L IKE MURRY'S OTHER WAR-TIME books, Adam and Eve had
a bad press and a good public. The first impression went out of
print at once; a second, limited by paper restrictions to 2,000,
sold out before publication: 'so presumably it has struck a responsive
chord somewhere', ¹ he remarked. On the other hand, coincident with
the news that he was living with Mary Gamble and filing a petition of
divorce (on grounds of 'mental cruelty'), it also created some scandal.
The prominent Quaker was not the only objector. The Anglican
Pacifist Fellowship asked Murry to resign, and two or three Noncon-
formist officers of the P.P.U. resigned themselves. They thought him
no fit representative of Christian Pacifism -- and perhaps, though for
other reasons than theirs, they were right.

Had he not made his marriage the touchstone of his faith? It was
not by chance that, when hardening his heart against his wife, he had
advocated anti-Fascist war; when aiming at her conversion, he had
all but taken Orders; and when trying to reconcile her to Mary, he
had preached a negotiated peace. A shrewd observer, taking note of
the fact that he had finally written her off and thrown in his lot with
Mary, might even then have drawn certain deductions.

There was no such observer -- not even 'Observer' himself. On the
contrary, 'I could no more cease to be a Pacifist than I could jump out
of my own skin,' ² he wrote just after leaving Larling. In a civilization
which, he was more than ever convinced, was in its death-throes,
where else could a Church be looked for but in the interstices of a
decadent democracy? At the same time, the protests against his book
must have shaken his confidence in Pacifists. Could such doctrinaires
be fit pioneers of a new Christian society, with the motto, Ama, et
fac quod vis? The Thelnetham experiment was already giving him
to doubt.

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