In 1921 the Editor of Blackfriars was able to write:

‘To-day, the first of April, Blackfriars keeps its first birthday. There are some—optimists as well as pessimists—who believed we should never achieve twelve months of life. The fear, expressed in our first number, that our career, as witness to the truth, might be as short lived as that of the Holy Innocents has happily not been confirmed.’ Despite all initial prophecies and fears, the review has survived to celebrate its twenty-first birthday with as much vigour and hope as its first. This success is due in large measure to the energy and enthusiasm of Fr. Bede Jarrett, Fr. Bernard Delany and Fr. Hilary Carpenter, and we are happy to have the inspiration of the last two behind us still. Fr. Delany, the first Editor, deserves the laurels at this celebration, for not only did he toil in launching the new review and keeping it buoyant for its first ten years, but also it is mainly due to his energy that it did not founder in the crisis of last summer, when the French defeat had its repercussions even on the monthly review edited by the English Dominicans. But at the twenty-first birthday celebrations we must not forget the large number of contributors whose eminence, wit and perspicacity have marked a distinguished path for the life of Blackfriars. Mr. Joseph Clayton appeared in the very first number, and his tribute to the founder, Fr. Bede Jarrett, in this number is one of a score of articles that he has contributed since then. And there have been many like him, among whom we must single out Fr. Vincent McNabb for special gratitude.

It must have been early in 1919, the time when Father Bede resumed his weekly walk with me, that he spoke of his desire for a monthly review; of the need for a new Catholic review in England; a periodical, fearless, outspoken, zealous for truth; not primarily theological; a review that would present, in intelligible fashion, Catholic teaching on social justice, comment on passing events, give adequate space to literature, strike the human note. A Dominican review—acceptable to the unlearned—and, perhaps this was harder, a review the learned would not disdain. The articles must not be heavy, nor yet be too abstruse for the plain man. Scientific technicalities were to be avoided, humour not discouraged. A Dominican review that would appeal to the laity and, no doubt, might be read by the clergy. In all its criticism of books and political activities, and in the inevitable controversies that would be provoked, the review, while not allowing truth to be obscured by feelings of charity must not let the plea of truth excuse want of charity. All cocksureness, arrogance, identification of personal opinions with eternal verities—in short, all pontificating by lay-writers on matters by no means de fide was to be deprecated, as far as possible excluded.

So, in many talks, Father Bede discussed the review he projected, the kind of review he wanted, that he believed there was room for; a review that would find its public. Of course he knew quite well that Catholics in England are not addicted to the habit of reading, preferring in their newspapers startling headlines rather than sober statement or reasoned argument. Aware of this disadvantage, equally aware that a large body of Anglicans read Catholic literature, Father Bede reached a definite decision—a monthly Dominican review should be established.

A religious Order, Père Lacordaire said, is an expression of the ideal of man as raised and inspired by God. Greater or lesser loyalty to this ideal is the measure of the success or failure of a religious Order. The motto Veritas, Truth, is the mark of the Dominican Order, the symbol of its ideal. To uphold, to spread and to defend the Truth was the high ideal of St. Dominic in establishing the Order of Friars Preachers. But if the quest for truth is a noble aspiration, it is none the less an arduous pursuit. To maintain the truth without counting the costs, to become its apostle by preaching it in season and out of season, to vindicate it without flinching when challenged, is an achievement which entails much labour and strenuous self-sacrifice. An apostle is not sent to preach his own fancies and theories, but to teach and defend the truth of God and His Church in whose name he speaks, so that if he, as the Church’s representative, indulges his own fancies and speculations, he forfeits his rights in the apostolate of truth, and is likely to become a traitor to the Word of God and His Christ, according to St. Paul’s strong words.

Unless we candidly acknowledge, and begin to repair, the shortcomings in our own Christian life, our deeply-pondered schemes for ‘social reconstruction’ are in danger of misfiring. The danger in these war-time social plans of ours is that we over-emphasise the planning element and spend our time talking about how we are going to act in the future without attempting to put our principles into action here and now. Consequently when the time comes for setting our schemes before, a waiting world we shall have nothing more concrete to offer than the distillations of our academic ponderings. Such vagueness will stand little chance of survival against the more practical methods employed by such opponents as the Communist Party. Unless we realise that our plans must ‘be set in motion now and not kept till the end of the war, and unless by the end of the war we have a plan already coping in practice with the problems not only of the intellectual, but of that more influential body, the working class, we are going to be left like dogs baying at the moon while the community falls victim to the tender mercies of the Marxist propagandists. All this because we have talked too much and acted too little.

