these influential groups. These laws and ethics lack the Wisdom of God's Inspiration.

If we do not make this mistake, but allow ourselves to be inspired by the Wisdom of God and enter the State of Grace, we find ourselves able to live by the perfect ethic, regardless of our attitude towards the law, even though we are still compelled to obey laws we distrust because they lack Grace. The resulting instability of the legal and political system is obvious, and its collapse is inevitable when authority is exercised in opposition to the Spirit of Christian Grace. Such authority is presumptive of atheism, and getting back to basics requires us to challenge any political assumption of authority that disregards the Authority of God. The New Age is a time when man reaches a point in his sophisticated development, where instead of questioning the existence of God, he questions the authority of those, who, though uninspired by God, still presume to exercise authority over him. If our Christian Faith tells us that God's Kingdom on earth is to be achieved through the Spirit of God and not through the Laws of God, we should challenge the laws of Britain before we challenge the Divine Laws of Torah and Shari'a. The grounds upon which Torah and Shari'a may be challenged are the grounds which challenge the Rule of Law itself.

If an ethical consensus is reached among those who have a strong and prophetic Christian Faith, whatever their academic or professional qualifications may be, and regardless of whether they have any, it will obviously differ from the ethical consensus reached by those with academic and professional qualifications, whatever their religious faith may be, and regardless of whether they have one. If it is accepted that God is the Source of all wisdom, it follows that, where the prophetic ethic differs from the politically correct professional ethic, the professional ethic must always be discarded. The political danger of getting back to basics is that it must ultimately expose this truth, and reveal the instability of Liberalism, Democracy and the Rule of Law. As we grasp this truth we realise that the authority of democratic government in Western Europe is exposed to the challenge that undermined the authority of communist government in Eastern Europe. As the collapse of the 'principalities and powers of this world', which means the collapse of authority exercised by man over his fellow men, begins to appear to be ultimately inevitable, we can seriously contemplate whether the present system of government, not only in Britain but throughout the whole world, can survive this decade.

This prophetic view would, on careful consideration, associate a society built on the foundation of Divine Grace with a society held together by love rather than by law, and one in which all material things are held in common. It would soon recognise the connection between such a society and the Moneyless Society living in a State of Absolute Freedom which has already been described in this book. Nevertheless, this prophetic view is as much a minority view today as primitive Christianity was in its day, and, as it is as diametrically opposed to today's vested interests as primitive Christianity was opposed to the vested interests of its day, it is likely to be as rigorously repressed. As with primitive Christianity, those who try to contain it will find to their dismay that, once the True Gospel of Christ has been preached openly, it can never again be 'unpreached'. No human artifice can obstruct the Kingdom of God indefinitely, and the Prophets of God know that one day their prophecy will be fulfilled.

The strength of primitive Christianity, like the strength of this modern prophetic form of Christianity, lies in its appeal to the Common Man. He must surely see that, while democracy benefits only those who govern, prophetic Christianity, which challenges the right to govern, is of real benefit to him. Everyone who has less than an equal share of the world's wealth must gain when all material things are held in common, and nobody, whether he be a Company Director, Aristocrat or Communist Party Member can have more than his fair share. All that Christianity asks of the Common Man in return, is that he should abandon his own ambitious hope of selfish privilege, accept unselfishly full responsibility for his own behaviour and for his neighbour's needs, and contribute all that he can voluntarily by way of work and wealth to the needs of the community. Instead of worrying about human rights, he has to start worrying about human responsibilities. As Karl Marx would have put it, 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need', but Christianity seeks to achieve this result, not through the coercion of the law, but in the Freedom and Grace of the Spirit.

When we, as individuals, are willing to accept voluntarily the responsibilities which we have delegated to the Welfare State, we can abolish the Welfare State and replace its inefficiency with the efficiency of a system based on love rather than law, in which all work is done as a vocation rather than as a career, and in which all work is done voluntarily without payment. The idea may be opposed by those who do well out of the Welfare State, or gain some material advantage from democratic and bureaucratic government and the Rule of Law.

However vigorous the opposition, it cannot persuade us to reject this Christian alternative to the Welfare State indefinitely. When Christians make it their business to make the nature of this alternative society common knowledge, it will not be long before a major movement towards it changes the basic nature of our society. The great majority of people will eventually recognise that advantages are to be gained when a process of spiritual renewal leads automatically towards an egalitarian society in which all things are held in common, and a political system, open to exploitation by politicians and bureaucrats, is not needed to set it up. The Rule of Law will inevitably be overthrown eventually by the transcending Grace of the Spirit of Christian Freedom. The Prophet's only problem is to say whether this will happen in the next ten years or the next hundred, because the speed of progress depends entirely on the response of the individual to attempts to transform him spiritually.

The Church has declared this last decade of the 20th Century to be a Decade of Evangelism, but it has unfortunately allowed four years of the decade to pass without thinking seriously about the kind of Gospel it should be preaching. The Gospels are there for us all to read. They do not have to be preached if people are interested enough to read them, and inspired enough to interpret their meaning for the world of today. Far too little has been said about the transcending power of Christian Grace, and of how it will ultimately destroy the 'principalities and powers of this world' as it creates a new kind of human society bound together by love rather than by law. A book like this is necessary to tell people, 'This is how I read the New Testament. Now read it for yourself and see whether you form a similar impression from your reading. You need do two things. Pray about it when you are reading it, and allow the Holy Spirit of God to overrule your intellect and guide you in His way of wisdom. Don't be so foolish that you dismiss it as unimportant without understanding it. Atheists have made fools of themselves for the past hundred years when they denied the existence of a God Whose Nature they were quite unable to define. In the world of the wise, fools are not suffered gladly,'

Part of the Church's problem is that the True Gospel of Christian Grace is ultimately destructive of human authority, including the authority of an ecclesiastical establishment which has chosen to be liberal in order to defend its own authority. If the True Gospel of Christian Grace is preached with fervour during the rest of this decade it would undermine the world of legal and political authority, but it would also undermine the authority of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, which, in the mind of the prophetic layman of today, has taken the place occupied by the Scribes and Pharisees when Christianity began. The comparison may be apt if we are approaching the New Age today, for they were approaching their New Age then.

'Getting back to basics', from a political point of view, is a process which takes democracy and the rule of law for granted, and sees them as part of the basic foundation. The politically motivated must not get more basic than that, but Christians cannot be prevented from going back further. The Christian doctrine of Grace exists to question the authority that lies behind the law. Jews and Muslims can claim authority for Torah and Shari'a. God gave them these laws. That is their authority. If atheists can mock the ritual of religion, then believers can mock the ballot box - the ritual of democracy. What does it stand for when the political parties themselves have already chosen the only candidates who have any chance of being elected? Why should we, the voters, accept that people have the authority to make laws that restrict our freedom just because a handful of people, with all kinds of vested interests of their own, chose them to represent a political party?

Proving the existence of God may not be easy, but it is easier than justifying the authority of our 'democratically elected' politicians to make the laws that they expect us to obey. As Christians, we believe that God exists, and many, like myself, have such strong feelings about this that we are absolutely certain. Our belief in God does not require us to believe in democracy or in the rule of law, unless we have the Law of God, that is to say Torah or Shari'a, in mind. We may be encouraged by our faith not to destabilise society by breaking the law, but that should not prevent us from questioning its authority in our search for a better social structure, or from reaching the conclusion in getting back to basics that democracy and the rule of law do not offer an adequate foundation upon which to build the perfect society of the New Age.

From a Christian layman's point of view, the basic foundations of human society go back much further than democracy and a rule of law imposed upon us by our 'democratically elected' politicians. The validity of all this is open to question. The only Authority not open to question is that of God, Who is the Source of the love by which all living things perpetuate their existence, and the Source of all wisdom, and Who is therefore called Creator of all things. He has, in His Wisdom, given to man both Torah and Shari'a for guidance, but for those who can accept the indwelling of His Holy Spirit, He has given Himself in the Example of Christ for us to follow and become. If that Ultimate Authority transcends Torah and Shari'a, it doubly transcends the laws made and administered by foolish men.

We may criticise Torah and Shari'a from the lofty position of those in whom the Holy Spirit dwells, and who, by living in a State of Grace, transcend the need for law, but we cannot criticise Torah and Shari'a as undemocratic, illiberal or politically incorrect, because our democracy, our liberalism and our political correctness are all judged by Torah and Shari'a. Nevertheless, nothing can be more basic, as a foundation upon which to build the society of the New Age, than the Amazing Grace of Freedom that is to be found in the Spirit of Christianity. By transcending all laws it gives to mankind that service to God which is perfect freedom and a peace that passes understanding.

We have to get right back to the basics of motivation. Must we be coerced into doing the right thing, or can we do it of our own free will if we are given the guidance and the example to follow? Do those who try to coerce us really possess the wisdom of Solomon? How do we know whether we are being coerced into doing the wrong things, and what should we do about it when we are? Were Hitler and Stalin right? Were our politicians right to declare war? Did the judges at Nuremberg rightly condemn Rudolf Hess to life imprisonment? Can we justify intervention, even on humanitarian grounds, in Yugoslavia? How would we have reacted to the intervention of neutrals on humanitarian grounds to relieve the sufferings of the Germans in the last war? Could there be wars if the people of the world refused to be coerced by their leaders? Must our creative efforts always be motivated by the expectation of profit? Should we stop thinking about our rights and think about our responsibilities instead? Come to think about it, do we really have rights? If so, where did we get them from, and would we need them if we were absolutely free and lived in a society founded on love where everyone was willing to share everything with everyone else? Having got right back to basics, is our society founded on the right foundation for it to be able to survive unchanged in the New Age? If not, what is basically wrong with it, and what has to change? Is it the foundation itself?

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CHAPTER 11 EVOLUTION NOT REVOLUTION

We have seen that getting back to basics means more than just getting back to the sound principles of good government, because the validity of government itself and the validity of man-made laws cannot be taken for granted. If atheists are allowed to get away with their rejection of the authority of God, fairness demands that believers should be allowed to get away with their rejection of the authority of man.

Most systems of religious belief look ahead prophetically to a time when the 'principalities and powers of this world', that is to say the authority of man over his fellow men, will collapse. This prophetic view has always existed in Christianity, but it has tended only to come to the surface during periods of prophetic revival. The reason for this is to be found in the history of Christianity.

At the time the writings of the New Testament first appeared, Christianity was an oppressed minority religion, easily distinguishable, not only from the all powerful Roman Empire, but also from the dominant Judaic ecclesiastical establishment of the time. When the Roman Emperor Constantine was converted to Christianity, the faith became less distinguishable from secular power. The comfortable liaison between Church and State continued after the fall of Rome, as the emerging imperial powers of modern Europe came to assume Rome's dominant position in the world, and it continued up to the 18th Century, when it was challenged by the secular political ideology of the Enlightenment, and by revolutionary movements, starting with the French Revolution.

We have now reached the point where the traditional monarchies of Europe have adopted the democratic political principles of the republics. As Crown and Altar no longer play a major part in our lives, we have returned to a situation similar to that in which the primitive Christian Church had to struggle for survival. Just as important is the fact that the democratic principle is losing its attraction. As it can be improved upon, people of the New Age will expect things to change.

Democracy was most popular in the early post-war years, when it compared so favourably with the political alternative of dictatorship. It still does, but that is not so much because democracy is a worthy system of government as it is because dictatorship is now generally recognised as an appalling system of government. As the risk that democracy will be replaced by dictatorship recedes all the time, people are less likely to cling to it through fear of the unknown. To many people today, the unknown can only be better than the failed political system we have.

A passage of Scripture, which was not likely to be emphasised when the Church held a position of authority, is that in Colossians chapter 2, which is all about gaining our freedom from human regulations by living a life in Christ. It is supportive of the distinction drawn in the previous chapter between the professional basis (i.e. the basis of human regulations), upon which the society of the principal liberal and democratic nations of the world now stands, and the prophetic basis (i.e. the life in Christ), upon which the society of the New Age needs to be built. Metaphorically speaking, the human race has to build a new house to live in on this new prophetic foundation, because the foundations of the house it is living in are so unsound that repair (i.e. turning yet again to some new political ideology) is no longer possible.

Verses 14 and 15 of this Chapter tell us, 'Having cancelled the written code with its regulations, that was against us and stood opposed to us, he took it away, nailing it to the cross. And, having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.'

