A Transposition of Good and Evil: Thoughts From Malcolm Muggeridge

Yesterday's browse through the local antique shop yielded a real treasure, a copy of A Twentieth Century Testimony, published in 1978 by Thomas Nelson (ISBN 0-8407-5143-5). Intended more as a 'coffee-table' pictorial book than a real literary work, it features the words and images of Malcom Muggeridge, the prolific British journalist and author. He passed from this earth in 1990, but in his day, never failed to stir the cultural pot with his command of the written and spoken word.

Muggeridge, to the surprise of many, embraced Christianity as his only hope, and the world's only hope, in the late 1960's. He introduced much of the West to Mother Teresa, and championed Solzhenitsyn when he was shunned on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

OldSouth keeps a copy of Muggeridge's little masterpiece The End of Christendom close by, and revisits it annually. (The link takes you to Amazon, so you can order your own copy...hint, hint...) 

He wrote prolifically for over sixty years, yet these words taken from yesterday's purchase are amongst his most luminous and pithy:

Good and evil provide the theme of the drama of our mortal existence. In this sense, they may be compared with the positive and negative points which generate an electric current. Transpose the points and the current fails, the light go out, darkness falls, and all is confusion.

The darkness falling on our civilization is likewise due to a transposition of good and evil. In other words, what we are suffering from is not an energy crisis, nor an overpopulation crisis, nor a monetary crisis—from none of these ills that are commonly pointed out—but from a loss of a sense of moral order in the universe. Without that, no order whatsoever—economic, social, or political—is attainable.

For Christians, order is derived from that terrific moment, when, while all things were in quiet silence and that night was in the midst of her swift course, thine almighty Word leaped down from heaven out of thy royal throne, leaped down to dwell among us, full of grace and truth. It was thus that Christendom came into existence, and to abandon or repudiate the almighty Word from which it is derived would be infallibly to wind up two thousand years of history and ourselves with it.


Have a good rest of the month, and keep your chin-straps on.