HAD MURRY LIVED IN the seventeenth century, there can be no
doubt whatever that he would have taken his place beside Fox
and Harrison as the founder of some dissident, millenarian sect.
Even as it was, his cry was the same as theirs: Repent, and flee from
the wrath to come! Only, the wrath he predicted was secular -- the
'unimaginable catastrophe and horror' ¹ of war; and the repentance he
preached, social -- the supersession of capitalist individualism by the
equalitarian 'economics of Jesus'. ²

In Das Kapital, he more than once said, he heard the voice of a
modern Baptist: and he owed it to Marx that he was able, at last, to
enter fully into the eschatological expectation of primitive Christianity.
From 1931 onwards, the apocalyptic note is seldom far absent from his
writings. It is one of the things that gives them their unique air of
realism. Has not 'that remote and to us fantastic belief of the Jews of
the time of Jesus . . . the belief that the world was on the brink of a
universal cataclysm . . . suddenly become the conviction, or the fear,
of every thinking and imaginative man to-day?' ³ One sometimes gains
the impression that, while the generals were preparing for the war
before, he was preparing for the one-after-next.

The religious individualist of 1923 had re-emerged as a religious
socialist, in the fullest sense of the words. He saw now that all the
traditional truths of Christianity, once they were applied to the real, the
social man, took on a new relevance and urgency; and it seemed to him,
as he finished The Necessity of Communism, as if everything he had
lived through hitherto had been merely a preparation for this hour: he
was being 'tempered to make a Socialist without illusions'. ⁴

The book had taken a fortnight to write. On the day he finished it,
November 9, he wrote to Plowman: