IF you can keep your head while all Whitehall ministers farce about you.

If you can keep a straight face as they marry same-sex people, while denying it's marriage, and then stifle your bewilderment as they invent a way of legally marrying' those who don't want to get married (as this week).

If you can be led by croquet players on lawns churned into fields of sleaze and still keep your own feet and not slide after them.

If you can still dream dreams of Utopia, while coping with nightmares of targets, ASBOs, and lost prisoners, and terrorists.

If you can trust after being asked for the £1,000 overpayment of Family Credit last year, while getting a letter asking you to do exactly the same this year.

If you can make allowances for MPs and a PM who run the country as though God is an acronym for Gross Office of Desperation (insert preferred choice Dishonesty, Duplicity, Disillusionment, Disenchantment, Dissolution, Dissatisfaction, or other or all of them).

If can you pray for the day they'll stop posing as puny gods rewriting right and wrong, and return the country to its Christian heritage.

If you fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds' worth of forbearance or forgiveness for our moral, ethical and economic shambles.

Then, yours is the earth and everything that's in it.

And which is more you'll be a saint, my son!