Malcolm Muggeridge — British journalist from a Parliament family and former agnostic, wrote these words a few years before his death in 1990:
Jesus spoke, but he also healed. The two went together; they were the equipoise between loving God and loving one’s neighbor—the two duties in which Jesus resolved all that the Law laid down and the prophets had proclaimed.
. . .
In our post-Christian era death has recovered its old terrors, becoming unmentionable, as sex has become ever more mentionable. Private parts are public, but death is the twentieth century’s dirty little secret.
. . .
Referring to the legend–advanced, for instance, in a D.H. Lawrence novel–that Jesus’ purpose became the finding of fulfillment for himself in the world, rather the saving of the world, and that He impregnated a woman, Muggeridge reappropriated critic “Dr. Johnson’s” remark on a lesser-known Shakespeare play: “To remark the folly of the fiction … were to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility.”
Earnestly Speaking 