How must those who preach the Gospel speak if they arc to be listened to? For the sociology of religion this is the sixty-four thousand dollar question. Here in Wales audibility seems to have varied over the years right up and down the scale. Two hundred years ago the chapels were unbuilt, the cathedral of the Archbishop of Wales was in ruins, and the Gospel message was heard hardly above a whisper. But come forward a century, to around 1850 or 1880, and the same message is heard so loudly as to drown everything else. The Church of England, presently to be the Church in Wales, is back on its feet. ‘These eminent propagandists of the Faith, the Irish’, as a contemporary priest at Maesteg called them, begin to pour in even before the Famine. Above all, the chapels are being built, literally in their hundreds. ‘Sin and savagery’ is how one historian describes the Glamorgan and Monmouth valleys in the early Industrial Revolution. Yet this chaotic, rootless proletariat was converted in a couple of generations into Christian communities, centred round the chapels, one of the greatest triumphs of evangelism in modem times. But come on yet another century, to the present day, and the picture changes again. The proportion of regular church- or chapel-goers to the population has in many places been halved, though still remaining far higher than in England. The influence of Christianity in work or leisure or politics is a mere shadow of what it was. The Free Churches can still stop the Cardiff Students’ Union from having a bar. But they cannot stop the Sunday shifts which—-with, admittedly, other things—have led two-thirds of Port Talbot people, in a recent questionnaire, to put down Sunday as ‘just like any other day’. Whatever the conditions for hearing the message of Christianity may be, it is clear that they were not satisfied two hundred years ago, came to be satisfied in the nineteenth century, and have ceased to be so well satisfied now. The problem of course is whether they can ever be satisfied again.

The rise of Christian Democracy is, as Professor Fogarty rightly says, ‘one of the major social movements of modern times’, yet it is surprising how little has been written about the subject up to now. The ‘People and Freedom Group’, the only Christian Democratic society ever to exist in this country, of which Professor Fogarty was a distinguished member, did a great deal before and during the war to make known the aims and ideals of Christian Democracy, then very much discredited. Apart, however from the excellent study of Christian Democracy in France and Italy, by Francois Goguel and Mario Enaudi, published in 1951 by the University of NotreDame, Indiana, nothing further has appeared in English on the subject, and Professor Fogarty’s scholarly and exhaustive study is therefore particularly timely and welcome. It should do a great deal to dispel the astonishing—and indeed disgraceful—ignorance of both Catholics and non-Catholics in this country regarding the political history and beliefs of Catholics in Western Europe.

Those who consider Christian Democrats to be ‘right-wing clerical reactionaries’ as well as those who are honestly if naively convinced that Catholicism flourishes best under an authoritarian regime, have a great deal to learn from Professor Fogarty, and his book should not only find a place on the library shelves of every educated English Catholic, but should also be made compulsory reading in every Catholic Secondary and Public School.

Professor Fogarty’s definition of Christian Democracy is very wide and far-reaching. He emphasizes in his introduction that his book is not particularly a study of the political parties or even of current political and trade union tactics. The Catholic social movements and the movements of Catholic Action are in his view the weightier part of the Christian Democratic iceberg.

It is just over half a century since G. K. Chesterton warned his readers not to insist too urgently on the splendours of Dickens’s last works lest it should be discovered that they were not true admirers of the novelist. Chesterton celebrated the Dickens of the stage-coach and the spirit of Merry Christmas and charity: that aspect of the novelist which Mr Walter Allen has termed the jolly Dickens, Dickens in fairy-land. It is not surprising that he had but faint praise for the later, darker novels. Most recent critics of the novelist, however, have tended to direct their attention chiefly to the later works and to occupy themselves with the task of elucidating and illuminating what is sometimes spoken of as his powerful and impressive rendering of evil and, by contrast, the weakness of his portrayal of goodness.

This contrast, and the problem it poses for the critical reader, is strikingly apparent at the very beginning of Dicken’s career. In the early novel Oliver Twist it is the vision of the underworld, the world of the workhouse and Fagin’s lair that most of us remember. The world of the Brownlows and the Maylies fails to grip the imagination. Probably the least thoughtful and least satisfactory way’ of elucidating this weakness is to suggest simply that what we arc confronted with here are characters who fail to impress because they are too good to be true. This explanation appears to be irrepressible; it is capable of appearing, usually in the form of a brief aside, even in the work of critics who have in fact much more carefully considered explanations to offer.

The character of Iago in Shakespeare’s play, Othello, has greatly puzzled critics over die past century, and much controversy has centred around the motivation behind his hatred of Cassio and Othello. The intensity of his emotion and the fiendishness of his actions seem to many critics completely disproportionate to the causes of resentment which Iago declares to be his motives. This puzzlement is, at least, partly caused by failure to recognize and appreciate the nature of sin in the Christian sense of the word. Critics would cease to wonder at the extent of Iago’s moral depravity if they were willing to take seriously those Christian teachings on personal sin and its destructive effects on human nature which still formed a living part of western man’s intellectual equipment in the fifteenth century. Shakespeare’s dramatic analysis of the effects of sin on Macbeth afford one, though not the only, example of how well he understood them. His delineation of Iago is another. In many ways, indeed, Iago constitutes an excellent illustration in dramatic form of St Thomas’ teachings on sin, as well as those on the special sins of pride and envy and on the Devil.

As so many critics have insisted, the specific instance of wounded pride which Iago alleges as the source of his bitterness certainly does not of itself suffice to explain the vicious extremes to which Iago’s malevolence finally carried him. As St Thomas teaches, however, the elements in the immediate occasion of any sin seldom account in themselves for all the evil which ultimately will flow from the sin.