Forgiveness Pre-Paid

Slave traders are perfectly godly provided the money they gave to the church was made by more virtuous means, according to one of the more pharisaical contributions to the culture war. A Church of England court has denied a request by the College of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint John the Evangelist and the glorious Virgin Saint Radegund, near Cambridge, to remove a memorial to a seventeenth-century benefactor whose investments in the slave trade were made long after his spiritual purchases and in any case brought him no profits. The memorial's presence is all the more troubling because the present master of Jesus College is a black woman, whose ability to rejoice and be exceeding glad has been called into question by no less an authority than the Archbishop of Canterbury. Handing down the ruling, the deputy chancellor of the diocese of Ely acknowledged that slavery was "evil, utterly abhorrent, and repugnant" to almost all right-thinking people, but cited L P Hartley to the effect that people in more Christian centuries than our own did not always benefit from the advanced and forthright moral guidance which characterises the modern Church.