Why must a Christian continually clash with the clergy? It looks as though we are continually failing to understand one another and so failing to get started on our common life and witness. But this is not so. It is simply the job of any Christian to wrench the gospel out of the hands of the clergy or whoever is concealing it. This argument is the wrenching required to release the gospel from their clutches so it can go out to those who want to hear it. This clash is the gospel at work. Any Christian must represent all those who are waiting for news of salvation. Any Christian must speak up for those outside the ambit of the clergy that they clergy has made himself blind to and so shut out. The clergy cannot hear them and all he does is intended to keep them away. He fears them and because he doesn't like being afraid, he hates them.
All England is right here before us, waiting, unnourished and hungry, gnawing at all sorts of things that are not food. We must speak and intercede for those who are not here but need to be. And we must intercede on their behalf to those who out of fear withhold the gospel from them. They have buried the treasure – the talents – and we are all buried as a result. Those who withhold the gospel are tyrannising over us all. We are all paralysed until we speak up and demand that they give us what they owe, the gospel that brings our freedom. They are the apparatchiks of the regime and ministers of the god of this generation. The Christian must defy them. The Christian must represent all the men who have not received the gospel. These men do not know where to turn for help, who to make their appeal to, who to pray to, which name to use. These men will not turn up here, in this assembly of the Church, until the gospel is disbursed here. All the heads of families and all the families can see that there is nothing here for them here. Whatever there was has been suppressed. The clergy have given them nothing, neither good news nor bad, but have withheld from them the truth. The truth is what we are all due. We are all owed that much.
As a result the English are now very weak. The ties of affection that have held our country together and kept it peaceful are now very thin. The whole people is in danger because each one of them begins to believe that they are not loved or valued that everyone is against then that ignores them or that they don't fit in or that they cannot meet the person who could love and value them, that they are not good enough or that there is not good enough or no one who understands them. all this commonality is missing. And we have to tell them that it is here for them. The Lord is the universal mediator of the English to the English, and that without him the English are either grinding against each other without lubrication and about to seize up or fall apart. There is a universal enabler, a go-between, who makes every relationship between every two people possible and who has alone enabled the English to get on with one another. We do not call him spirit of Englishness. He is the Holy Spirit. We call him Lord.
