Holy Morality: A Religious Approach to Modern Ethics

As a veteran author of Pendle Hill pamphlets – nine, including this one – Carol Murphy has traveled a long way since she wrote her first, The Faith of an Ex-Agnostic. The journey has brought her through religious philosophy and pastoral psychology to the nature of man. In the present pamphlet she deals with the immediacy and simplicity demanded by modem ethics. Now is where we live, where the past must be overcome, where we meet others, where we must seek and find God. It is a concrete and nonverbal now, lost when we classify or analyse, threatened when we allow the problem of the moment to obscure it.

“Most of the wor1d,” writes the author, “lives on the problematic level and looks for rational or useful solutions. The statesmen is interested in disarmament possibilities, not the peace that passes understanding; the civil rights worker is interested in justice, not formless brotherhood. But without the spring of action that arises from the deeper level, a dimension where arguments and strategies do not exist, the world solutions turn to dust and ashes. It is at this deepest level that the man of holy simplicity meets his fellow men. . . .