For those unfamiliar with the Christian Myth, this may need some explanation. The passage is about the Christ of the Gospels, and the Cross on which He was crucified. The written code is the laws of men, under which He was tried, found guilty, and judicially executed. These laws are 'against us', in the sense that they are not ultimately for our benefit, but for the benefit of those in authority. The fact that they are unjust is proved, because they found God guilty. It is easy to see why, when the Church played a major role in government, it would keep silent on this matter. The Church is only likely to emphasise it when, as in the days of primitive Christianity and in the present age, it has to oppose human government on the grounds that human government is so obviously not inspired by God.

The Christ of the Gospels, according to the Christian Myth, is God Incarnate in man. The Gospels set out to describe how a man would behave if he possessed all the wisdom of God. If the Gospels are historically correct, they are telling us that such a man did live, was crucified, rose from the dead and now lives for ever, but the question of whether the Gospels are historically correct is, as we saw in Chapter 3, unimportant. The important thing is that the Gospels, whether they are based on fact or myth, provide us with a realistic portrait of what God Incarnate in man really is like.

We can deduce from all this that, as God is eternal, the wisdom that comes from God is eternal also. It survives our bodily death. It is recycled and returns to God. If we subscribe to Descartes' philosophical statement, 'I think, therefore I am', we recognise that our human essence is not to be found in our bodies but in our minds, and, if we believe in God, we obviously believe in a Higher Mind which, because it is detached from any material body, is eternally Pure Spirit, Pure Thought and Pure Wisdom. In the case of the Christ of the Gospels, as His Mind had absorbed the entire wisdom of God, it lives for ever as God. In the case of the believer who has absorbed part of the wisdom of God, that part lives on after death, and is recycled.

Exactly how this recycling takes place after death is obviously open to debate. No Christian can say with certainty that there is no such thing as reincarnation, especially as the Christian concept of resurrection is also a kind of recycling. In the Christian concept of life after death, the divine wisdom in our minds returns to God, and is held there until, through the activity of the Holy Spirit, it enters the mind of someone who, by being 'born again' becomes a Christian. So if, through the Grace of God, we acquire some of the wisdom of God, that wisdom has eternal life, and the essential part of us lives on.

The passage quoted from Colossians really tells us that, as Christ had all the wisdom of God, the attempt to put an end to him judicially under the laws of men backfired. The entire Mind of Christ survived, so He survives in essence and in Spirit, and He lives in the Christians of today. If the Christians of today do not put paid to the 'written code with its regulations', the Christians of tomorrow most certainly will. So, if, as Christians, we begin by questioning the validity of democratic government and the laws it produces and administers today, we will, as Christians and through the Grace of God, destroy these things tomorrow.

Later in the chapter, verses 20 to 22 ask, 'Since you died with Christ to the basic principles of this world, why, as though you still belong to it, do you still submit to its rules?' There could be no stronger condemnation of the Rule of Law to which we submit ourselves than that!! Then we are told, 'These are all destined to perish because they are based on human commands and teachings.'

As the rift between Church and State widens, the Church must give up trying to compromise its faith in order to uphold the authority of the State. Its failure to do so has contributed significantly to its lack of influence in modern society. True Christianity offers us the freedom of living in the Spirit as an alternative to submitting ourselves to the coercive laws imposed upon us by our 'democratically elected representatives', and operated through a legal, political and bureaucratic establishment more concerned about its own welfare than it is about ours. A new form of prophetic Christianity is needed today to restore the idea that Christianity is ultimately opposed to the political order, and will inevitably triumph over it.

We can, if we so choose, interpret history in that sense. Christianity did, in fact, triumph over the secular power by infiltrating it in the conversion of Constantine, and it continued to infiltrate secular power throughout the period of European imperialism. European imperialism collapsed when it no longer allowed itself to be infiltrated. When Third World countries gained their independence, the imperialists left them a legacy of democracy, which has been so grossly abused by their own politicians that it has become a dirty joke, and a legacy of Christianity, which is likely to become the foundation for their New Age.

As we have already seen, the sheer nonsense of the professional ethic which puts a supposed 'sanctity' of human life before the quality of life (which the believer knows goes on after death) has burdened the National Health Service with the costly procedures of maintaining life unnaturally. As a result, nursing services are stretched to the point of becoming inadequate, patients have to endure a prolonged life of misery, and the relatives who have to care for them have the quality of their life destroyed. Yet the professional ethic obstinately demands that this should go on, without ever stopping to ask the question, 'Why?' As a consequence of this ethic, the National Health Service, which is an institution of major importance to the 'politically correct', but is not as important to those who believe in eternal life, may soon end up in chaos.

This brings us to the main issue raised in this chapter of evolution rather than revolution. The prophetic Gospel of Freedom in Christ unashamedly challenges the validity of democratic government, the distribution of wealth, the value and use of money, and the rule of law. It makes no secret of the fact that, as democratic government, the distribution of wealth, the use of money and the rule of law cannot provide a sufficiently stable foundation upon which to build the society of the New Age, a stronger spiritual foundation has to be prepared. We are dangerously near to the time when the entire social structure of our society will collapse.

We cannot hope to repair this structure by trying out new political ideologies. Voting for a different political party is not going to solve our problems, because we will still be governed by professional politicians. Neither is the creation of a European mega-state or a review of the authority exercised respectively by local and national government. We will still end up with the same 'politically correct' professional foundation to our society, when we need a prophetic foundation. It would probably make little difference to the way we are governed during this period of transition from the present age to the New Age if there were no elections, or if the voters boycotted them. As politicians will not be needed in the New Age, their importance is diminishing already.

Having said all that, it is vitally important that we move around carefully in this tottering ruin of our civilisation, and that we proceed as rapidly as we can, through the process of spiritual renewal, to build the new structure that will replace it in the New Age. We must keep this tottering ruin as habitable as we can for the foreseeable future. A revolution would bring it collapsing about us, as it has done in Yugoslavia.

We can build the New Age structure by developing communities of people who are able to transcend the law by living harmoniously together in love, sharing their material wealth and holding all things in common as they live in the Spirit. They will be the forerunners of the New Age, and, when the tottering ruin of our civilisation collapses as the Rule of Law ceases to be obeyed, these communities may be sufficiently well established to evolve into a nation in which there is freedom rather than anarchy.

The emphasis from now on must be on spiritual rather than political change. We need, above all, to be politically inactive as we move quietly round in the tottering ruin of our civilisation, which is all we have to live in between now and New Age One.

That is the irony of the situation that we are in today. If we are wise enough to see that getting back to basics means more than getting back to the sound principles of good government, we will be wise enough to see also that we need to adopt all the sound principles of good government to carry us through this dangerous transitional period from now to New Age One. After that, the New Age structure of Freedom in the Spirit will be ready for us, and we will never have to be governed ever again.

Paradoxically, when we can see man's basic need for freedom, and recognise that it is incompatible with government, we can see also that it cannot be compromised with government. Ultimately, there can be no such thing as freedom under the law, and any attempt to improve on the system of government by amending the law at this stage in man's civilised development is doomed to failure. Democracy is the nearest we can get to freedom when we are still being governed, but democracy is not freedom, and what we want is our freedom.

So we have to turn a deaf ear to those who seek to impose their kind of government upon us - the protesters, demonstrators, the 'chattering classes' the political activists and the terrorists. These people will only add to the instability of our tottering ruin of civilisation. For while it may yet be possible to achieve marginal improvements to the quality of human society by political change, the major improvements that we so desperately need can only be achieved spiritually by changing human nature. We need to have better people before we can have a significantly better society. We dare not risk a Yugoslavian outcome to any attempt to improve things by political change. As Michael Portillo has said in the 'Back to Basics' context, 'If Crown Parliament and Church are not respected, neither will be law, judges or policemen, nor professors, nor teachers, nor social workers, nor bosses, managers and foremen. Social disorder follows when respect breaks down'.

The great paradox in the Christian position is that ultimately it cannot respect these 'basic principles of the world' and it cannot 'submit to its rules'. It has to build a new heaven and a new earth, but it has not built them yet, and until it has built them it has to sustain the present order and avoid anarchy. It is good for us to have our Christian vision of the New Age, and to know where we are going ultimately, because it helps us realise that we are not seeking an alternative political solution, but a spiritual solution that will transcend and replace the Rule of Law. We do not want to change Michael Portillo's order of things until they have been changed fundamentally by the spiritual renewal of the nation. Meanwhile we must give the existing order our qualified support.

Nobody who is unwilling to do something about his own selfishness is in any position to complain of other peoples' selfishness. The transformation of the world must begin within, with the transformation of ourselves. Yet, by the same token, nobody involved in Michael Portillo's system of government, whether it be Crown, Parliament, Church, the law, judges, policemen, professors, teachers, social workers, bosses, managers or foremen, can claim a right to hold authority in that system unless he, too, is prepared to do something about his own selfishness. Christ came into the world to save sinners. We are all sinners, and we must not resist salvation or flee from the Grace of God.

That way, and that way only, can we hope to live in the tottering ruin of our civilisation between 1994 and New Age One. The prophetic message has never been a comfortable one. That is why the prophet is never welcome in his own country, but Britain was saved once before by prophecy during the Wesleyan revival, and Britain can be saved by prophecy again. It is not too late, because we have not been overtaken by anarchy yet, and the salvation of Christ is still available. Once more, as in the days of Wesley, the reformers must move before the revolutionaries do.

Meanwhile I reflect on how the people of this once Christian nation are spending Holy Week and Easter in 1994. The majority will see it as a secular holiday and complain about the weather. A pious Christian minority will celebrate in the traditional way, just as the pious Jewish minority celebrated their Passover, and all the religious minorities in our multi-faith society celebrated feast days and fast days with the appropriate ritual. Yet for all this piety, none will have seriously challenged the authority of man in the prophetic manner required by all true religion. The divided faiths of our multi-faith society have to become One with the One True God before that is likely to happen! The barriers of human authority that still coerce the faithful, and jealously guard them as separate flocks, have to be broken down, for this human authority is the authority of the Chief Priests, who connived with Pilate to kill God, and who brainwashed the public into shouting 'Crucify Him!'. The public will not always be as easily coerced!

The divided Churches and Faiths can only survive in the New Age if they reform from within, recognising that the Authority of God takes precedence over the authority of the priesthood. The One Church of the future will be the Church of God's Choice, and it will be a Church of All Faiths. Evolution has to occur in the spiritual life as well as in the political life, and the faithful, as well as the New Age Travellers, some of whom already have a prophetic insight, have to evolve, from a people finding comfort in their faith and ideas, into responsible people determined to use their faith and ideas to change the world.

Where do we find Pilate today? I find it interesting to recall that, while I was a bureaucrat myself and undergoing my conversion, I asked Pilate's famous question, 'What is Truth?', and then learned the answer that Pilate is the essence of today's world of human authority. This world of the famous, of people familiar to Pilate, is a crumbling world in which all of them fear losing their jobs, and the greatest fear is among the most famous. It is a world in which the law must be obeyed, whether it is just or not, and whether it passes judgment on God or not. When it judges God, it judges and condemns itself. Then it has to be crucified metaphorically, so that it makes room for tomorrow's world, the world of the faithful who are determined to destroy human authority and its man-made laws because of the injustice they bring.

Tomorrow's world is the world of those who will have meekly followed and become the Example of the Incarnate God. Because the following process will be undertaken with meekness, it will be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. When they have achieved their objective, the meek will inherit the earth.

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CHAPTER 12 CONCLUSIONS

The question that I hope most readers will be asking by now is whether there can ever be a political solution to man's social and economic problems. We live at the end of a century of failed political experiments, and the people of Europe are justifiably sceptical of the current political experiment which aims to create a United States of Europe with a common currency, but without a common language. When the Moneyless Society in a State of Absolute Freedom comes into existence, there will be no need, either for a European Parliament or for a European Currency, and we may wonder whether they can be made effective in time for them to have a useful life before they become redundant.

It is significant that all of the negotiations for the creation of a United Europe are being undertaken by what can best be described as the Political and Bureaucratic Establishment of Europe, which has assumed, without any good reason for that assumption, that everything it does has the support of the people of Europe. An obvious question to be asked is, 'How can the people of Europe benefit from arrangements, which will create a vast amount of unproductive bureaucratic work, from which the Establishment will benefit, but which the people of Europe will have to pay for?'.

