Glittering Images. Susan Howatch

      Jardine’s threat to discuss the Virgin Birth with me over the port was never realized. One of the lay dinner-guests, Starbridge’s most distinguished architect, proved to be a non-smoker who could not be dispatched to the smoking-room, and out of courtesy Jardine at first avoided splitting theological hairs. However after a discussion of the arrests which had recently taken place in the German Evangelical Church the architect said deferentially, ‘Talking of clerical matters, Bishop, I hope you won’t mind me mentioning the A. P. Herbert Bill. I’m interested in your opinion of it, particularly as I too think that the grounds for divorce should be extended, but I’m still not sure how you justify your views theologically. What makes you so sure that Christ wasn’t laying down the law on this particular subject but only stating an ethical guideline?’

      This was clearly an intelligent sympathetic layman who deserved to be encouraged. Jardine said kindly, ‘Well, the first thing you must remember is that Our Lord wasn’t a twentieth-century Englishman brought up in a culture which glorifies the modest understatement. He came from the Middle East and in the culture of his day people communicated important truths by the use of striking word-pictures, statements which we would call exaggerations. A well-known example of this is when Christ says: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”. A modern Englishman would merely say: “He can’t do it”.’