Healthy Spiritual Climate

Humourless forces of militant atheism at the Charity Commission are probing a London church run by a bishop with the commendably topical name of Climate Wiseman. Besides the financial clouds that so often pursue the unworldly and immaterial, the Commission will also be looking into the bishop's recent sideline in plague protection kits. Wiseman has admitted to sales of over a thousand bottles of cedar and hyssop and scarlet yarn at £91 per faithful and his money, and claims quite correctly that the formula is based on the Bible. The mixture is recommended in the fourteenth chapter of Leviticus, although it remains as yet unclear whether Wiseman's cures also included killing birds and dunking other birds in their blood, or shutting up houses for a week if the walls are the wrong colour, or slaughtering lambs and placing their blood upon the ears, thumbs and toes of the afflicted. Wiseman also proclaimed that the Covid-19 virus can be cured by faith: an assertion which only the crudest construal could possibly take literally as long as an invisible barrier to the powers of darkness is available for cold hard cash.