There were giants in those days’. It was in reference to the I past generation of Catholic writers that the remark was made, to the generation of Chesterton, Gill, Belloc and Baring, all those whose brilliance and wit led to talk of a Catholic revival in fashionable circles. How many of them were really giants might be questioned; but it is beyond question that a lesser breed followed in their wake, whose clever caperings and ‘told-you-so’ attitude did little credit to anyone, least of all to the ‘giants’ and the cause they served. Nor has the cause been better served by that superficial reading of the ‘giants’ which induced ill-founded reveries of an ‘age of faith’ and readily identified Christianity with dead cultures.

And the most poisonous effect of this fashionable nostalgia has been to leave a whole generation of young people thinking of themselves as inhabiting a world of winter which they can only hope will somehow turn again into a medieval summer. It will not. For despite the gloomy predictions and pessimistic determinism of the swelling band of prophet-historians, this wintry world is the one we have to live in, and, under God, it is we who must alter it. Furthermore, if only we were not so blind, if only we would take our eyes away from the past and look at the world in which we are living, we should see the summer, here already, shining in countless heroic lives. There are giants in these days. It is true, they are not given to poetry and belles-lettres, these giants of our day; they are a silent race, as becomes those who remember Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Where are they to be found? Many of them in monasteries, returning to God his choicest gifts, even the gift of speech; some live in Eastern Europe; others, perhaps, sell Catholic papers outside Lyons Corner House on dreary Saturday nights.