At the end of the last century people pretty generally believed that Christianity could not much longer survive the rapid progress of science; there was a battle on, and its conclusion was inevitable within a matter of years. Today the situation looks completely different. Scientists are more cautious in their speculations and Christianity has proved more resistant than could have been expected. The idea has grown up that perhaps collaboration rather than rivalry may be of more value to each: there are signs that the lion is prepared to lie down with the lamb.

The publication, a few months ago, of E. L. Mascall’s Christian Theology and Natural Science is an important step in this direction. Dr Mascall is a theologian who has maintained his interest in the science he studied in earlier life. In his new book he examines in detail a number of the points at which theological and scientific studies come into contact. As a result of this examination he insists that Christians should neither ignore nor repudiate scientific discoveries. There is not the slightest need for them to fear that science will make it necessary to abandon traditional Christian teaching, or that reconciliation can only be effected by desperate expedients such as turning Christian dogma into mere metaphor. Of course some apparent conflict must still remain, but the sensible procedure is then to examine each situation with care, and see whether valid conclusions have been drawn by theologian and scientist from the evidence available to them; if either has gone too far, we may have to suspend judgment until further evidence comes to light. Each is seeking truth, and the Christian especially must be fearless in accepting truth from whatever source it comes, since he believes that ultimately it comes from God and tells him something of its author.

The people who write in English about the liturgy have mostly read about it in French or German. The great movement of reform in the Church which has as its centre the revival of the liturgy is arriving in England rather late and with a noticeable foreign accent. There are important studies in the liturgy by English writers but none of them are by Catholics. The Catholic who is dissatisfied, as any educated and normally critical man must be, with what was taught him as Religious Instruction at school gets in touch with the new life in the Church usually through translations of continental books or else through second-hand works based on continental originals.

Readers of Blackfriars will presumably not need a detailed account of the manifestations of this new life. Like every other movement of reform within the Church, it has been essentially a return to sacred Scripture. There have been a good many other motives and movements, some good and some not so good, connected with the change: there has been a concern for the reverent and meaningful performance of the ceremonies of the Church; there has been a certain nostalgia for the past—whether the thirteenth or the fifth century—there has been a weariness with a certain kind of seminary textbook theology in which the great rivers of the Fathers and the Scholastics have been reduced to so much damp sand; there has been a characteristically twentieth century emphasis upon the social and communal as against the private. But in the first place it has been a matter of the Scriptures.

India is one of the few countries left in the world which still has the capacity to produce saints. One of the most authentic of these was Ramana Maharshi, who died only a year or two ago and whose life by an English disciple, Arthur Osborne, was published recently. He lived a life of austerity equal to that of the greatest of the Fathers of the Desert and reached a state of contemplation which in Christian terms could only be described as habitual union with God. He himself remained a Hindu of the strict advaita (non-dualist) school and maintained simply that his ‘self’ had ceased to exist and that he had realized his true ‘self’ in God. I have met many people, both Christian and non-Christian, who have known him, and all of them testify to the extraordinary holiness of his character, which was shown not least in his wonderful compassion and kindness. It can hardly be doubted that the transition from a life of complete silence and solitude in the isolation of a cave to the later life of the Ashram with its constant concern for every human need marks the influence, at least unconsciously, of Christianity on the Hindu mind, but Maharshi remained typically Hindu in his character.

The same must be said of Vinoba Bhave, who continues the tradition of Hindu sanctity in our own day and who has also found an English disciple to write his life. Mr Tennyson has written an extremely good book. He lived and worked, and what is more walked, with Vinoba, and though his actual contact with him was only for a short period, it was obviously the most momentous experience of his life and he has the bom writer’s flair for revealing the feeling and quality of his experience. The result is a book which not only gives a vivid record of the life and work of Vinoba, but is also able to show something of its historic importance for India and for the world.

With important foreign statesmen arriving frequently on courtesy visits to India from East and West and with India’s voice respectfully heard at the international councils, the observer is left with the impression that Mr Nehru’s spectacular foreign policy is paying a high dividend and that Delhi is rapidly becoming one of the most important political centres of the world. Only on close scrutiny of the economic and social conditions does he get the impression of a scene reminiscent of Chancellor Briining’s Germany in the early thirties: a regime desperately trying to camouflage by real and imaginary diplomatic successes the fact that, domestically, it is sitting on a volcano.

In the cities the westernized ruling class—the British-trained civil servants and the American-inspired managing agency executives—seem to run the show at full swing. Although the shortage of technicians is still acute, there is a considerable tendency among the new generation to go in for scientific training. I was told by a university professor in Calcutta that the brightest students take up science these days.

Dr Deshpande, the Secretary-General of Hindu Mahasabha, the self-styled guardian of national traditions, assured me that the idea of a man working his way up—so essential to any industrial society—is by no means incompatible with the true principles of Hinduism; the rigidity of the caste system was the result of later corruption, but his Movement means to go back to the ancient sources.

On the face of it, therefore, there is no obstacle in the way of a new India, rising on the wings of modem technical production and re-invigorated Hindu tradition, utilizing vast, still untapped, raw material and manpower resources.

Fifty years ago the extraordinary J. K. Huysmans wrote his Crowds of Lourdes. Huysmans has been described as ‘un ecrivain precis, subtil, et tourmenté’ and certainly his study of Lourdes reveals these characteristics. Though one may disagree entirely, his devastating comments on religious art and architecture in this city of our Lady are refreshing and provocative. His observant eye misses nothing. The most critical visitor to Lourdes could not rival his invective about the commercial by-products of the shrine. And that, after all, is what the apologist for Lourdes has to face.

Huysmans’s book can be taken as a half-century mark in the history of the Lourdes shrine. He wrote it after he had become a militant convert to Catholicism. Surprisingly, though it is probably now neglected, the book is not out of date in essentials. Mrs Ruth Cranston’s The Mystery of Lourdes (Evans; 18s.) might well be taken to mark the approaching centenary of the apparitions, 1958. It eclipses the Huysmans book and, one might even venture to say, all the English books on Lourdes. It is a remarkable book to have come from the pen of a Protestant bishop’s daughter, herself a Protestant. Huysmans, after his conversion and quite against his own inclinations, came to Lourdes to investigate it for himself. A specialized interest in faith healing drew Mrs Cranston to the place where so many miracles of healing take place. ‘The three years since I began the study of this wonderful place, and its great cures of soul and body’, she writes, ‘have been among the richest of my life.’ Huysmans, who detested crowds, went to Lourdes reluctantly but he, too, like so many others, was captured by its spirit.

Huysmans describes the Lourdes of about 1900; Mrs Cranston describes the Lourdes of today. She has the advantage of superb photographs to supplement her descriptions; Huysmans has the advantage of that style ‘precis, subtil et tourment?’. He suffers aesthetic agonies because of, as it seems to him, hideous religious art. Mrs Cranston is untouched by this, as probably even the most sensitive pilgrim is, in face of the overwhelming faith and suffering nobly borne.