When it was proposed to repeat the series of daily lectures at Blackfriars, Oxford, during the Unity Octave of 1950, the decree from the Holy Office on the oecumenical movement published during March had not been thought of, nor had The Times correspondence on Catholicism Today yet appeared. But those who read the following papers, which comprise all but one of the lectures finally delivered at Blackfriars in that January ‘Octave’, will realise how The Times correspondence prepared the way for, and gave point and unity to the series. Moreover they can hardly avoid noticing how aptly the lectures conform to the spirit of the decree of the Holy Office; they may, indeed, be taken as an extended commentary of that important document.

It is true that the decree was heralded by an unwise blare of trumpets in the popular press, so that when it did appear in English at the end of February many non-Catholics were disappointed, having been led to expect some ‘concessions’ which the Church could never give. Nevertheless, members of the Church of England have been able to recognise the true meaning and the value of the Vatican document. The Archbishop of Canterbury himself showed a clear understanding of its import when he discussed it as a ‘timely’ and ‘encouraging’ direction to Catholics on what can be done in co-operation with non-Catholics in face of the increasing peril of Christian civilisation. The Church Times gave the document a warm welcome without mistaking its significance : ‘The Roman Catholic ordinaries, to whom the document is addressed, arc instructed to take a positive interest in movements towards reunion, not only to keep close watch upon them, but “prudently to foster and to guide them”.

The question of the reintegration of Christendom has been brought before the public of this country recently by an article and a series of letters in The Times, and before the whole world by the Holy Father’s address on Christmas Eve. I hope that some of the following remarks may help to explain to non-Catholics why it is that we Catholics do not seem to be able to join in whole-heartedly with some of the attempts that are made from time to time to effect that reintegration by a process of corporate reunion of the separated Christian bodies; although we are at least as anxious as any other body to see reunion achieved. And we believe that we hold from God the key to reunion.

There is a homesickness for visible unity in the Christian world today, thank God. The crisis of our civilization, the growth of secularism, the menace of conscious deliberate organized antiChristian forces have no doubt in part occasioned this heightened sense that Christians must unite in face of common perils. And again, the serious disadvantages (to use no stronger language) that attend upon Christian missionary effort, both at home and abroad, through the mutual contradictions and competition of the various Christian communions, are perhaps more vividly realised at present than at most times in the past three hundred years. But surely the driving force of what I may call the reunion movement is something deeper, more native to Christianity as such, than even these grave practical considerations. Surely the dynamism of the movement, or movements, comes from a growing conviction that disunity can only be justified by a virtual denial of something that is of the very essence of Christianity, that it would mean contradicting the intention of God Incarnate. Did he not himself remind us that a kingdom or a house divided against itself cannot stand?

The first step towards the investigation of the extent to which science has in fact taken and may continue to take the place of religion is to decide the sense in which we are to understand the word science. First, we are to discuss not scientia but ‘natural science’, and this is not a sharply definable conception. Natural science is the knowledge and theories that are obtained by the scientific method. The scientific method starts from observations, verifiable by repetition or, where repetition is not possible, by the making of similar observations. These observations lead by the method of induction to statements about classes of observations, which statements we dignify with the name of laws. These laws may be used as material for the deduction of other laws which are only accepted if verified by their prediction of what experiment confirms.

The observations of science are never wholly accurate (except when they are enumerations), but their degree of error is usually known and so we can arrive at comparatively reliable statements about what has been observed. The inductions made from these observations are of a degree of reliability dependent on the number of observations used and the accuracy with which these are expressed by the generalisation. Some scientific laws, then, make statements which are very unlikely to be appreciably modified, while others are considerably less certain.

The scientific laws are not a disconnected set of rules; they are unified by the theories or suppositions concerning the nature of what science studies. Thus the atomic theory links together hundreds or thousands of laws in physics and chemistry, explains them, and suggests new lines of investigation. These theories are the more likely in proportion as they link together a wider range of laws (and so of observations) and as they are fruitful in leading to new knowledge. Some theories, such as the atomic theory, are practically accepted as fact; others, such as Wegener’s theory of floating continents, as fruitful conjectures.

My starting point will be some words of Bishop Hensley Henson, written in his Journal during the early stages of the Malines Conversations.

‘In the afternoon I read Pusey’s Life. His essay at negotiating a union with the Roman Church appears to have run the normal course, and experienced the normal fortune. Eager approaches from the Anglican side; non-committal compliments on the Roman; restiveness and reproaches in both camps; extravagant Anglican expectations, and then sharp disillusionment when the Roman authorities finally speak. I cannot doubt that the present essay will repeat the too familiar-history.’

If we discount a certain bias and exaggeration in the writer’s expression of opinion, it can hardly be said that his forecast was not a true one. Bishop Bell’s summing up in his account of the Conversations in Archbishop Davidson’s Life, though sympathetic and optimistic, does not in essentials differ from Bishop Henson’s.

‘Of their effect on the Church as a whole’, he writes, ‘Who can speak? There has been progress in understanding, in charity, in desire. So far as the longed-for rapprochement was concerned, the fundamental difficulties remain unsolved. But channels of thought and methods of study have been started, from which perhaps in later days some great gain may result.’

And now, once again, twenty-two years after the publication of the Malines Report, The Times correspondence of last November, on ‘Catholicism Today’, has revealed on both sides of the dividing line a deeply-felt desire for rapprochement, and a widespread sense that the way to increasing unity of heart and mind lies in the growth of friendly contacts and in conferences, on the theological level, between representatives of the different parts of divided Christendom.

