Lives in Cricket No 46 - George Raikes

65 surprise of Vance, it was all too easy to allow the muscular to overwhelm the intellectual. For instance, Maurice Baring stated that, when he was at school: “A boy would be thought more important for making a hundred at Lord’s than for winning the Newcastle scholarship”, whilst Thomas Hughes has a character declare “I’d sooner win two School-house matches running than get the Balliol scholarship any day”. A Canadian headmaster, Alick Mackenzie, described as being “the epitome of ‘vigorous Christian living”, was positively suspicious about ‘bookworms’, claiming that they lacked ‘social balance’ – his aim was to “turn out men well-adjusted mentally and physically … oblivious to the niceties of theological controversy.” Whatever label is given to the movement, it might seem to be a most enjoyable and, indeed, a most admirable form of Christianity – life is to be enjoyed, comprehended and improved for others less fortunate whilst God is a deity both benevolent and present (note 7) . And yet, such a positive world-view has been opposed, back to the days before Christianity was adopted as the ‘state religion’ of the Roman Empire. A very significant problem with the world of the likes of Kingsley and Hughes has always been the need to explain the existence of pain and suffering in the material world. In earlier times the answer to this tricky conundrum was to be an advocate of ‘dualism’, a doctrine in which God and the Devil were of roughly similar potencies. One of the earliest dualists was a third century Persian thinker named Mani who claimed that, while God was the King of Heaven, the earth was the domain of the Devil. This led on directly to the view that, given the inherently evil nature of corporeal existence, the ‘correct’ response was to withdraw from earthly existence as far as possible. Hence, strict adherents ate as sparingly as possible (note 8) and refrained from procreation; most significantly, dualists refused either to pay taxes or to recognise the authority of conventional churchmen. The practice of ‘Manichaeism’ does not seem to our modern eyes as being much fun, especially as it was considered heretical by both Christians and Muslims and believers (including Mani himself) frequently incurred the unpleasant fate of most unorthodox sectarians. However, variations continued to ‘break out’ at regular intervals and often proved hard to suppress. Whilst the beliefs of early dualists can clearly be identified as precursors of those of the Victorian variants of Manichaeism, there have been three main developments – firstly the modern dualists generally live lives that are somewhat less severe than their predecessors; secondly their beliefs no longer attract the death sentence (with lashings of torture) and thirdly there are relatively many more of them around so that it is not entirely clear who is orthodox and who is heretical. Kingsley and Hughes were certainly not in the majority when they set out their manifestoes (note 9) . The ‘enemy’ massed against the Christian Men were indeed many and their brands of Christianity were all dualist at heart. For instance, the Rev Henry Venn referred to the “hopelessness of man’s estate” and expressed himself in a way so that it was clear that he thought in a way that reduced “human misery in the present world to a more rhetorical foil to the translucent The Curate of Portsea; Was Raikes A Muscular Christian?