The European Community is therefore likely to follow Fascism and State Communism to become what may be man's last failed political experiment, if the view that there can only be a spiritual solution to man's problems happens to be the correct one. In that case, the perfect society will be one in which human nature has been changed into the Perfect Nature of Christ, and such a society can only be achieved through a process of spiritual renewal.

The example of the discredited Communist State shows that, while equality is still a sound principle, and Marx's 'From each according to his ability to each according to his need' still cannot be faulted, any attempt to establish an egalitarian society by political means is fundamentally flawed. This is because the political method demands the existence of a Government, and, whatever form Government takes, it cannot avoid creating a ruling class. Until human nature has been changed, every ruling class will expect to be rewarded with social and economic advantages, and this expectation conflicts with the egalitarian principles of Marxism. The fault lies, not in the principle of equality, but in the principle of government. An egalitarian society must, by its nature, be an ungoverned society.

Thus the Moneyless Society in a State of Absolute Freedom is able to preserve the principle of equality, whereas the Marxist State cannot. The Moneyless Society must therefore appeal more strongly to the underprivileged than the Marxist State could ever have done. Indeed, anyone who enjoys average prosperity in today's society cannot be worse off economically in an egalitarian Moneyless Society. These 'average people', combined with the 'below average' do, in fact, form a substantial majority in today's society, and, while the 'average people' would neither gain nor lose economically from the change, they would gain substantially in a spiritual sense, because they would find themselves with more leisure and less stress. The spiritual gain is likely to be so substantial that even those whose economic position is marginally above average would be likely to gain overall from the change. It follows that, if we believe less in the ballot box ritual of democracy, and more in the popular consensus reality, the fact that a Moneyless Society and a State of Absolute Freedom must be of enormous advantage to a substantial majority of the world's population would require its urgent implementation without the need for an election.

The vested interests most adversely affected by the change would be in the upper middle and upper classes, where the adverse effect would be economic, and compensated by spiritual gain. The rich should think profoundly about what really matters in life, and evaluate the real importance of wealth and status in terms of happiness. If they cannot overcome their dependence on wealth and status, they will make themselves look foolish in a world made wiser by its recognition of the unimportance of wealth and status. Ridicule will be the obvious response to any resistance from vested interests.

Those who believe in freedom and equality must always be willing to let those with other views express them freely. These opposite views may be foolish. They certainly would be if inspired by self interest, and if they are, they have to be challenged. If they are suppressed, their folly will never be exposed. Whenever the principles of freedom and equality have been enforced by a ruling class (the classic examples are found in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution), that ruling class has always denied freedom of expression to those holding contrary opinions. The irony of this lies in the fact that Revolutionaries usually see themselves as Freedom Fighters. The slogan of the French Revolution put liberty before equality. As well as violating its own principle of equality, a post-revolutionary ruling class inevitably violates its own principle of liberty or freedom when it suppresses the opinions of those who oppose the Revolution.

The principles of freedom and equality are not violated when the world is changed by spiritual rather than by political means. As we saw in Chapter 4, we cannot hope to change the world spiritually in a day, and the evolutionary process of spiritual change is best achieved, as we saw in Chapters 4 and 5, by the creation of Communities of like-minded people who are dedicated to those principles of Love, Wisdom and Peace that sit so comfortably with the principles of Equality and Freedom. These Communities will have to struggle at first to survive in a hostile materialist world. Like today's New Age Travellers, they will pose a serious threat to the social, economic and political ethos. Like the vulnerable early Christians, they will have to deny themselves the use of coercion, and the traditional means used by the politically motivated to achieve their aims. To do otherwise would violate their fundamental principles, so they will lack the means of responding blow for blow to challenges from vested interests. People conditioned to believe in the profit motive and the rule of law will not find it easy to understand how these vulnerable Communities will be able to survive, during the early stages of reform, but they will survive and grow as the early Christians did.

The other serious question affecting these Communities in the early stages of social reform arises from the obvious attraction that a Moneyless Society must have for the underprivileged. There is a danger that most of the early members of these Communities will come from underprivileged backgrounds. Communities which consist mainly of poor people are likely to be seriously underfunded. Both of these questions have to be faced before we can seriously contemplate the spiritual renewal of the world proceeding through the creation of these Communities.

The answer to these questions is to be found in the kind of response that can be expected to a programme of social reform through spiritual renewal from the wealthier members of society. The success of the programme of social reform rests entirely upon the success of the programme of spiritual renewal. Spiritual renewal must light the spark of Charity in the hearts and minds of those renewed. That is its purpose, and that is why the renewal programme should target the more advantaged members of our society.

The Welfare State has created an unwieldy, and largely unnecessary, professional and bureaucratic class which, because it produces little or no wealth from its own activities, has become a parasitic growth on the Nation's economy. Members of this class are relatively well off, but not wealthy. Most of them would be worse off in an egalitarian society. As they see their wealth as earned and not inherited, they feel they are justified in spending it on themselves. They fail to appreciate that, although most of them have worked hard for what they have, very little of their largely bureaucratic work has done anything to enhance the quality of life of those who have had to contribute, through taxation or sometimes more directly through professional fees, to their material wealth. I am only too conscious of this situation, because my own career as a Tax Inspector is a good example of the work done by this class. The professions of Law and Accountancy, with which I had much dealing in my work, provide other good examples. Much of the work created by argument between the Inland Revenue and the Professions only exists because taxation laws are more complex than they need to be.

The least successful members of this bureaucratic and professional class would be as materially well off in an egalitarian society. The more successful members of this class include some of the most intelligent members of our society, and they cannot pretend not to understand the principles argued for in this book. They can only reject these principles on selfish grounds because they have to admit, at the end of the day, that, however hard they have worked to attain their position in our society, their work has been motivated largely by selfish ambition. They have spent their lives following a career, motivated by their own prospects of success, rather than a vocation, motivated by their religious faith or their concern for the welfare of others. Not all of them will be able to resist the call to repentance that a book like this makes, and, as a result, many will be willing to bring their own not insubstantial resources into the developing Communities, finding as they do so a sense of joy that they would not otherwise have experienced.

Many of the upper class, schooled in the principles of 'noblesse oblige', will also come to regard the Communities as their natural home. Some may even allow their stately homes to be used as Community homes. Preaching the Gospel of Christ as exemplary of a happy but unselfish way of life is likely to have greater effect upon these more intelligent members of our society than the fundamentalist Gospel which expects the believer to accept that everything he reads in Scripture is historically true. Its effectiveness is likely to result in the spiritual conversion of many of those who possess the wealth that the Communities will need in the early stage of their development.

There is therefore a reasonable hope that the Communities will be adequately funded in their early stages, but the question remains to be answered of how these early Communities can survive in this selfish materialist world, when they lack any power of coercion and have to rely entirely on the Grace of God and the Guidance of the Holy Spirit. No committed Christian would see this as a problem, because he would recognise the Grace of God and the Holy Spirit as symbolic of the Ultimate in Power and Authority. There could not possibly be a firmer foundation upon which to build a Community.

Followers of other faiths would find little difficulty tracing a clear approval of the Community idea in their own Scripture. Jews, and probably Muslims as well, would find authority in the prophecy of Jeremiah that the Laws of God (that is to say the Torah and the Shari'a) will, at the end of the age, be written in our minds and set in our inward parts (Jeremiah 31 vv 31/4), and that should encourage them to reflect more sympathetically upon the Christian theology of Grace, through which Jeremiah's prophecy can be realised in the spiritual transformation of human nature.

So, the Communities, by eschewing all use of the coercive weapons of politics and law, will find themselves effectively using the Ultimate Weapon against sin - the Grace of God and the Holy Spirit. At first, they will have to survive in a world in which the majority is committed to the view that the social and economic problems of mankind can be solved by political means. The world in which these Communities will begin their lives is the world we know today. People will still vote for their favourite party at elections, in the vain hope that their vote may be significant in bringing about a change in the social, economic and political condition of our world. It is none of our business, as believers and potential Community members, to try to stop them. If they are foolish enough to believe in the power of the ballot box, they must be left to discover from painful experience, as we have done, that belief in the power of the ballot box is an absurd belief to hold.

This is just one example of the Community principle that, just because we have strong beliefs of our own, we do not have to force them upon others who happen to think otherwise. That censorious attitude is the attitude of political activists and revolutionaries. We are so sure that we are right that we can afford to be tolerant of the views of others. They will see their mistakes eventually and come round to our way of thinking. When we are determined to change the world, patience becomes a virtue.

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EPILOGUE

St. Paul uses the members of the human body, and their diverse functions, as an example to illustrate the diverse vocations to which we members of the Christian Community are called. He does this in Chapter 12 of his letter to the Romans, and in Chapter 12 of his first letter to the Corinthians, referring first to the various members of the human body ( eyes. ears etc.) and then to the kinds of vocation to which we are called. In his letter to the Corinthians (verses 27 and 28), he writes, 'Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it. And in the Church, God has appointed, first of all apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then workers of miracles, also those having gifts of healing, those able to help others, those with gifts of administration, and those speaking in different kinds of tongues'.

Notice that he puts apostles and prophets first, and administrators and those who speak in tongues last! In Romans (verses 6 to 8), he omits the apostles and speakers in tongues altogether, but he still puts prophecy first and leadership last! The other point to notice is that both times he moves directly from the diversity of vocations to the importance of love (Romans 12 verses 9 to 21, and 1 Corinthians chapter 13). Love, and not law, is what holds the Christian Community together.

The same diversity of vocations exists in today's Christian Community. The vast majority of Christians are called to a ministry that includes 'teaching, encouraging, giving to the needs of others, governing and showing mercy', but only a few are called to the more demanding vocation of 'prophecy' (the words quoted are from verses 7 and 8 of Romans Chapter 12). The function of those called to the less demanding ministries is to make the world we know a more tolerable place to live in. The prophet's function is to recognise that the world we live in is fundamentally flawed, and that it needs to be changed fundamentally and finally into the Kingdom of God, a process that requires us all to follow St Paul's directions in Romans Chapter 12 verse 2, 'Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your minds'.

The need for Christians following these two very different kinds of vocation to be held together by the bonds of love, so that each kind respects all the work that the other kind is called to do, cannot be emphasised enough. Without that love there is dissent, and the prophet would condemn all holy wars and religious conflict as a flagrant breach of God's Holy Will. Where Christians respond to their vocation, without criticising or envying those called to do other things, they follow the Example of Christ to the point where they live in a State of Grace which transcends the Law. Where they do not, there is religious conflict.

There is so much religious conflict today, that we tend towards a philosophy that is neutral towards religion in order not to offend the leaders of ecclesiastical establishments who are jealous of each other. Since the atheist point of view also has to be considered in a society which has come to regard discrimination as a major evil, a philosophy neutral to religion becomes a philosophy neutral to God. Ironically, it is more the fault of our religious leaders, that we have this neutral philosophy, than it is the fault of atheists! The prophet's message to the religious leaders of today is therefore, 'Repent and reform yourselves, because the problems arising from this neutrality towards God are enormous'

Through its neutrality towards religion, formal education in Britain misleads children into believing that religion is unimportant. Attempts to be impartial in religious education tend to emphasise the form of religion at the expense of the substance. In a multi-faith society, teachers may be criticised for failing to describe the religious forms of the various faiths now followed in this country. This leaves them with no time at all to go into the deeper aspects of spirituality. In any case, very few teachers have sufficient spiritual experience to understand what the word 'spirituality' means, and even fewer are able to express themselves as impartially as the principle of 'political correctness' requires. True spiritual experience usually comes in the wrappings of the faith one has always followed! That there is some kind of interplay between the Divine Mind and the human mind is an idea common to all religion, but it is the aspect of religion least likely to be taught in our schools today. The result is only too obvious in the spiritually immature output from our compulsory education system, and in the depraved behaviour of some of our youth.

Ironically, our greatest gain from today's compulsory education is likely to come when these young people wake up to the fact that so much of what they were compelled to learn, because of the laws made by the political establishment, was so much rubbish. This will turn them against the political establishment, and hasten its demise.

