WE are approaching Halloween. This is a weird innovation – when I was a lad growing up in Leeds in the 1950s we contented ourselves with mischief night, November 4, the night before Bonfire Night, when we cheekily knocked on our neighbours’ doors, and then ran away before they could catch us and clip us around the ear.

Contrast this with what is now called “trick or treat”, which is a sort of moral bribery in which miscreants are rewarded for refraining from their worst tendencies. Of course, this has now become a huge commercial enterprise with costly but shoddy costumes which parents are bullied into providing for their luckless offspring. Shame on the little boy or girl who does not have the latest face mask and full gruesome regalia, which, by definition and in those same commercial interests, varies from year to year. So, like a football strip, you always have to have the latest.

I once had a rather startling experience when, as a City priest on my way to an official evening function, I was shrieked at in the very centre of the Square Mile, by two extremely beautiful but hysterical young women shouting “Dracula”. What, you might inquire, was the cause of this consternation?

It was simply that I was wearing my priest’s cloak. Now what does it say about us as a civilisation when two fashionable young ladies see a well-dressed priest going about his lawful business in the early evening, and instead of thinking “Ah – parish priest” they think instead: “He’s got to be a vampire”?

Why? The reason, I suggest, is that the sensationalisation of evil has supplanted the traditional place of goodness in, for instance, children’s television programmes which are obsessed with witches, zombies and vampires.

The lucrative teenage vampire romances mingle the tingle of horror stories with the tantalisation of sexual feelings.

Bluntly, this sort of blood-lust means simply lust and nothing more.

At this point you will think that I am getting on my high-horse again, with my notorious readiness to condemn anything that suggests a bit of fun. But this goes beyond fun. The Christian church has always acknowledged the presence of darkness. There was Good Friday when darkness covered the whole earth from the sixth hour to the ninth.

There were Christian atrocities and transgressions which are unspeakable. And the symbol for all these things is Satan or the devil. But the whole point of what used to be called our civilisation is that the impenetrable darkness is set against a more glorious light.

For example, in the case of the debauchery which we call Halloween, the day truly prefigures something infinitely more encouraging: and that is the festival of All Saints. In other words, darkness overcome by light, and that, thank God, is the truth which makes life worth living. It is shameful that the annual end of October festival has turned from being a celebration of goodness, into a sort of caricature evil: in other words from light into darkness. It is the corruption of our children.

When your doorbell rings on Halloween and you answer it to excited little ghosts and ghouls asking the boring question “Trick or treat?”, get them to tell you about vampires and they will be more expert than Count Dracula himself. But ask them about the Christian saints whose day dawns the next morning. Their silence will not only be owing to the gob-stoppers.