Radical left isn’t the solution to problems

LIKE John Payne (Hinckley Times 10th Jan.) I am very aware of the erosion of what he terms ‘old certainties’.

However, I would seriously question his ideas as to the remedy.

Indeed, his notion that only the election of “a radical (socialist?) government” can effect a cure seems to me both simplistic and historically uninformed.

The moral decay evident in our society is nothing new.

Anyone who reads of the state of this country in the early 18th century will find shocking similarities to today.

One historian has written that: “Robbers and murderers everywhere pursued their dreadful trade.

“Gangs of drunken ruffians paraded the streets and subjected women to nameless outrages and defenceless men to abominable tortures.... The whole population seemed to be given over to an orgy of drunkenness which made the very name of Englishman to stink in the nostrils of other nations.... Keepers of gin-shops were known to hang out signs that a customer might get drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence, and have straw to lie on”.

The drama and literature of the day were so corrupt as to shock even hardened visitors from abroad.

It is no coincidence that it was at this time that Joseph Butler, then Bishop of Durham, declared in his Analogy of Religion, that it was taken for granted by many that Christianity was no longer even a subject of inquiry, but that it had at length been discovered to be fictitious and was a subject fit only for ridicule.

However, the answer to this terrible situation was not found in politics, nor even in the Bishop’s powerful Christian apologetics. It was found in the Evangelical Awakening and the gospel preaching of George Whitefield, John and Charles Wesley and other men raised up by God and empowered by His Holy Spirit.

Out of that spiritual awakening came the impetus for the great reforms of the 19th century and the ‘old certainties’, of which John Payne bewails the loss.

Those standards were not new; their roots are in the Bible and the message of Jesus Christ. He alone can give the spiritual power to live by those standards. The problem lies not in politics but in the human heart.

Only Christ can provide a truly radical solution - a new and godly heart!

Brian Corns