Christians cannot look at Israel from a purely human point of view, for they must see Israel as an essential part of God’s plan for men. In a sense, of course, every nation is a part of God’s plan; human history is governed, or at least supervised, by God, and all the national groupings that arise in the course of history fall under his Providence. But Israel belongs to the plan in a unique way, not just as one people among others, but as the People of God. Israel has no significance as a nation except in a divine perspective. For Israel is the Chosen People, chosen as a people, loved by God as a people.

The life and destiny of Israel then is a mystery in the strict sense. This is a word which is often abused, but I am using it as the Fathers of the Church used it to mean ‘that which plays a part in the realization of God’s plan’. This is the sense in which the Fathers could call the events of the Old Testament mysteries; the episode of Jacob and Esau, David’s flight from Saul and later from his sons, the sufferings of the prophet Jeremias. All these were stages in the realization of God’s plan, types and figures of fulfilment to come, types and figures of Jesus Christ. Christian thinkers have always been aware that Israel was a mystery in this sense. But in the last two decades our attention has been increasingly directed to the fact. We have realized, for instance, that anti-semitism has a theological significance for us: it is an attack upon God, upon charity, upon the continuity of biblical revelation ; an attack in fact upon the roots of Christianity itself. Must we not also say then that the recent establishment of a free Jewish state, the re-emergence of a Jewish nation—and that in the Land promised to them by God—is theologically significant? an answer indeed to the innumerable prayers addressed to God by the Jews since the occupation of Jerusalem by Titus in 70 A.D.? There is no valid reason to think that such fervent and continuous prayers should remain forever unanswered.

The last ten or eleven years since the end of the war with Japan have shown some fascinating problems for the Catholics and other Christians in the Far East. I cannot claim to be an authority on them, but I have watched them as best I can and would just like to tell here something of what I have seen and to hope that others may answer my doubts with far greater knowledge and experience.

To begin with, I went back to Japan ten years ago in 1947 and saw the air of expectation in the Catholic world, which I now feel seems to have been unjustified.

At that time, General MacArthur and the U.S.A. held complete control. The Japanese had been ordered to cease to believe in their religion (if you can call it a religion), Shinto. To this day, Catholics have been unable to decide whether Shinto was really a religion or a sort of political cult. If the latter, then Catholics could still practise it; if the former, then obviously not. At any rate, Shinto was now dead and every Catholic missionary wondered if Catholicism could not take its place; and the Protestants of course thought the same.

Edmund Burke died in 1797, when Rosmini was born. Between their two lives fell the great blow of the French Revolution, striking fire—a fire of fury—from the aged Burke’s mind and then echoing on behind all Rosmini’s political thought. Burke died fighting the Revolution as an unmitigated evil. Rosmini, living through the half century that followed the great upheaval, could neither simply accept nor simply denounce it; his task, as he saw it, was to contribute to the construction of a new order such as the new age required and was confusedly clamouring for. Burke, though an Irishman, was a Protestant; and though too great a man to be a mere politician, he was on the whole a Whig and a strong upholder of the English political system set up by the Whig aristocracy at the end of the seventeenth century. Rosmini, a Catholic and an Italian, could feel no such respect for the pre-revolutionary world. For him that world meant, above all, the Austrian Empire of which he was a subject by birth; the Empire’s Erastianism offended him as a Catholic, and its hold over divided Italy offended him as a patriot. If the Revolution had done nothing else it had punished the old Catholic states for oppressing the Church of which they professed themselves the defenders. To Rosmini, as to many Catholics of his generation, the open hostility of the Revolution seemed hardly more dangerous than a return to the cold suspicious patronage of the eighteenth-century governments. Freedom, they thought, even with poverty and persecution, was better than such patronizing protection.

Seventy-Seven years separate the publication of Daisy Miller, by Henry James, from that of The Quiet American, by Graham Greene. With Daisy Miller James made the closest approach in his lifetime to the kind of popular acclaim now enjoyed by Greene; the novel is one of his simplest, and the workings of its author’s mind are revealed in skeletal clarity. The transformation in the significance of America and in the writing of novels which has appeared during that time make it startling that the two books should share something of a common attitude to Americans as symbols. The changes of the intervening three-quarters of a century have naturally had their effect on this symbolic use; the position of America in the world has changed, and the value of the symbol has correspondingly altered from that presented by James. Nevertheless there is a similarity, and it seems that Americans abroad can still provide material for an imaginative examination of society and human motives.

James’s ambivalent attitude to his native country is, of course, widely demonstrated throughout his novels. Always he finds it difficult to reconcile his admiration for the forthrightness, vigour and pragmatism of a young country, with a feeling of its inferiority before the majestical sweep of European history and the society with which he sees that history so intimately twined. The arts and politics of Europe are superb monuments of humanity, but at the same time there is in them a subtle threat, a danger that their greatness dominates the life of the present and cows it into submission to a dead past. Into this world enter the young Americans, Roderick Hudson, Christopher Newman, Daisy Miller, Isabel Archer. Their conflicts with the subtleties and intrigues of Europe form the substance of the novels in which they appear.