Statements in physics are statements in physics. They are not statements connecting physical data with nonphysical conclusions.

Statements in physics are usually either true or false. Statements connecting physical entities with non-physical ones are usually neither true nor false but senseless.

Simple examples of such arguments can be taken from a field more limited and less involved than physics: elementary arithmetic.

Here, the statement 2 + 1 = 3 is true; the statement 2 + 1 = 4 is false; the statements 2+1 are green, or virtuous, or a solid body, are senseless.

This distinction is sometimes less obvious if the statement is given in the form of a conclusion. For example: if 1 + 2 = 3, then 2 + 4 = 6 is a true statement; if 1 + 2 = 3, then 2 + 4=7 is a false statement; if 1 + 2 = 3, then space has three dimensions, is a senseless statement, and it is senseless quite independent of the question whether space really has three dimensions or not.

Senseless statements of this type have been made regularly during the last half-century with reference to physical entities; and it is just these statements which have usually made the greatest impression on non-scientists, and even on occasions on scientists themselves. Thirty or forty years ago, when the phenomena of radioactivity were first investigated, it was found that it was not possible to predict whether a single defined particle of a radioactive material would decay within a given period, and that only statistical judgments could be made with precision.

The varieties of religious life are but variations on a single theme, that of Christian perfection sought in a life lived in common according to rule. But a religious order in its beginnings is always an answer to a contemporary need: the centuries pass and modifications may be necessary. Circumstances change and they have to be met in a new way. But, as was suggested in speaking of the monastic order, what is essential remains—and the idea behind the life of every religious order is written throughout the Gospels: the counsel that those who want to love Christ perfectly will leave all things to follow him.

The end of the twelfth century saw grave threats to the Church’s unchanging mission of presenting the Gospel to the world. The bitter struggle between princes and the Papacy was affecting the primary work of the Church. Prelates were often largely engaged in affairs of state, while the ranks of the lower clergy were often recruited from men too ignorant or too worldly to commend the spiritual backing of the Church. In the new universities the rediscovery of Greek philosophy was making for a materialist scepticism which could attack the very roots of religion. And in France a new and terrible heresy had grown up—that of the Albigenses—in effect a revival of the Mani- chaeism against which St Augustine fought. The Albigenses taught a dualism, that there were two gods, one good and one evil, and in fact attacked the foundations of faith, and through their organization, the foundations of society itself. The spiritual life of Christians who remained faithful had itself grown careless and was grievously affected by worldliness and corruption. It was at this critical moment of the Church’s history that two men rose who were to meet the challenge of religious decline and unbelief. They were Francis and Dominic, founders of the Friars Minor and of the Order of Preachers.

The Newman Demographic Survey in Wales started, unlike that in England, with a direct poll of the people of a Catholic parish. It had been hoped to parallel the work done in England on the records of parishes, dioceses, and certain public services. But it turned out that Catholics can be traced, when the public service records in question are kept in the form usual in South Wales, only by digging so far into the files as to violate professional secrecy. And there are many small parishes, above all in Menevia, where the danger that even the most discreet digger into ecclesiastical records may stir up gossip is greater than in,, say, Westminster. So a direct poll it had to be, and last winter a pilot poll was duly taken in the parish of Aberystwyth. Aberystwyth was chosen because it was isolated and with a small Catholic population; a manageable first sample, and with the advantage of containing a University College with an active and enthusiastic Catholic Society. The Bishop of Menevia gave his consent, and the survey was duly carried out by the Catholic students, led by Dr E. T. Nevin, Lecturer in Economics in the University, and with aid and comfort from the Very Rev. Fr Maguire, o.carm., Chaplain to the University Catholic Society. The survey forms were drafted at Cardiff in collaboration with Dr Nevin, and were duplicated at Cardiff. They were given out after Mass on Sunday, January 23rd, 1955, accompanied by a letter from Fr Maguire, at each of the Mass centres in the parish. Parishioners were asked to return them the following Sunday. In addition, other known Catholics were contacted at home. This was simple enough in Aberystwyth itself and the other small towns. In the open country, in the weather of February 1955, it was often a case of Dr Nevin leading his merry men (and girls) in a Good King Wenceslaus act up the snows of Plynlimmon. ‘You see that corner?’ said one farmer as the enumerators’ car turned for home. ‘I’ll be interested to see if you get round it.

We still know less about Walter Hilton than about any other of the great medieval English mystics, yet what we know is enough to show us that in his own age and during the fifteenth century he was more highly esteemed by students and practitioners of the spiritual life than perhaps any devotional writer of the times. Richard Rolle’s sensational works had earned for themselves the immense popularity which they deserved, but there were many who came to deplore this popularity, and it is evident that the influence of Hilton was regarded as both a salutary corrective to Rolle’s extremes, and as in itself beneficial. In the present century this development of later medieval thought has been again obscured, partly, though quite involuntarily, because of the new impetus to the study of Rolle given by Miss Hope Emily Allen, in her immensely scholarly if labyrinthine Writing Ascribed to Richard Rolle, and in her admirable little edition, English Writings of Richard Rolle. In this second work, published in 1931, she presented one solution to the problem which confronts everyone who wishes to edit a text which achieved a large circulation in the Middle Ages. Had she attempted a complete collation of all the surviving manuscripts (no less than ninety-three separate texts of the various English writings which she edited were known to her), she might well have been still engaged in the task. Instead, she took for each treatise or poem two or three of what she considered to be the best manuscripts; and so for the last twenty-four years we have been able to read good, early versions of Rolle’s own words largely free from the welter of footnotes with which most of those who are engaged in such scholarly pursuits still encumber their works.