The prophet is an uncomfortable companion for members of both the ecclesiastical and political establishments to be with. He bases his authority on his direct access to the Wisdom of God. In this way, he becomes the living proof that, while the ministry of the priesthood and the ritual and dogma of the Church can be helpful in spreading the Gospel of Christ, it is not essential. The prophet's relationship with God does not depend upon the ministry of the priesthood, so he shows that the essential features of Christianity are capable of surviving the demise of the ecclesiastical establishment. This marginalises the authority of the Church. Indeed, the prophet's devotion to God, rather than to the Church, can be embarrassing for the Church if he sees the Church as territory to be surrendered when a strategic withdrawal is needed to enable God to win the battle to gain His Kingdom on earth.

The prophet's presence is even more embarrassing to the political establishment. The ecclesiastical establishment can at least rejoice in the prophet's determination to help forward the Kingdom of God, but the prophet has nothing to offer the political establishment in exchange for the prophesied loss of authority. The prophetic link between God and Government was broken through the compromise reached between the political establishment and atheism. The faith of those who seek to be part of the professional, political and bureaucratic establishment is no longer tested or regarded as important.

In stark contrast to this, it is impossible for a prophet to compromise with atheism. He knows through his own experience that God exists, and, as he knows that he owes his wisdom to his relationship with God, he does not expect those who deny themselves that relationship to have much wisdom. Not surprisingly, he sees atheism as the philosophy of fools, and the atheist academic as an educated idiot. Whereas the atheist both challenges and refuses to accept the authority of God, the prophet both challenges and refuses to accept the authority of uninspired man. When the prophet uses his God-given wisdom to challenge the authority of a Government that lacks God's approval, there can be no rational answer to his challenge, for all government today has to be supported by popular consensus, and that can change rapidly to support the philosophy of the prophet.

We may well ask whether a prophetic view of the future can help us to live in the present. Most of us realise that our own future will be a mixture of what we like and what we dislike, and we may prefer not to know. We all know we are going to die, but we would rather not think about that unless we are quite certain of life after death. The stronger our faith, the more willing we are to think about the future, and the more willing we are to think about the future, the more likely we are to become prophets. Prophets must always recognise that, even though they may see the future, they cannot change it. To some, it may appear that they they do, but all that their influence achieves is to enable a pre-determined future to happen.

Obviously there are cases where knowledge of the future can help us in the present. Had I known that my wife would die before me, I would have worried less about how she would manage if I died first. The rich man who knows when he is going to die can enjoy spending his money or giving it away before he dies. Arguably, the worry that some of us have that we may have to spend years in an expensive nursing home before we die is never justified, because we can hardly expect to be happy if we have to live for any length of time in such an environment. Deprived of the costly care, we would get the business of dying over quickly enough.

So much for prophecy about our future as individuals, but let us suppose that this book provides an accurate picture of what life will be like in the next century, if we all voluntarily submit to the process of spiritual renewal now. Can we live more fulfilling lives today if we know what tomorrow's world will be like?

If the predicted future appeals to us, we will not want our own stubborn and selfish refusal to be spiritually renewed to be a cause of delay. So we will absorb the prophecy, spread the good news, and change our way of life. Association of Nostradamus and the date July 1999 with the change can make Nostradamus' prophecy self-fulfilling, by helping us to realise that the change can take place that soon, given our cooperation. When those concerned about the ecology recognise that the ecology would benefit more from a change in human nature than from a change in the law, they too will want to hasten this change.

If we know that we are going to die in July 1999, we would be foolish not to spend or give away all of our money and private property before it happens. Where money and private property are concerned, the creation of a Moneyless Society and a State of Absolute Freedom in July 1999 would have the same effect as dying. Money will be as useless to us in a Moneyless Society as it will be when we are dead. This should concentrate our minds on spending it or giving it away now, which is what we ought to start doing as soon as possible, by forming ourselves into Communities in which all things are held in common and everyone is free, because everyone has been spiritually renewed!

It helps us enormously to realise that the end of political authority and the rule of law are essential features of the perfect society, because it enables us to distinguish between the State of Absolute Freedom, which can only exist after the rule of law has collapsed, and the rule of law itself. It helps us to realise that a stable society can only exist either under rigidly enforced laws, or in that State of Absolute Freedom that will follow the collapse of the rule of law. As we can only have the freedom we seek after we have been spiritually renewed, we must be prepared to accept a more rigid form of political authority than we have under Liberal Democracy, if we cannot accept spiritual renewal. Right-wing or Left-wing dictatorship, or something akin to Islamic fundamentalism is the only solution to the problems of violent crime, drug-related offences, vice, pornography and the growing number of serious crimes committed by children, if we reject the alternative of spiritual renewal that leads ultimately to the State of Grace or Absolute Freedom that transcends the law.

Liberal Democracy has served its purpose. It has helped us make an important advance towards our ultimate goal of human freedom, but it is not capable of maintaining order in a heathen society, and it is not needed in a reformed Christian Community where the Law is transcended by Grace. The heathen state of Liberal Democracy is an absurd foundation upon which to try to build a stable society. Its rejection of prophecy reminds one of the unstable two-legged stool of Russian Government which rejected, first of all the prophecy of Solovyov, and secondly the prophecy of Solzhenitsyn. Liberal Democracy is part of the route of man's pilgrimage towards the State of Absolute Freedom, but it can never become the State of Absolute Freedom, because that has to be built on a prophetic foundation, and not on a foundation of Liberal laws.

The authoritarian regimes of the extreme Left, of the extreme Right, and of Islamic fundamentalism, are capable of preserving order. The Moneyless Society in a State of Absolute Freedom will preserve order even more effectively, but the intermediate heathen state of Liberal Democracy can only lead to anarchy.

In a Moneyless Society it will not be possible for anyone to make a financial profit. Drugs, pornography and sexual favours will have to be given away because they cannot be sold. The profit motive will have been replaced by the charitable motive, and things will be given to people because we love them. This will affect the type of products that will be available, because people will only work to satisfy the Community's needs, and nobody will feel himself called to supply noxious substances to his friends.

Since all wealth will belong to the Community, and individuals will own nothing, theft will be impossible. If someone tries to acquire and hoard something needed by the Community, it will be taken from him. As everything 'stolen' will be 'stolen' back, nobody will steal. Anyone who sets himself apart from the Community because of his unreformed behaviour, for example anyone who resists the Community's attempt to 'steal back' from him, will be regarded as part of the underclass.

Because everything will be held in common, the Community will be egalitarian. The distinction between rich and poor will no longer exist, and, since all work will be done voluntarily, the distinction between working class and the other classes will vanish also. However, the complete transformation of human nature into the Perfect Nature of Christ may take longer than the creation of an egalitarian society, acceptable to the majority. There may, at first, be an underclass, distinguishable from the majority by the selfish behaviour of its members. As selfishness will be equated with foolishness, and fools will not be suffered gladly, this underclass will be a permanent object of ridicule, against which it will have no protection. Moreover, if the world faces a danger of overpopulation, the underclass will be regarded as expendable and surplus to the population economy. The underclass will therefore be eliminated fairly quickly by assimilation without need for extermination. Being unselfish, and being part of a classless society will be seen as a better alternative to being without hope.

As we come closer to the ultimate fulfilment of Prophecy, that is to say the end of the present age and the beginning of the New Age, the Prophet's Message is likely to become less mysterious and more rational. Today's Prophet can use scientific language, because we are able to understand it. His inspiration eventually reacts with our reasoning, and we see the prophetic vision as a mixture of inspiration and rational deduction. To prophesy accurately, we have to be able to identify irreversible trends and to project them forwards. That is a rational view of prophecy, but it is not that easy for us to identify these irreversible trends without Divine Inspiration. Even if we identify them as a progressive growth in human sophistication and a quest for absolute freedom, we cannot be sure that our identification did not originate from Divine Guidance. Yet, when we have identified these as being probably the most significant of the irreversible trends, we are able to prophecy by projecting them forwards and reflecting upon what the world will be like when everyone is perfectly wise and perfectly free.

We cannot become wiser without also becoming less selfish, and more loving towards others, and we cannot expect to be free unless we accept our share of the responsibility for caring for those less fortunate than ourselves. This very necessary transformation of human nature, which must happen before the New Age, does seem to be entirely in harmony with God's Plan for us, but as it is not mysterious, but wonderfully logical, we could believe that we thought of it ourselves.

Living as we do, at the end of an age of great scientific and technical development, we have come to associate prophecy with science fiction. For the past hundred and fifty years it has been right for us to visualise the future as a time when our scientific and technical capabilities will be greater than they are in the present. In this book, I have had little to say about that aspect of tomorrow's world, because I sense that there is a greater need for us to change our way of life, to gain the maximum advantage from the scientific and technical knowledge that we already have, than there is for us to extend that knowledge. Our greatest mistake has probably been to use the word 'unemployment' to describe the leisure that we have gained from the inspiration we have been given to let technology do our work for us. We must learn to accept that leisure with gratitude, and change the ethic of work, so that all work is done voluntarily and nobody's livelihood has to depend on his ability to find work. This would happen in the Moneyless Society. Only then can we reasonably use technology to do even more work for us. Only then can pushing back the frontiers of science and technology even further have a purpose.

Christians believe that a New Age of Man began some 2000 years ago with the Incarnation, but many hundreds of years passed before they adopted the Anno Domini system of recording time from the beginning of the Christian Age. Historians, like the Venerable Bede, had to work their way back through recorded history to discover this new starting point, and then they had to rewrite the historical dates of the past as years 'Anno Domini', or as years 'Before Christ'. Modern theologians believe that these historians got the date of Christ's birth wrong, and, if the Nativity Story is a Myth, there can be no such historical date.

If the Nativity Story is a Myth, we can see why it was impossible for early Christian historians to identify the year of Christ's birth accurately. We can be sure that the Christian Faith, based on the story of the Incarnation, had begun by A.D.50, but, arguably its origin could have been at any time in the 150 or so years prior to A.D.50. The fundamental question is whether the Faith began with the conception of a Son in the womb of Mary, a virgin at the time of conception, engaged to be married to Joseph, a carpenter who was able to trace his descent directly from David, who ruled the Jews some 1000 years earlier, or whether it began with the conception of a divinely inspired Myth in the mind of a prophet or in the minds of members of a prophetic community. If the Nativity story is historical, we can safely assume that the Christian Faith began within a few years of, A.D.1., but if it is a prophetic Myth, its origin could be as ancient as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The scholars, who have had the Scrolls for over forty years, owe it to mankind to publish their findings. What little we know suggests that the sect responsible for the Scrolls had access to a kind of Incarnation Theology, not quite the same as Christianity, but not quite the same as Judaism either. It could be the theology from which Christianity developed, an inspired theology, which God intended to be improved and eventually perfected in the writings of the New Testament.

We should see the Incarnation, whether it be fact or inspired myth, as the first instalment of a story that has taken the past two thousand years to unfold. The story will end with the Incarnation of God in the whole of humanity, and we may already have reached the point in the story where no other ending is feasible. I make no prediction that the end will come suddenly on December 31st Anno Domini 2000, so that the next day will be January 1st New Age One. My prediction is that the Incarnation of God in the whole of humanity is a process that may yet take years to complete, but when it is complete, people will try to trace when the final stage of the process, the New Age, began. The precise date of origin may be as difficult to ascertain as the precise date of origin of Christianity, but the present state of the world suggests that, once the New Age process of change has begun, it will progress more rapidly than Christianity did. We may not even have reached the next millennium before we know that enormous changes world wide have occurred rapidly in the social, economic and political form, beginning with the collapse of Socialism in Eastern Europe, and proceeding to events of major importance that may occur in the immediate future. In that case, the most reasonable suggestion would be to regard A.D.2001 as New Age 1.

The much acclaimed 'New Dawn' of the early 20th Century was Socialism, the thinking man's answer to Capitalism. Even with Socialism in its present state of terminal decline, no reasonable person would advocate Capitalism as a long term alternative to Socialism. While it is perfectly true that Charity, practised within the Capitalist State, can bring greater benefits to the needy than Socialism can, the virtuous element is not Capitalism. It is Charity.

The lesson learned from the failed Socialist experiment is that every society unredeemed by the Incarnation has a ruling class which exploits everyone else. We cannot be free if we have a ruling class, but we cannot abolish the ruling class if we remain unredeemed and without Grace. Society without a ruling class is an egalitarian society, in which equal responsibilities matter more than equal rights. That unselfish responsibility must be present in everyone before the ruling class can be abolished. When we look back at 20th Century wars, famines, corruption, and failed political ideologies, we see it as a century of disasters, none of which could happen to people who were unselfish, responsible and charitable enough in their behaviour towards one another not to need to be governed. These disasters were caused by the ruling class's concern to preserve itself.

