Religion: Naked Hatred

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While preparing to return to England on his superiors' orders, Anglican Father Trevor Huddleston, South Africa's great enemy of apartheid (TIME, Nov. 14), showed newsmen a remarkable document. It was a letter from a government official named Hertzog Biermann, and it typified the bitterness which, in the name of God, many white South Africans harbor against an outspoken man of God. Excerpts:

"You have left nothing undone to provoke the most un-Christian feelings through the mischief you have worked here . . . Because of this I see the hand of Providence in the manner of your going. If ever a man deserved to be drummed out of a country, to be ignominiously deported as an undesirable immigrant or, in the last resort, to be strung up from the nearest lamppost as a renegade, it was you . . . You leave behind a legacy of ... naked hatred among people who were here before you came and who will, by the grace of God, survive the pernicious effects of your ministry."