Malcolm Muggeridge’s words still ring true

In 1975 I was five years into a career teaching law and had written two law books. I had also struck up an improbable friendship with the internationally known British author and journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, who had recently written an unlikely bestseller called Jesus Rediscovered.

This book had generated a widespread but mistaken belief that Muggeridge, a former editor of Punch renowned for his acerbic wit and public agnosticism, had somehow undergone a recent and dramatic Damascus Road conversion (“the most unlikely Christian disciple since the Apostle Paul,” as one wag put it). Now this claim of a sudden conversion was not true. Muggeridge’s earliest writings disclosed the same themes, the same doubts and religious preoccupations, the same thirst for living water, as his later writings.

One day, in 1974 I think it was, I accompanied Malcolm to a taping of the CBC television program Front Page Challenge. All the panelists, but particularly the bumptious Gordon Sinclair, rang variations on this idea of a Damascus Road conversion.