A second danger lies in regarding our plans as nothing more than ‘emergency measures.’ By definition, such plans fall into disuse the moment they have served their purpose, which in this case is to prevent chaos and disorder after the strain of war. This implies an attitude towards social reform that arises from a misconception of the causes of social injustice. If totalitarianism, and that alone, were the cause of all social evil, then indeed we need only trouble to destroy that and the world would be righted.

When God created all things in His Wisdom, we are introduced to His work in three stages because we cannot understand all the works of God at once. So God instructs us about these elemental things which happened before men existed on this world, and He tells us that in the beginning of His creation He created the good things, the basic things, the things which could, as it were, contain all the other things that He wanted to make. On the first day He created the Light, and on the second day He created the Heaven, and on the third day He created the Earth and the Sea and all the things which grow on the earth. All these things are the good things. God said so and it is so.

Then there was the second stage in God’s creation. God could have left these things to grow; the seeds of life were in the earth. They were given on the third day and all seems to be complete; but it was not enough for God. More than the seeds of life were needed for them to prosper. It was not good enough that they should be just good. Things need more than the seeds of life if they are to live; they need the blessing of God, if they are to be fruitful. The work of the second three days was the work of blessing what was already good. On the first day God created light, but on the fourth day He made the stars which shine in the light.

The passing of Dr. Darwell Stone may seem to many of us like the end of an epoch. It is less difficult to believe that he has been taken away from us than to believe that he was, even though in retirement and with failing health, so recently among us. He was, in a sense, the last of the Tractarians. Not that a younger generation of Anglican divines may safely build on foundations other than those which they, and he, have laid—it will be a bad day for Anglican theology if that should ever come to pass. Yet he was the successor of the Oxford Movement in a directness of line which it is hardly possible for a newer generation to follow. And that, in part, by reason of the very completeness of his own work. He consolidated the foundations which the Tractarians had laid, surpassing them in his ability to synthesise, and to extract the essentials from, the patristic data to which the scholars of the Oxford Movement had recalled the Ecclesia anglicana.

Darwell Stone’s was not perhaps an adventurous mind, nor was his writing, though always lucid and free from jargon, exactly exhilarating. He was a conservative of the conservatives. The great spiritual and religious upheavals of his day seem (if we may judge from his writings) to have passed him by. The lectures which in igoi he delivered in St. Paul’s Cathedral, and which were published under the title Christ and Modern Life, show that he had indeed devoted considerable attention to many of the questions which were tormenting his contemporaries—questions of comparative religion and of Christian apologetics confronted by ‘modern thought.’ But the very assurance and ease with which he treated of them tend to show that they did not present him with any serious challenge or any deep spiritual problem.

Is Britain’s frontier on the Rhine or on the Straits of Dover? Since July, 1940, this question has been a poignant one. It has a more than military significance, however, for it comports great moral issues, the duty or indifference which Britain owes to the Continent of Europe. That it owes only indifference is the theme of one of the most interesting books which the war has produced in English. Sea tower, by T 124, is a book lucid in its composition and extremely compelling in its conclusions. Briefly, the author sets out to show that the original Anglo-French Entente, which first caused us to send great armies to the Continent, arose out of the threat to British sea-power when the Germans began to build a large navy in the first years of this century. This German construction was the result of the appreciation by the Kaiser and his advisers of the doctrine elucidated in Mahan’s classic work on sea-power, that ‘Great Britain, the wealthiest country in the world, possessor of the world’s greatest empire,’ had achieved that position through her naval supremacy. The author maintains that, as the threat was a naval one, it was paradoxical to contribute a great land-army to the struggle on the Continent, and successfully shows that the responsibility rests chiefly upon two men; these were Sir Edward Grey and Sir Henry Wilson, two men whose reputations become more questionable year by year. An expeditionary force, he says, was no more necessary to our interests in 1939 than it was in 1914.