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The Spectator's notes

Charles Moore

Wednesday, 31st October 2007

Charles Moore's thoughts on the week

Some hunting people, particularly those in the most rural areas, think that the best way to deal with the ban is to ignore it. The law is so unworkable, they say, that it scarcely matters. This is a mistake. There have now been several convictions under the Hunting Act — the Quantock Staghounds are the latest victims. This week, the wretched Ann Widdecombe held a meeting in the House of Commons in which she showed police officers and others a film about how the ban is, in her view, being flouted. Politics has only to change a bit for the police to turn nasty. If politics changes the other way, and there is a Conservative government (no Widdecombe, thank God: she is retiring), the promise of repeal must be cashed in straightaway.

Much as I enjoy Rupert Christiansen’s new collection of favourite hymns Once More with Feeling (Short Books), I must take issue with a point he makes about Newman’s ‘Praise to the Holiest in the Height’. The fifth stanza goes:

Oh generous love! that he, who smote,

In Man for man the foe,

The double agony in Man

For man should undergo;

Christiansen says that this is ‘an example of hymnal poetry in which the grammar and diction are so convoluted and compressed that the sense remains impenetrable’. Surely not. The ‘he’ (‘who smote’) is God. He smote Satan (‘the foe’) in ‘Man’ (Adam, referred to earlier in the hymn) on behalf of mankind. In the person of Jesus (the ‘second Adam’), God submitted himself to the ‘double agony’ — the agony in the garden and the agony of the Crucifixion (see stanza six, which continues the sentence begun in stanza five) — also on behalf of mankind. Compressed, yes, but not impenetrable. It is the neatest formulation of the doctrine of the Atonement.

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A child of our time

From the economic and psychological bedlam of the global downturn has emerged a particularly dangerous false dichotomy: namely, that there is somehow a choice for ministers over the next few years between economic reconstruction and the repair of Britain’s broken society, and that the government (whether Labour or Conservative) must prioritise the former at the expense of the latter.

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The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

‘A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous “helicopter drop” of money.’ So said Ben Bernanke, now the chairman of the Fed, in a speech about how to ward off the ‘extremely small’ chance of deflation, which he delivered in 2002.