When I agreed to speak this afternoon I thought it would be more useful if I spoke to you personally and informally, rather than if I attempted to give a set lecture on so vast a subject. Besides, I would like to begin by making my own standpoint clear, and I can do that more easily if you will let me be personal.

I have great sympathy and great respect for many of those who are working towards reunion. But I have never classed myself among them, partly this is because ‘reunion’ has never seemed to me an immediate and practical problem. Perhaps because, all my life, so many of my closest friends have belonged to different communions and religions from my own, I can realise what a gulf still remains of mutual misapprehension, and how unlikely it is that that will be done away with within a space of time measurable by the historian. And then I have always consciously avoided the use of the term ‘reunion’ since it has seemed to me ambiguous in modern English. Possibly I am here influenced by the fact that, when I was a young man, ‘reunion’ was commonly used in England in the sense of ‘reunion of the Church’, and that as a phrase is incompatible with either the Catholic or the Orthodox conception of the Church’s indivisibility. But the need of mutual charity will always be an immediate and practical problem. All through history in every religion and in.every Christian communion there have been members who have been infected by the spirit of religious intolerance. That spirit of intolerance has been always a father of lies leading to calumnies of individuals and to distorted travesties of the doctrines of others. It has had its roots deep down in the spirit of hatred and has flowered in season into acts of gross physical cruelty.

First of all I must apologise for borrowing the striking title from Professor Gilson without intending to present the same pattern in the matter of mystical experience as he presented in that of the philosophical. In Gilson’s deservedly famous work, the author traces the swing of the pendulum in the history of philosophy from the pure rationalism which is willing to admit ‘two truths’ rather than accept any tutelage from theology to that attractive over-simplification which he calls ‘theologism’ in which all human thought is made theological. The unity of such experience is to be found in the constant swing of the pendulum along the same path.

It would be possible to show some similar swing in the realm of mysticism from the moralism which leaves no room for passivity with God to the excessive passivity of quietism. We might begin with St Peter and St Paul or St Ambrose and St Augustine, where the seeds of such divergence might be unearthed. But such is not the plan of this paper; for the experience to be considered is not simply European, nor yet even exclusively Christian. And the unity which we hope to disclose is not the uniform motion of the pendulum, but the union of synthesis in the central point of reality.

There can be little doubt that there are men not Christian nor European whose experiences in the realms of religion, to say the least, bear a close resemblance to the experiences described by the greatest of Christian mystics. Writers—and many of them are not writers only for they have set out to taste the experience as well—such as Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, or even in another direction Ananda Coomaraswamy, have made this abundantly clear in the last twenty years.

It is the object of these papers neither to find differences nor to apologise for them, but to pause for a while to consider how far they really exist. We wish to learn to appreciate something of another’s point of view without sacrificing anything we treasure as true ourselves. Is truth different for different men? Or is it vital to some men and a matter of little concern to others? Or are our differences questions purely of emotion or feeling or of the company we like to keep? If we answer negatively to these questions, then differences between sincere people must be mainly questions of misunderstanding. We cannot hope here to heal a schism, but something will be gained if we can help to remove one stumbling-block. This is worth while, even if the stumbling-block be small or mainly a legacy of the past.

I am confining myself to a doctrine which was at one time considered vital, especially among Methodists. And, though it may be less considered today, it has its intrinsic interest as well as being a doctrine that might be revived in any back-to-the-Reformation movement. I refer to the Lutheran doctrine of assurance of grace, referred to usually by Wesley in Pauline terms as the Inward Witness of the Spirit. I do not know whether the Wesleyans used to regard this as a peculiar Protestant doctrine, but it is certain that Luther himself looked upon it as such. It was to him part of his justification of his big step in rejecting the external authority of the Catholic Church and was further dictated by his desire to gain an interior feeling of peace with God more vividly felt than any assurance such as Catholics normally seek and find in their sacraments. They all felt confirmed in their appeal to assurance by such Pauline passages as the one, ‘The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.’ They made it part and parcel of their doctrine of justification by faith or confidence that Christ had washed away their individual personal sins.

As I face this audience I am overcome by that compounded feeling of fascinated envy and sheer fury which overtakes, in different proportions, my countrymen when confronted by the quintessence of English cultural achievement, Oxford; so profoundly attractive and so irreconcilably alien. As a child I thought that Englishmen were just the same, Scotsmen with a different accent; but now I know, through experience, that they are different; that environment and tradition have moulded their characters according to a different pattern, a difference which expresses itself in a thousand subtle contrasts of emotional reaction and temperament—perhaps most strikingly emphasised in the contrast (so difficult to define) between English humour and Scottish wit.

Such contrasts, deeper experience shows, do not utterly divide. Quite apart from their common history, not always a uniting factor, both peoples recognise that they share a common culture pattern and, more important, that they are the same kind of beings. No doubt a platitude, but one pregnant with significance.

Generalise the analogy! Within infinitely greater contrasts, beneath the most diverse cultures, breaking through cleavages due to colour, custom and opinion, which stretch back indefinitely beyond recorded history, man remains irreducibly man. Biologist and theologian are at least agreed in that.

Irreconcilably opposed in everything save their humanity! If you doubt it look at the record of history: issues, so easy to settle, so simple at root, twisted and travestied beyond recognition and buried under the bodies of whole generations till the problems they beget are so beset by tension, so clouded by emotion, that they can only be solved by annihilation.