This world, traditionally ruled by some kind of ruling class since the dawn of civilisation, is not the world that people will want in the New Age. If the New Age world of Freedom is to be worth living in, it must become God's World. When we want to live in God's world, we can be sure that God will make it happen as soon as we sacrifice our own selfishness. The New Age will begin as soon as we want it to, and as soon as we achieve the redemption of our fallen human nature, by being transformed into Christ's Perfect Nature and by living in a State of Grace. I cannot be more precise than that in my prediction, but I hope that Nostradamus was right and that the old corrupt world we live in today will end in July 1999.

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NEW AGE ONE

APPENDIX 1

An escape from the orthodox monetary system

My attention has been drawn to an article appearing in the first issue for 1994 of the magazine 'Resurgence' which describes the Local Exchange Trading Systems (L.E.T.S.) which began in Canada in 1983, and which have spread elsewhere in the world, including Australia and Britain. 'Someone else has got hold of your idea of a Moneyless Society', was the comment!

The thinking behind L.E.T.S. is that there are people in every community who have services to offer in exchange for the things they need, but cannot afford. A straight barter system is of no help to them because the people who have the things they need do not want the things they have to offer. The monetary system was invented to get over that problem, but it has now become so complicated, and supports such a huge parasitic bureaucracy, that a simpler and less costly monetary system is needed to replace it. L.E.T.S. meets that need.

If we picture a local community with an unemployment problem, we recognise that the conventional marketing system denies poor people, who are capable of producing goods or providing services, access to the market because they cannot afford the costly advertising, publicity and sales promotion techniques that are expected today. Consequently they remain unemployed, and the whole community suffers because it has to import aggressively marketed products and services, which could just as well be provided within the community, if everyone could get down to the job of producing or providing them.

L.E.T.S. is a kind of local Bank. A local currency is invented and given a name. To illustrate the point we could call the unit of currency a 'Letter', but any other name would do. Someone in the local community is made Banker, and people who give or receive goods and services are credited or debited with the appropriate amount of 'Letters', instead of being credited and debited with the appropriate amount of pounds and pence. People who might otherwise be unemployed, because they cannot market their skills or their goods, are thus enabled to work to provide goods and services needed within the community in exchange for a local currency that is acceptable within the community, and which cuts out the professional bankers and financiers who profit so much from the monetary system. It also opens the market to local produce, and reduces the expensive and aggressively marketed produce that the poor local community would otherwise have to 'import'.

While L.E.T.S. is able to help a run-down community with high unemployment to prosper by its own efforts, it does not go as far as the Moneyless Society proposed in this book, because it does not recognise that the time has come for us to take the most significant step ever in the civilisation of man - the spiritual transformation of human nature. L.E.T.S. obviously expects a fairly high level of trust and integrity from those using the scheme, because contracts made in the local currency can hardly be enforced in law, so why not go that one step further to create, by the process of spiritual renewal, a new society that lives in a State of Grace and which no longer needs the Law?

In that case, the run-down community with a high level of unemployment would live as a community rather than as a collection of individuals trading their skills for profit in a way that is only unconventional in the sense that the currency used as money is unconventional. Why cannot people be wholly unconventional, and give their services freely within the community without any expectation of reward?. If everyone does it, the community starts working again to provide, from within itself, all the goods and services that the community needs. This is made possible because everyone in the community is willing to work for the community rather than for himself.

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NEW AGE ONE

APPENDIX 2

Thoughts about my own community

When I discovered, about a month before Eileen died, that her illness was terminal, I agonised for some days about how I would manage without her. The logical thing to do was to sell the house and move to more suitable accommodation, but I only found peace when I decided against that, and prepared myself to go on living here for the time being, and for the rest of my life if necessary.

Most of the ideas on which this book is based had already formed in my mind. Eileen's illness and death confirmed them and gave them added force. The idea of a Community in which retired people could care for one another had been in my mind for many years, but Eileen had never taken my ideas seriously enough to want to be part of an experiment to try them out. The Community is best explained in the context of a Moneyless Society, where nobody owns houses or their contents, because everything belongs to the Community.

In such a society, people needing accommodation would expect, of right, to be given it. If no empty houses or flats were available, they would expect to be housed by those with rooms to spare. Someone in each parish would make it his business to know where the spare rooms and empty houses were. Those who do not enjoy having their spare rooms used as temporary accommodation for the homeless would move into smaller houses. Retired people, many of whom would have spare rooms because their children have left home, would probably prefer to move into larger houses used as a Communes by elderly people.

These Communes would attract the newly retired to join them and use them as home for the rest of their lives. When Commune members die, younger persons replace them. As everyone in the Commune gets older every year, a reasonable balance between the newly retired and the very old is achieved by taking the newly retired as new members. The fit and active members of the Commune would be expected to care for the old and infirm, and they would, in these circumstances, expect to be cared for themselves when their time of need comes.

Since we are reflecting upon Communes that will exist in tomorrow's world, we have to recognise that their members will be wiser and less selfish than we are. They will join, willing to give the service that is needed of them, and they will not feign infirmity, as many selfish elderly people do now, just to gain attention. The work required of the fit and active will not be burdensome, and often less so than the work most retired people do now in their houses and gardens. There will be time for holidays, and no risk of burglary. The Communes will improve the quality of life for older people.

It therefore seemed reasonable, in the context of the book I was writing, for me to try to create a Commune in the house that would become mine when Eileen died. Immediately, things began to happen which confirmed my decision.

Just before Eileen was admitted to the North London Hospice, we entertained friends to tea, and they promised to visit her on her first day in the Hospice. They were unable to, because the wife suffered a severe stroke on that day. She was unconscious for five days, and was not expected to live. As I talked to the husband, I remembered that I had once mentioned my idea of a Commune for the elderly to him, and that he was interested in the idea. If, as we thought likely, our wives were to die within weeks of each other, he would join the Commune.

A few days later, a lady we played Bridge with visited Eileen in the Hospice, and she was leaving as I arrived. As Eileen needed a rest between visitors, we chatted, and I mentioned how the idea of a Commune was helping me to come to terms with the situation. To my surprise, she was enthusiastic about the idea, and wanted to know more about it.

A member of our Church lost his wife a fortnight before Eileen died. He too was interested. As I could only fit three people comfortably into my Commune, it seemed the places were already filled, and that I was meant to go ahead with the idea.

After an operation, a spell in intensive care, and three months in hospital, my friend's wife recovered sufficiently to return home, partially recovered but disabled. The other two had unforeseen problems disposing of their flats, and saw that they could become homeless if they came into the Commune and found that it did not work. Both gave me the same good advice - to forget about the Commune for the moment, but to remain in the house at least until I had finished the book.

Eileen's death had been a profound spiritual experience for me. As she slipped away, the book and the Commune grew in importance. Any hope that she might be healed through prayer seemed to be conditional upon her ultimate cooperation with the book and the Commune. I could only pray, 'Thy Will be done', and leave it to God to decide whether she would help with my vocation, or whether I should be free to do as I, or rather He, pleased. The 14th to 17th Chapters of John's Gospel suddenly became relevant to all that was happening. If she died, it would be so that something more important to God would live.

I expected to be surprised by the future, which is not what one expects to happen in bereavement, when so often there appears to be no future, and it was in that frame of mind that I chose the readings from John's Gospel for the funeral service and the words from Psalm 126;

'Those who sow in tears shall reap with songs of joy.

Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed, shall come again

in gladness, bringing their sheaves with them.

For two months, the idea of the Commune remained uppermost in my mind, but then I discovered what being surprised by the future is really like. It seemed increasingly unlikely that the two men would join the Commune, and the lady and I became fond of one another as we went more deeply into the more intimate details of how a mixed community of elderly people would live in love in a house in a North London suburb.

I had been incredibly naive. As Eileen and I had grown old together, sex had become less important, as we found to our delight that love is more important than sex in marriage. We were deeply in love, and it was the kind of love that was needed as a cement to bind the Commune together. I saw no difference between the way I loved Eileen at the end, and the way I, and each member of the Commune, would love the three other members.

My lady friend's experience of marriage had been rather different! We were of the same age, but she did not think, as I thought, that there is no sex after seventy. She helped me discover my error through a simple practical experiment, and it changed my thinking entirely about the more intimate relationships within the Commune. The experiment was a pure exercise in a kind of loving that seemed right, and which could enhance the quality of life in a Commune!

There remained the mundane problem of money. To practice what the book preaches would require me to give everything I have to the Commune, but it would require the other members all to make the same unselfish sacrifice. The house and contents are probably worth over £250,000, and it would not be much of a sacrifice for someone to come here who had only £5000 to offer! It could be seen as a very good investment, but that was not the point! Other members should also make a financial sacrifice, so that funds built up to enable the Commune to expand to accommodate more members. Its example should be an influence on the life of the local community. Commune members live more cheaply than people living on their own, and can give more generously to Charity.

It therefore seemed reasonable to expect members to put up about £60,000 each if I was to put up over £250,000, but I knew very well that Eileen expected me not to prejudice our sons' expectation of a legacy after my death. It occurred to me that, as tax has to be paid at 40% on Estates over £150,000, there was not much point in my leaving more than that. I decided that this mundane problem could be solved by creating a Charitable Trust to own the house in perpetuity to provide living accommodation for the elderly subject to an interest-free loan of £150,000 repayable on my death to my two sons. All my other possessions would then be transferred to the Trust, and I would still be contributing substantially more than the other three members. Their contributions would provide the funds to repay the £150,000 loan on my death and some of the capital needed for repairs and expansion. Hopefully, if they, like me, could afford to put in more than £60,000, they would. The Commune could be expanded by building in the garden (subject to planning permission) or by acquiring other houses.

Nearly six months have passed since Eileen died, and I have quite enjoyed being surprised by the future. Neither my lady friend nor I know quite what to make of what has happened to us, or what to do about it, other than to let ourselves go on being surprised by the future. Getting married again does not seem to be as good an idea as forming a Commune in which everyone loves everyone else. I cannot help it if I still love Eileen, and, as it cannot be many years before I die, I look forward to being with her again for eternity. But what happens now? Will the Commune be formed? If so, will any of the three people initially interested belong to it? Do my lady friend and I have a future together, or did we just meet to give one another encouragement, or even a new approach to life, and then go our separate ways? Something of our relationship has found its way into the book, and I am sure she realises that the book has become the most important thing in my life.

There is a vast difference between the kind of Commune that may be formed before the prophetic ideas in the book have made their impact, and the kind of Community that may be formed afterwards. Will I be a member of the kind of Community that can be only formed after these ideas have made their impact? That is the really important question, and it demonstrates why I had to finish the book before starting a Commune, which may turn out to be a Community.

People have to change before the kind of Community visualised in the book can be formed. This is because only a minority of people in Britain take their religious faith seriously, probably as few as 10%. Of these, an even tinier minority, probably far less than 10%, think of themselves as believers, rather than as Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and so on. How many Christians would share my view that the Church's teaching and ritual is unimportant so long as the Church remains divided, and that what really matters is that we discern, follow and become the Example of Christ? How many followers of other faiths would be willing to include that fundamental and vital element of Christianity in their system of belief, provided that they are not expected to accept the rest of the ritual, authority and dogma of any of the divided Christian Churches?

Yet, following and becoming the Example of Christ has to be the foundation upon which Communities are to be built. In a sense, a new religious faith has to be invented, a Communal Faith of all believers, a Faith which acknowledges the importance of following and becoming Christ's Example, but which is open to be influenced by the mysticism and spirituality of all religious faiths. For no other faith can so successfully challenge the authority of man as it is exercised through the Rule of Law. This Communal Faith of all believers will acknowledge only the Authority of God. This we see in the Example of Christ, and it is exercised in a State of Absolute Freedom by following and becoming it. There is no coercion. We simply follow the lead of Christ, and march as closely as we can to the Leader. This Communal Faith invites members of all faiths to make common cause in the spiritual renewal of Britain, challenging the exercise of human authority in both religion and politics. The focal point of this challenge is the Community.

