Middleton Murry felt ill at ease preaching from a pulpit as a pulpit felt like a place to utter certainties and “I possess no certainties”.
Beliefs, in his view, were as subtle and shadowy as they were important:
“they have their home somewhere between the definite and unsatisfying world of factual knowledge, and the equally definite and unsatisfying world of dogma. A belief lies in between a measurable fact and a comprehensible idea: it is like the light on the landscape, tremendously real, terribly evanescent: it is the bloom on the ripeness of reality, and for that very cause mobile, unstable, incapable of fixity. One becomes therefore more and more reluctant to talk directly about one’s beliefs: one feels that they should be whispered rather than proclaimed, and implied rather than whispered”
[Not As The Scribes, p.11].
This opinion was not likely to get all that many supporters in his age of world wars and strident ideologies where “beliefs” were shouted to the skies and also an age that seemed to worship science with its “world of factual knowledge”.