Mole from the

demonic ranks
The Gravedigger File by Os Guinness (Hodder & Stoughton, £4.95).
THE Gravedigger File presents itself as papers handed over to a friend by a quondam agent at his defection from a high rank on the Central Security Council, which is in fact an agency for the subversion of Christianity. The theme of the papers, memoranda from the Deputy Director to the new Director Designate of the Los Angeles Bureau, is that Christianity is happily engaged on destroying itself, and that his task is only gently to further present trends; in other words that Christianity is digging its own grave.
Obviously the method of such a book is heavy irony and satire, and therefore exaggeration and caricature. This literary genre excludes any sort of • balanced presentation or rational argument. The partisans of the point of view of the author find such a work hilarious; his opponents should be reduced to impotent grinding of the teeth. Malcolm Muggeridge finds the book "enormously entertaining" and compares it to The Screwtape Letters. Certainly the author has a gift for a telling phrase, and often almost Chestertonian epigram, though he lacks the lightness of touch of a Knox or C S Lewis: after a time the literary genre becomes heavy and laboured. It will, no doubt, amuse those who share the views of the author, but I doubt that it will stop in their tracks those who are already set on the slippery slope to selfdestruction.
Henry Wansbrough OSB