As a Christian of reformed and Protestant sensibilities myself, I am furthermore delighted to find that Gomes declares me to be emancipated from the moral burden of the Thomistic tradition.

Quite apart from my naive affection for Aristotelian ethics (shared with such other insufficiently Protestant men as Melanchton and Beza), I confess that in my former confusion, I had been somewhat struck by the theological ethics of Calvin and his successors; in that darkened state, I had been impressed more than I ought by more recent Protestant efforts to ground sexual ethics in the fact of the divine creation of the human race as male and female.

So I am delighted to find in the Reverend Gomes a man more reformed and Protestant than Karl Barth--to say nothing of Luther and Calvin; a man more Christian than Paul, Augustine or Aquinas; a man with more authority than all of these and the Scriptures put together; and I find myself confirmed in this high estimation out of the man's own mouth, as he liberates us from each of these tyrannies in its turn.

Had Gomes not revealed my own previous consideration of humility as a virtue to be nothing more but a prejudice cloaked in a pretended authority, I might have thought him to reveal here something of temerity; but liberated from these credulous preconceptions, I instead rejoice that what I now recognize as genuine Christian liberty has at last found a true apostle here at Harvard.

I AM GRATIFIED, therefore, that Gomes has at last affirmed in public that position which it has for a long time apparently pleased him to assume in private. The Reverend Peter J. Gomes has spoken, and I cannot but marvel at the new expansiveness of that liberty with which Christ has set us free.

The license which Gomes has secured for every Christian, the many onerous bonds of the new moral law whose hold on use he has broken, the ease at which his eloquent words must have placed many an uneasy conscience, surely have earned him a place among the great and wise of the Christian Church. Indeed, I doubt that the Christian soul has been at such liberty since the days of the Molinists, who so ably defended the same cause until they fell victim to a cruel and unjust intellectual mugging at the hands of a certain M. Pascal.

But it is greatly to be hoped that Gomes's achievement in Christian ethics will be of somewhat greater duration; and if, as I have said, it is only to be regretted that he did not go somewhat farther in his vindication of our liberty, he has at least shown us the way which we must follow.

But if in my newfound zeal for the teachings of the Reverend Professor Gomes, I have written anything here which seems to the more timid of The Crimson's readers to be contrary to Christian piety or good natural sense, I can only answer that I lay no claim to being a professor of Christian morals; and thus in matters pertaining to Christian ethics, I consider that I can do no better than to take up Gomes's opinions, and follow them with enthusiasm wherever they lead.

Thank God our Plummer Professor of Christian Morals has taken it upon himself to free us from all those restrictive moral constraints laid out in the dusty old pages of the Bible.

Christopher Brown '94 is a writer for Peninsula.