The Greatest Treason

 I've been pondering what is below for a while. 

Sayers's play, The Zeal of Thy House, is one which ought to be taught in divinity school and in church leadership. While the play isn't quoted below, she discusses it in her letter from which the following is excerpted. 

Much everlasting love,

Bob

 

“I think it comes to this: that, however urgently a thing may be needed, it can only be rightly demanded of those who can rightly give it. For the others are bound to falsify and so commit:

 

            ‘the greatest treason: To do the right thing for the wrong reason’

 

“And, by the time you have done it, you know, it is no longer the right thing.”

 

Excerpt from a letter from Dorothy L. Sayers to John Wren-Lewis, Good Friday, March 1954

 

The quote she uses is from Murder in the Cathedral, by T.S. Eliot, Part I. Here are a few lines from this section of the play:

 

Thomas Becket: “Now is my way clear, now is the meaning plain:

            Temptation shall not come in this kind again.

The last temptation is the greatest treason:

To do the right deed for the wrong reason…

 

“While I ate out of the King’s dish

To become the servant of God was never my wish.

Servant of God has chance of greater sin

And sorrow, than the man who serves a king.

For those who serve the greater cause may make

the cause serve them.”