I cannot visualise the necessary commitment to this cause coming from people who have not grasped the need to challenge all human authority, and I do not see how this need can be grasped until ideas, like those expressed in this book, have been grasped. The faith to challenge political authority may exist in the Islamic Community, but it has to be separated from commitment to the very human kind of authority exercised by many Islamic leaders. Indeed, believers of all faiths have to turn to their mystics and prophets for leadership and not to the religious establishment, which is often dominated by human authority. Mystics and prophets know God to be more important than any religious establishment.

As every atheist knows, religious faith without God is superstitious vanity, and, as every mystic or prophet knows, the absence of God from the religious establishment is the root cause of atheism. We need the faith of mystics and prophets more than we need the authority of the religious establishment, and the faith of mystics and prophets challenges human authority in the religious establishment as much as it challenges human authority in the legal, bureaucratic, financial and political establishments. Its ultimate aim is to undermine and finally to destroy human authority, and to establish God's Kingdom on earth.

The people who form the Communities suggested in this book must be certain they have that kind of commitment. Their faith must bind them to a movement to change the world, and not to Churches, Mosques, Synagogues and Temples which are willing to live in the world without trying to change it.

For example, we have to see that the politicisation of Europe will be a disaster for the people of Europe, who must never again be brainwashed into obeying human authority. Fortunately, these people are wiser than they were. They are grasping the fact that, had they not obeyed their political masters, the political masters, and those who profited from the two great European wars of this century, would have had to do the fighting themselves.

We are less gullible than we were in December 1914 when British and German troops at the front line, who had celebrated Christmas together with much affection and good humour, went back to killing one another afterwards. I would like to think that, in similar circumstances today, the troops would have the sense to say,, 'To hell with the officers, we have made peace', and the officers, realising that their troops were wiser than they, would say, 'To hell with the politicians, we have made peace'. It cannot be long before we hear our policemen say, 'To hell with the law. If we cannot maintain order our way, let the lawyers, judges, bureaucrats and politicians risk their own lives if order has to be preserved their way'. If we have not had our spiritual renewal and formed our Communities before that happens, there will be anarchy.

Community members must keep the idea of frustrating the political will clearly in mind as we move towards the New Age. The Communities have to be seen as prototypes of the Moneyless Society in a State of Absolute Freedom. All things will be held in common in the Communities, and the law of the land will be ignored, avoided or evaded as much as possible. Community members will not allow themselves to be regulated by politicians and their professional, bureaucratic and financial henchmen. The Communities' task will be to undermine all human authority in the Name of God, and render it unworkable. For if what is 'politically correct' is spiritually incorrect, then it must be evil.

Now that I have finished the book and understood the fundamental difference between the Commune I had hoped to form and the Communities, I recognise that, if my small Commune is to be effective as a Community, it cannot accept people who lack the commitment to be spiritually reformed if necessary. If God means me to go ahead with a Commune that is destined to become a Community, He will send me the right people to join it.

The book is finished, 6 months after Eileen died, and now I must face the great unknown in faith. I am willing to stay here another 6 months, open to the option of forming a Commune or a Community if that is my calling. Either way, it will give me something to write about. If I feel that I should move into a retirement home instead, I will have more leisure, meet different people, and still find something to write about. Prophet though I may have become, I still look forward to being surprised by the future.

'Surprised by the future' indeed! That could be the title of another book, and hopefully it will be as the future unfolds. My Commune was to have been the means by which elderly people could avoid the loneliness which so many of them suffer, as a consequence largely of their own selfishness, and because of their lack of faith in God and concern for others. I visualised everyone in the Commune being made happy by their love for each other, and I saw that happiness as something that would generate Charity.

Completing the book has made me realise that the comfortable Commune, happy to go on living in the world as it is, may have to change into a more militant Community, determined to change the world. It raises a question about the kind of people I can live with for the rest of my life. On the other hand, I may not be called to practice everything I preach. Undoubtedly, the world has to be changed, but the elderly people I would like to form the Commune with me may not be the ones who are destined to change it! The idea of Communes for the self-reliant elderly, to replace some of the functions of the Welfare State,is a good one, and if I don't start one, I hope someone will.

Eileen did not share my prophetic urge to change the world, but we lived comfortably together because we loved each other. Consequently, I made only slow progress with my book. I do not believe that I could love another woman as I loved Eileen, and this means that I can only have that close a relationship with one in the context of the Commune or as an ally in the more profound task of changing the world. If Eileen died to enable me to follow this vocation, I cannot allow another woman to frustrate it, which could so easily happen if I were to marry again.

The Commune for retired people, like the experiment described in Appendix 1, would be a step in the right direction. What concerns me at the moment is whether I will be guided to take this step or be encouraged to make a leap. Waiting in faith for God's answer to that question is what makes life so interesting for me.

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NEW AGE ONE

APPENDIX 3

Summary of prophecy

1. Christians expect the return of Christ to coincide with the demise of the 'principalities and powers of this world'. In rational modern language, this means that the coercive exercise of human authority (e.g. through the Rule of Law) will break down when human nature has been changed into the Perfect Nature of Christ.

2. It is also possible to prophesy by identifying irreversible trends in history and projecting them forwards. Two such trends are the growth of human wisdom and the pursuit of human freedom. Wisdom is associated with unselfishness, and we can free ourselves from government only if we are wise and unselfish enough to assume responsibility for the welfare of others, instead of leaving that to the State.

3. Although we are growing in wisdom, its Source is not to be found in schools and professions which have adopted a neutral attitude towards God. Their teaching, laws and professional advice are now open to challenge. As laws becomes absurd, the wise will avoid them, and as we lose respect for the Rule of Law, its ultimate demise is assured.

4. 'God Incarnate in man' is a difficult concept to understand in the light of modern science and philosophy. It needs to be expressed in more modern language. When we think profoundly about it, we recognise that, provided the New Testament Profile of the Incarnate God is comprehensible to us, and with the Grace of God we are able to follow it and become it, it makes no difference whether the Profile is based on historical fact or inspired Myth. By preferring the Myth theory, we can avoid controversy over whether the story of the Gospel is historically and scientifically possible, and simply get down to the business of following, and trying with Grace to become, the Example of Christ.

5. To the extent that we succeed, we become an updated version of the Example of Christ, and therefore a valid Source of Authority, which no government or legal system lacking Divine Support can claim to be. We have adequate grounds to challenge the validity of any man's authority.

6. If the wisdom of the people increases, as the wisdom of those in authority declines, the people will ultimately be wise enough to submit only to the Authority of God. They will become ungovernable, and yet be living in a State of Freedom and not in a State of Anarchy. That is how we would describe 'The Kingdom of God' and the demise of the 'principalities and powers of this world' in modern language.

7. All wealth will be held in common in the Ultimate Community of Man. This Community will also be a State of Absolute Freedom. It will not be necessary to repeal laws or devalue money, because both will become automatically valueless. As things cannot be bought and sold in a Moneyless Society, motivated by love rather than by profit and law, the redundant money and laws will be valueless as 'Collector's Items´ .

8. The process of change can begin now. If people are willing and able to be changed, it can be completed this century.

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NEW AGE ONE

APPENDIX 4

The prophets of Israel

The Old Testament prophets of Israel provided the world with a long term prophecy that has yet to be fulfilled, and it is basically that eventually God will triumph over Mammon. One of the clearest of the long term prophecies is that of Jeremiah which looks ahead to a time when the Laws of God will be set in all of our hearts and 'written in our inward parts'. This prophecy was taken up by the early Christian Church. It became the foundation upon which St. Paul built his theology of Grace, and the point from which which all Christian reform has begun. It is fundamental to my own thought that the coercive authority of the law must one day give way to the Exemplary Authority of the Incarnate God, as the 'principalities and powers of this world' are destroyed.

These prophets also concerned themselves with the more immediate future. For those living in the 7th Century B.C. this was the Babylonian exile. As they saw things, the Jews had betrayed the trust that God had in them. As they had broken His Covenant and lost His support, they would be defeated and taken into exile in Babylon. A remnant would return of chastened people, from whom the new Israel would spring.

History proved this prophecy true. The Jews were defeated and suffered horrendously. They were taken into exile. They returned, but as a vassal people, first of the Persians, then, when the Persians were defeated by the Greeks they became a Greek vassal state. When Rome triumphed over Greece, they became a vassal state of Rome. They gave birth to Christianity, which many see as the new Israel, and, almost immediately afterwards, they revolted against Rome, and were defeated and dispersed. The significance of the Babylonian exile is that it marked the end of the free Jewish state.

After the revolt and dispersal, Palestine became an integral part of the Roman Empire. Ruled latterly from Constantinople, it was virtually unaffected by the decline of the Roman Empire. It was a Christian country until Christianity was challenged by Islam, and Islam eventually triumphed both over the remains of the Roman Empire ruled from Constantinople, and over the Crusaders. Palestine went on to be ruled as an Islamic country from Constantinople, which was renamed Istanbul. That was the position until A.D. 1917, when Jerusalem was liberated by the British, and Palestine became a British protectorate until Jewish terrorism induced the British to allow the rebirth of a free Jewish State. So some Palestinians are Christians and the rest are Muslims.

What would the ancient prophets have to say about modern Israel, and her relationship with God after over forty years of independence? Many Israeli Jews today are indifferent to God, and one would question whether Jewish fundamentalists who want to see Judaism triumph over Christianity and Islam in Israel are obeying the Will of God or 'following the devices and desires of their own hearts'. By our 'politically correct' standards, Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is appalling, but prophets do not base their judgment on political correctness.

They judge by spiritual standards, but nevertheless they would be aware of Israel's politically vulnerable situation today. During the Cold War, Israel was a client state of the West, but her strategic value to the West no longer exists, and, so long as the West judges by 'politically correct' standards, her aggressive attitude towards the Palestinians earns her no favour there. If the more powerful Islamic States were to settle their own differences and unite to intervene on behalf of their Palestinian brothers, the State of Israel could be wiped out.

Israel has undoubtedly benefited enormously from Jewish financial expertise. Without it, she would never have been able to support her strong military forces or afford her sophisticated weaponry. Without Jewish financial and legal expertise, the Israeli Jews would never have been able to manipulate law and finance to oust the Palestinians from their land, for the land was taken by stealth rather than by force. The prophet would have to concede that perhaps they were inspired by God to do this, just as they were inspired thousands of years ago to take the same land by force.

If tomorrow's world is to become a Moneyless Society in a State of Absolute Freedom, the Jewish legal and financial expertise will become a useless gift. If the Palestinian Arabs are still alive then - and Israel would face terrible retribution if she treated them as Hitler treated the Jews - they would expect to have equality with the Jews who share their land with them. Christians and Muslims will not expect their spiritual lives to be dominated by the religious practices of Judaism. The Jews of Israel need to read their prophets diligently and ask, 'What would they tell us if they were alive today?'

The Old Testament describes a God Who is anything but 'politically correct'. He does not believe in the sanctity of human life. When the Jews broke their Covenant with God, their suffering in military defeat was as horrendous as the prophets had prophesied, but their defeat was a disaster they could have avoided had they listened to the prophets. Moreover, there was a previous time in Jewish history when things went the other way because the Jews kept their Covenant. Then it was their enemies who suffered horrendous casualties. That humanity is subject to the whim of such a powerful God is a frightening thought. He is not a God to be appeased by formal religion, because He knows the difference between the ritual and the reality of religious faith. If we believe in this kind of God, we have to conclude that He wills the destruction of any underclass that consistently rejects His Covenant, and that He regards this underclass as dispensable.

This destruction is not brought about by mysterious means, but in the course of what appears to be normal life. It may come about in military defeat, in disease or famine, or through natural disasters, which only a few survive. Very often, the damned walk into a trap of their own making. So we have to think carefully about how many of our 'politically correct' interventions to save life, because we believe in the sanctity of human life, turn out to be a vain waste of effort which causes more suffering than it alleviates.

This applies as much to humane interventions in underdeveloped countries, where a combination of political ineptitude and natural disaster has produced famine, as it does to military intervention on grounds of justice to protect people from the injustice of their leaders or their neighbours. Recurrent famine or heavy loss of life through recurrent natural disasters may suggest that the locality is severely overpopulated and that lives have to be lost before equilibrium can be restored. It applies too to the sophisticated medical and surgical procedures we use in our hospitals to keep people alive. These procedures are very costly, and, when they are used, they reduce the ability of hospitals to treat simpler cases where the expectation that the quality of life can be wholly restored is greater. When the patient dies at the end of a long and costly struggle to keep him alive, it can be said that he and his relatives have been subjected to an ordeal that it would have been wiser to avoid.

