Cripps for Malvern

First top-rank statesman to espouse the now-famous Malvern program (TIME, Jan. 20, 1941) is Sir Stafford Cripps, the No. 2 man in Churchill's Cabinet and leader of the British Government in the House of Commons. Last week he said in Britain's Methodist Recorder that, if the churches will adopt the Malvern resolutions and really implement them, they will be playing an enormous part in the post-war world.

On March 1 Sir Stafford--a member of the Church of England, whose liberal wing initiated Malvern--said that one reason why Russia was so successfully combating the Nazis was that it had "a seven-day-a-week religion based on idealism and not a one-day-a-week one" like so many nominally Christian countries. In the Methodist Recorder he suggested that the democracies had better infuse religion into their social and political life, and that "there must be a new intention and determination to carry into all the activities of our daily life the fundamental teachings of the New Testament."

"We have got to move toward greater equality and greater 'community' of living," said Sir Stafford. "We have got to have a moral background to our whole life. We have tended to divorce our religious and ethical values from our practical affairs. . . . But we must learn to do as we think. To bring those two worlds together we need the Christian inspiration."

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