Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

You don’t have to be good to do good

Believing that we can’t get it right in our outward behaviour until we’ve got it right inside can become an excuse

issue 18 March 2017

I am a regular listener to the Sunday morning service just after eight on BBC Radio 4. It’s a habit owed to my old bedside clock radio. Purchased in 1978, its controls have gone wonky and the radio takes ages to retune; so I just leave it on Radio 4 all the time. Every week, therefore, I awake on Sunday to the sound of hymns.

I like hymns. Their melodies and words are often trite, their message sanctimonious, but from a churchgoing boyhood I know them so well, and early on a Sunday morning there’s something comforting in the familiar. Besides I’m not a very fierce kind of atheist. Rationality gets wearisome, and I cannot but think it a good thing that humans should gather regularly in pursuit of larger truths and greater goods than engage us in our daily grind — even if they are under a misapprehension as to what these are and where to find them.

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