It applies also in our system of justice. Political queasiness about restoring the death penalty means that prisons are filling up with long stay prisoners and getting overcrowded as a result. This means that we may have to build extra prisons, but surely there must be a better use for our national resources than that! How can we be so cruel to prisoners that we imprison them for the rest of their lives, do all we can to deny them the means of committing suicide, and then expect them to be grateful because we spared their lives?

It is remarkable how a study of the Jewish Prophets can affect our views on the sanctity of human life, because the God they portray to us obviously does not think that way at all! What they seem to tell us is that our lives are profane and expendable if they are not lived in accordance with God's Holy Will. Then Christianity comes up with the idea that, when One Man's Life is lived entirely in accordance with God's Holy Will, even He has to be crucified, so that He can rise from the dead and come again in glory to live and reign for ever!

That belief is not accepted by Judaism, so the supreme irony seems to be that the fierce Old Testament God of the Jews could have been as much responsible for the Nazi holocaust as He was for the Babylonian exile. I wonder what the Prophets of Israel would have made of that, because it must have some bearing on whether modern Israel will survive long enough to come to terms with the New Age.

It is just as difficult to prove the historical accuracy of the Old Testament prophetic writings as it is to prove that there was a historical Jesus, but the sceptic who wants to argue that the prophecies were written up after the event (which cannot be disproved) has to explain why that was done and by whom. Who but God would want to invent the idea that the Jews, or any other race of believers, can only prosper so long as they obey His Will, and who but God would want to make the point today that the human race can only gain its freedom and prosperity by following and becoming the Example of the Incarnate God? These prophetic ideas are not the kind of ideas that encourage loyalty to any religious establishment. They are ideas that frequently challenge the authority of the religious establishment and the false prophets within the establishment who confuse human authority with God's Authority. The idea that the prophecies may not be historical is as unimportant as the idea that Jesus may not be historical.

The truly important prophecy for us today is the unfulfilled one of Jeremiah that God's Laws will be written in the heart of every man, which is exactly the same thing as saying that our fallen human nature will be transformed into Christ's Perfect Nature. For that has to happen before we can achieve a State of Absolute Freedom without falling into anarchy. Filled with Grace, we will transcend the Law; and the coercion of human authority through a system of man-made laws will no longer be needed. That way, and that way only, can we achieve the freedom sought by the New Age Movement. The point has been fairly made in this book that the New Age cannot prosper until that transformation of human nature has happened. If we take the Prophets of Israel seriously, the outlook for those who refuse to be transformed is bleak indeed. Like the people the ancient Jews defeated, and like the ancient Jews who succumbed to the attack by Babylon, their lives are not sacred, but profane and expendable.

Finally, there have to be a few words about idolatry, because, according to the Prophets of Israel, the worship of idols and false gods was what most upset God and turned Him against the Jews. What is the relevance of the prophetic condemnation of idolatry for us today?

Surely idolatry is what happens when we allow ourselves to be so distracted by the ritual of religion that we lose sight of the reality. The golden calf is symbolic of human creation, as opposed to Divine Creation, and of all human authority in the religious life. It would be wrong for us to assume that a particular form of ritual, particularly the one we use ourselves, is acceptable to God, but the others are not. The form of the ritual is not as important as the substance, and the existence of God proves that all forms of ritual have the same substance. That Substance is God Himself, and we must never lose sight of that.

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NEW AGE ONE

APPENDIX 5

The Defender of faith

Although I had regarded this book as 'finished at last' several months ago, I have not yet found a publisher. So when Prince Charles expressed a preference to be known as the 'Defender of Faith', and controversy arose over the possible dis-establishment of the Church of England, and over religious education in our schools, it gave me the opportunity to add something to the controversial view expressed in the book that the Gospels may be based more on divinely inspired Myth than on historical fact.

The fundamental purpose of the book has been to inspire a spirit of militant prophecy in the faithful of the land. The coming 'Armageddon' will not be a battle between the faiths, but a battle in which the faiths stand together as allies against the faithless. The issue to be decided is whether the Authority of Man can be accepted in the New Age. The ultimate quest of civilised man is freedom, and the Authority of Man, enforced through the coercion of the law, is the ultimate obstacle to that freedom. Since it is a theological certainty that God has given us free will, it must be apparent to the rational believer that we can achieve our freedom under the Authority of God, but we cannot achieve it under the Authority of Man.

The Authority of Man is too obviously at work in the ecclesiastical establishment. There is One God, and if this One God were to have His Way, there would be One Faith. The British people have lost their faith because the deeper spirituality, on which all faith must rest, has not been taught at school to anyone alive in Britain today. Britain has only been a truly multi-faith society for the past thirty or forty years, yet, when I was at school between 1925 and 1936, religious education was as uninspiring as it is today.

In the Wales of my youth, Chapel was more popular than Church, but where there was one Anglican Church, and one Roman Catholic Church, there were several Chapels, and they did not work together. There would have been no support for a teacher, however saintly a man he was, who gave the children a profound lesson in Christian spirituality, because, in order to do so, he would need to have a profound faith himself, and he would be unlikely to have that unless he was a member of one of the Churches or one of the Chapels. The other Churches and Chapels would immediately have accused him of poaching souls. So religious education, even in my schooldays sixty or more years ago, was bland, uninspiring, and wholly lacking in prophetic witness. That is why the Churches are unable to exercise much influence in the world today. In spite of over forty years of ecumenical effort, the Churches are still divided, and we have to blame the ecclesiastical establishment for that, because the priesthood is more concerned about its own authority than it is about the Kingdom of God.

The evangelising efforts of my own Anglican Church are ineffective and disappointing. They have failed completely to inspire the young, whose religious education now comes almost entirely from schools which are afraid to teach the profound spirituality of any one of the Nation's menu of faiths for fear of offending the religious leaders of the other faiths. The reason why religious education is a problem is the same as it was sixty years ago, but it has become more complicated and more of a challenge, because the obstreperous ones are not confined to the Christian and Jewish community, as they were in my young days. They come from a wide range of faiths, and their concern is not that the Nation's children should be given a deeper spiritual understanding, but that their children should not be given a religious education that conflicts with their own highly prejudiced ideas of religion. Somehow this log-jam of objection to meaningful religious education by the religious leaders themselves has to be broken. It will not be broken simply by creating a society tolerant of all faiths. That kind of solution may appeal to the reasoning of an unbeliever, but it should not appeal to the reasoning of the faithful, because all the faiths teach that there is One God, and this One God has to be the God of all the faiths. If the religious leaders go on obstructing the lay movement towards the One Faith of the New Age, then the religious leaders have to be got rid of.

'Defender of Faith' is a prophetically inspired title for a future King who seems to have the courage to over-rule the more obstinate religious leaders who simply confuse the faithful in order to divide and rule and establish their own authority. This One Faith of the New Age is a future that leaders like these must contemplate with horror, because , even if it is what God wants, it is not what they want. In a One Faith situation, their authority would be lost for ever. We must look forward with hope to the rule of a Monarch who may be the first Monarch ever to preside over a totally free society, and who will defend, not only the One Faith of the New Age, but also the freedom of his subjects from the coercive authority imposed on them, through the law by their 'democratically elected representatives' in Parliament, and by a priesthood ordained by human hands.

Although I find the work of the Anglican Bishops and Clergy uninspiring, I would never leave the Anglican Church for another unless I moved to Scotland, in which case I would be quite happy to abandon episcopalianism for the form of congregational Christianity practised by the established Church of Scotland, for I am a great believer in belonging to the established Church of the country one lives in. The other side of the coin is that the Established Church must modify its teaching to accommodate the spirituality of all who live in that country. There would be no need for separate Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Baha'i and other faiths in Britain if the Established Churches modified their teaching to take account of the spiritual insights of these other faiths. The other 'Christian' Churches, and the other faiths, would then be marginalised as sects if they failed to respond to this New Age multi-faith outlook.

My loyalty to the Anglican Church rests ironically on my conviction that it is the freest Church of all. I can put up with inadequate Bishops and Clergy provided that they do not try to excommunicate me for my views. My dedication to Christianity rests on my belief that it is primarily a Faith of Freedom, and my dedication to Anglicanism rests on my belief that it is the Church of Freedom. The first great division in the Christian Church came when the Roman Catholics insisted that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, and the Orthodox of Constantinople insisted that He proceeds from the Father only. If my view that the Son of the Gospels may be more a Figure of mythology than a Figure of history is accepted, the Holy Spirit would have to proceed from the Father only, and this is what I believe. It does not worry me that Anglican Bishops and Clergy think otherwise. In a free Church, they can think what they like and I can think what I like about issues which I do not regard as fundamental to my Christian Faith. The Roman Catholic Church has denounced all Anglican orders as 'absolutely null and void, which allows me the freedom to ignore the views of my Bishops and Clergy whenever I choose to do so. I would hate to have to submit to the authority of Rome!

Recently I have attended a number of theological lectures given by a friend of my late wife. Her husband had intended to go into Holy Orders, but became disillusioned both with the theology and with the kind of priesthood it produced. He came under the influence of an old priest whose theology synthesised Christianity with Buddhism, and that convinced him he should take a secular career to earn a living, and devote his time to teaching this theology. He so convinced his wife that she lectures on his teaching after his death. Her theology places Jesus in line with other Great Teachers, like Moses and the Buddha, and accepts the idea of karma and reincarnation. It looks back to a time when a perfect priesthood exercised authority in a self-giving way and was unquestionably accepted as the only form of authority. The only authority she can reasonably claim to support her teaching is memory of past incarnations.

I have learned an important lesson from this, and it is that I have attributed my spiritual experience to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit because I have been theologically conditioned to believe in the Holy Spirit. Had I been theologically conditioned to believe in reincarnation, I might well have attributed the same inspiration to the memory of a previous incarnation, when I lived in a perfect society. The plain fact is that the perfect society, in which authority can only be exercised by the self-giving, is not only a re-incarnational memory according to the theology of this teaching, but also a prophetic vision of the Nature of Christ's Kingdom on earth according to my more orthodox Christian theology. To find that the same vision can be seen of the perfect form of human society by two observers occupying quite different theological positions is a discovery of considerable importance. The mind is a peculiar thing, especially when it fills with profound Thoughts that seem to be original. We know that they are there, but when we are forced to speculate about their origin, we inevitably use the form of theology most familiar to us to explain it. We cannot ever be dogmatic about these things, for the closer we come to the Divine Source of our vision, the more clearly we see that others have got there by paths quite different from our own.

The other important lesson that I have learned from these lectures is that they acknowledge the existence of the historical Jesus, as Islam does, as one of the world's great Teachers. This runs counter to my own view that there is such a strong element of Myth in the Christian Gospels that we can no longer say with any precision where history ends in the story and where mythology begins. Following the lead given by Schweitzer when, at the end of the last century, he reviewed theological attempts to recover the historical Jesus, only to find the mystery insoluble, I too have concluded that our function as Christians is to follow and become the Example of the Incarnate God described in the Gospels, and that we can do that just as well whether the Gospel Story is based entirely on Myth, entirely on historical fact, or on a mixture of both. I have had to reconcile my willingness to accept a mythological Jesus if necessary, not only with the theology of these lectures which recognises him as a Great Teacher, but also with Islamic theology which recognises him as a Prophet.

As Islam does not accept a number of Christian assertions about Jesus, it seems that a reconciliation could be made between Islam and Christianity if Christians were prepared to accept my view that the Gospels contain a substantial element of Myth. In that case, it would be possible to imagine the existence of two Jesus's. One would be the historical Jesus, around whose life the Myth of God Incarnate that we have in the Gospels was woven. It will be evident to any student of the New Testament that this Jesus kept a low profile, and that, as those theologians who sought to reconstruct the life of Jesus discovered, there is no historical evidence outside the Christian tradition that could be of any help to them. If, as I suggest, the Gospels contain a substantial element of Myth, it would follow that Christians simply do not know the historical Jesus, who has been completely overshadowed by the Christian Myth of God Incarnate.

