The Spectator’s Notes | 15 April 2006

On Good Friday 1613, John Donne found the direction of his journey on horseback in conflict with the duty of his soul. In his poem ‘Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward’, Donne writes that ‘I am carried towards the West/ This day, when my soul’s form bends to the East’ (where the sun/Son will rise, and where Jesus was crucified). He says, though, that he prefers to face the other way, to avoid ‘That spectacle of too much weight for me’: it would be unbearable to see ‘The seat of all our souls …Made dirt of dust’. He imagines his back, as he rides, being regarded by Christ, turned towards Him to receive punishment. This allows Jesus to ‘Burn off my rust, and my deformity’. This done, ‘Thou may’st know me, and I’ll turn my face’. Did Donne literally make such a journey, or is that too post-Romantic a way of looking at his poem? I don’t know, but I have just bought a new horse, so I shall ride westwards on Good Friday 2006, and think about it.

What a relief that at last there are lots of reports and articles in newspapers resisting the global warming scare. Like most people in this debate, I do not know what I am talking about, but I can tell that the climate-change alarmists are wrong by the character of their argument. They jump from ‘Climate change is happening’ to ‘It is caused by man’ to ‘Climate change must be bad’ to ‘The planet is under threat’ to ‘Governments can and must solve it’. This is not reasoning: it is End Time talk — the cry of woe, the denunciation of human wickedness, the approach of judgment, the call to repentance. When we hear the explicitly religious equivalent from the First Church of Jesus Christ Superstar in Eureka, Missouri, we all sneer, but when we hear it from the Archbishop of Canterbury and the government’s chief scientific adviser we are expected to nod our heads in shocked agreement.