If the Holy Spirit inspired the authors of the Gospels to create the Myth of God Incarnate, the idea is completely credible that the same Holy Spirit inspired Mahomet to realise that the Gospels do not describe the historical Jesus. So, whether or not any tradition of the historical Jesus still existed in Mahomet's time for him to refer to, Mahomet could have been inspired to contribute a view of the historical Jesus which differs considerably from the Christian view, which is not based on the historical Jesus at all. The tension that this would create between the Christian and Islamic faiths would be most pronounced when the leaders of those faiths were most inclined to put their own authority before the Authority of God, and least pronounced when those leaders were at last compelled to see that the Authority of God is infinitely more important than the authority of man, and that when they put their own authority first, they put the authority of man before the Authority of God.

It has become a tension that can only be resolved by calling into question the authority exercised by religious leaders. It is a tension that has to be resolved through the creation of a perfect priesthood which is completely self-giving, and a major factor in creating such a priesthood must be the Myth of God Incarnate in man. For, whether the Incarnate God is a historical or mythical Figure, He exists in the Gospels for all to see, and He is the Example of a self-giving priesthood which all priests worthy of the name must follow and become. One does not become a priest through the laying on of human hands but through the Baptism of the Spirit, when the selfish human Ego is completely sacrificed on the Altar of the Cross, and the human mind becomes the Mind of God. The true self-giving priest is God Incarnate in man. He does not have to be ordained by man because he is chosen by God. He will be one of the meek who will inherit the earth, because he will put the Authority of God before his own authority, and exercise authority as Christ does, by Example rather than by coercion.

By calling into question the authority exercised by the leaders of all faiths, the new Defender of Faith will be able to preside, without coercion, over a renewed Established Church of New Age Faith which, by purging itself of the taint of human authority, can challenge the coercive exercise of authority by Parliament through the Rule of Law. The realignment for the Battle of Armageddon will be made, and the authority of man will cease.

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NEW AGE ONE

APPENDIX 6

New age and cynic philosophy

After finishing this book, I came across several books by F.G. Downing who has discovered remarkable similarities between the teaching and behaviour of the Jesus of the Gospels and that of the Cynic philosophers of the pagan classical world. They were philosophers more than religious leaders because they were never comfortable with pagan theology, and their main task was to challenge the validity of human authority on similar lines to those which I have followed in this book.

I had, in fact read something of this similarity some years earlier, and it set me thinking about the problem of how Jesus, who is not identified in any way in the Christian tradition with classical philosophy, could have been so influenced by it. It was this thought, among others, that led me to see the possibility that the Gospels may be based more on myth than on historical fact - the point made in Chapter 3 of this book, for there is no reason why divinely inspired authors of a Gospel tradition could not have been educated people who understood this Cynic philosophy perfectly.

Cynic philosophers believed that their philosophy should be acted out and not just taught. They could not teach that only fools consider wealth and power to be important without renouncing both in their own lives, and they were able to show that their choice of poverty had provided them with greater health and happiness than they could ever have achieved through the pursuit of wealth and power.

A similar philosophy is to be found today in New Age, which rejects the pursuit of wealth and power and seeks an alternative life-style, much to the annoyance of the conventionally minded, whose main concern is to protect their private property, the value of which is sometimes threatened by groups of New Age Travellers, and to preserve a social status, which was not easy to achieve, and which means so much to them. The worries of the conventionally minded can be contrasted with the peace of mind that New Age Travellers find in a life style that rejects conventional attitudes towards wealth and power. The suggestion that some New Age Travellers may be unwittingly following the Cynic Tradition, and, in doing so. following the Example of Christ, is perhaps a risky one to make, but it has enough truth in it to make today's Christians think more deeply about what Christianity is all about. Let me illustrate my point by putting some Cynic philosophy into modern language, and by inviting readers to differentiate between it and the teaching and example of Christ if they can.

Some people have to go through life burdened by poverty. They should accept the burden joyfully and be glad to depend on the charity of others. They should remember that the wise often seek a life of poverty, and they should not envy the rich.

Others have to go through life burdened by wealth. They should accept this burden joyfully, and lighten it by their charity, which is the most joyful experience they are ever likely to have. They should remember that only fools envy them their wealth.

A just society is created when both rich and poor perceive this. The intervention of politicians, economists. academics, lawyers, financiers, bureaucrats and other well- paid, and possibly even well-intentioned, self-styled 'experts' cannot produce a more just society. It can only produce a more complicated society, because the complications are needed to give the 'experts' the lucrative careers they need to sustain their own unnecessarily lavish life-styles.

The more complicated society will never be just because it is not founded on wisdom. The charitable exchange generated by the simpler society will produce a just egalitarian society as surely as water finds its own level.

My suggestion is that this philosophy would have been acceptable to the Cynics and that it is acceptable to the New Age. Like the Cynic philosophy and much of New Age philosophy, it is neutral on religion, but sits comfortably with all the wisdom that comes from God. No true mystic or prophet would reject it.

As the French would say. 'Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose'. I thought that some of my ideas in this book were original until I read Downing's books on Cynicism and Christian Origins. The only important thing that has happened in the past 2000 years has been the growth of technology. The Cynics and the early Christians were uneasy about slavery. They knew it was wrong, but they could not see how the work of an advanced civilised society could be done without it. Christians in this and the preceding two centuries have had the same difficulty with the exploitation of the working class. The technology we have, and which we are still developing, dispenses altogether with the need for an underclass. What little work still needs to be done, when all the unproductive jobs, created to give an illusion of full employment, have been destroyed, can be done by volunteers, and no work should be beneath the dignity of anyone.

For the first time in history, we can have a completely classless society. An underclass need only survive among those fools, both rich and poor, who are identified in my reconstruction of Cynic philosophy; the fools who cannot accept the responsibility of freedom, and who still seek wealth, power and a status recognised by others. In a wiser society, these fools will not be suffered gladly. Humour was the method used by the ancient Cynics to identify a fool with his folly, and it can be used again with great effect in the New Age.

The New Age Movement must first reform itself on Cynic lines, and not be seen, as so many of us see it today, as a collection of idle drop-outs, sustained by State Welfare, and contributing nothing to society. The ancient Cynics did not drop out of society, although they rejected its mores. They stood firmly in the market place proclaiming the wisdom and virtue of their life-style, and the New Age life-style must be reformed so that, like the life-style of the Cynics, exemplified by Jesus, it too can become an example to us all. When that has been done, those who follow it must be seen at the hub of society, proclaiming its wisdom and virtue.

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NEW AGE ONE

NOTES FOR INCLUSION

The problems that concern us today - unemployment, the unjust distribution of wealth, an ageing population, terrorism, the violence that always seems to erupt when political authority collapses, as it did when former colonies of European Empires gained their independence, and on the collapse of Communism, the famine that often follows this violence, and the danger of overpopulation are, if we have the wisdom to see it, all inter-related and self-solving.

Unemployment is only a problem because we still insist that work should be paid for, and that people should work for a living. When we try to solve the problem by creating jobs, we discover that, because of today's technology, we already have too many productive workers and that the only jobs that can be created are unproductive ones. Because these unproductive jobs, mainly in bureaucracy, the professions, finance, the media, politics and management are more lucrative than productive jobs, we have this unequal distribution of wealth.

The professions that seem to offer the most worth while service are teaching, nursing and medicine, and these are the worst paid. Some professions like the law do little but create and solve their own problems. Since most of us should be able to educate ourselves, we have too many teachers, and we have to blame medicine for our ageing population. Many of our problems would therefore be solved if we would accept the inevitability of unemployment when technology is able to do so much of our productive work for us, make all work voluntary, and find a more reasonable way of distributing wealth, whether it is a natural resource or something created by our technology.

Terrorism, and the violence which follows the collapse of authoritarian government, can be blamed on the ineptitude of the more liberal government that follows. Obviously we would be better off in a State of Absolute Freedom than governed ineptly. Famine, which is caused partly by inept government and partly by overpopulation is Nature's way of keeping population under control, and we can only alleviate famine by using other methods to reduce world population.

The obvious mistake we make today is to believe that politicians can solve these problems. Politicians create problems. They do not solve them. The perfect society is the State of Absolute Freedom in which we have reached such a level of sophistication and individual responsibility that we no longer have to be governed at all. To achieve such a state, we have to become completely unselfish. We must abandon the concept of private property and learn to live in communities which hold all things in common, but, above all, we must find a substitute for human authority, which history has proved conclusively is always exercised with a selfish motive. People only want to be in charge because that gives them an advantage over everyone else. This selfish ambition is recognised as folly by the wise, and it is fair to say, therefore, that a fool can usually be found in charge of something.

At the moment, we are living in a kind of transitional period. The best alternative to a State of Absolute Freedom is competent government, and government can only be described as competent if it is firm. That kind of firmness requires a leader rather than a committee to be in charge of things. Whatever we may think of Hitler and his Nazis, we have to concede that, for the first five years of Nazi government, Germany had one of the most competent governments the world has ever known. The evils of Nazi government only became apparent later, just as the evils of Communism had not become apparent in the 1930's. Now that Fascism and Communism are both thoroughly discredited, the only acceptable political alternative seems to be some form Liberal Democracy. Whether the ideology is to the left or the right, the form has to be democratic. Authoritarianism is ruled out, even though democratic government may be inept.

Liberal democracy is a step towards the State of Absolute Freedom, because it allows the individual more freedom than he would enjoy under a more authoritarian regime, but, as it is a less competent form of government than a dictatorship or absolute monarchy, the question we must face is whether to go on in our quest for Freedom or go back to a more authoritarian form of government. The reasonable answer to that question seems to be that we must take that further step and go on, because we have nothing to gain from staying as we are. In other words, democratic government has become so inept that we must either go on or go back to authoritarianism. We would be better off living in a State of Absolute freedom than we are living in a Liberal Democracy, because the people who seek to govern us in a Liberal Democracy are not, in our present state of social sophistication, any wiser than we are ourselves.

The way forward, therefore, is to concentrate on developing our own sophistication as individuals, recognising that sophistication and selfishness are opposites. We can only safely dispense with the Welfare State if we, as individuals, are willing to take on the State's responsibility for the welfare of others. We need a transformation of human nature, which is quite a drastic step to take, but one which we will be willing to take when we realise that the only alternatives are to stay as we are, and be exploited by the incompetents in authority, or to revert to authoritarian government.

New Age One

Chapter One A PHOENIX RISES FROM THE ASHES

Chapter Two THE AGE OF POLITICAL INNOCENCE IS OVER

Chapter Three JESUS - FACT OR MYTH?

Chapter Four 'THE MONEYLESS SOCIETY'

Chapter Five 'A BETTER WAY OF LIFE'

Chapter Six THE EVOLUTION OF ETHICS - PERMISSIVENESS INTO PERFECTION

Chapter Seven 'SANCTITY OR QUALITY?'

Chapter EightWE LIVE IN A CHANGING WORLD

Chapter NineAUTHORITY

Chapter TenGETTING BACK TO BASICS

Chapter ElevenEVOLUTION NOT REVOLUTION

Chapter TwelveCONCLUSIONS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

A PHOENIX RISES FROM THE ASHES

CHAPTER TWO

THE AGE OF POLITICAL INNOCENCE IS OVER

CHAPTER 3

JESUS - FACT OR MYTH?

CHAPTER 4

'THE MONEYLESS SOCIETY'

CHAPTER 5

'A BETTER WAY OF LIFE'

CHAPTER 6

THE EVOLUTION OF ETHICS - PERMISSIVENESS INTO PERFECTION

CHAPTER 7

'SANCTITY OR QUALITY?'

CHAPTER 8

WE LIVE IN A CHANGING WORLD

CHAPTER 9

AUTHORITY

CHAPTER 10

GETTING BACK TO BASICS

CHAPTER 11

EVOLUTION NOT REVOLUTION

CHAPTER 12

CONCLUSIONS

EPILOGUE

NEW AGE ONE

APPENDIX 1

An escape from the orthodox monetary system

NEW AGE ONE

APPENDIX 2

Thoughts about my own community

NEW AGE ONE

APPENDIX 3

Summary of prophecy

NEW AGE ONE

APPENDIX 4

The prophets of Israel

NEW AGE ONE

APPENDIX 5

The Defender of faith

NEW AGE ONE

APPENDIX 6

New age and cynic philosophy

NEW AGE ONE

NOTES FOR INCLUSION