The religious problems discussed most frequently in French intellectual circles are, in all probability, the suffering of the innocent, hell, the story of human origins and original sin, the salvation of non-Catholics, the value to be attached to other religions. All of these, it will be observed, represent points at which the positive economy of salvation comes into apparent conflict with the aspirations of modern man and his compulsion to give an account of human history and of human destiny in purely rational terms. Such circumstances cannot but guarantee a sympathetic public for a book of some four hundred pages bearing the promising title of The Salvation of the Unbeliever, especially when it comes from so distinguished an author as Father Riccardo Lombardi.

Profoundly aware of the distress caused by the fact that thousands of men and women have never come, and indeed never have had the chance of coming, to an explicit knowledge of Jesus Christ and his Church, Fr Lombardi approaches his subject with the avowed intention of trying to establish as wide and as optimistic a solution as possible. Such a solution appears to him to be justified, demanded even, by what St Paul says in i Timothy: ‘It is (God’s) will that all men should be saved, and be led to recognize the truth.’

Professor Zaehner’s new book is most timely, and—to anybody with any interest in the subject, from whatever point of view—quite absorbing. It is also a pioneer work, for although the study of ‘comparative mysticism’ is not totally new, the little that has hitherto been written about it has been mainly from an a priori standpoint with little regard for the actual records. Moreover, such writing has often been based on assumptions, or wishful thinkings, of very doubtful validity. At one extreme is the assumption that all ‘mystical experiences’ are essentially identical, whether they be of Christians, Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists, Wordsworthian Romantics, drug-takers or schizophrenics. At the other, that only Catholics (or Hindus, or Moslems, or the clinically sane, etc.) have authentic mystical experiences, and that all the rest are frauds, delusions, or at best purely natural phenomena from which any intervention of God’s grace must at all costs be excluded. The outstanding merit of Professor Zaehner’s book is its rigorous empiricism, its careful scrutiny and comparison of the plain facts, which can only be the testimonies of the mystics themselves, or those who have been called such. Even as a collection of texts, and apart from his own thoughtful comments, hypotheses and deductions, this is a most valuable book.

The opinion that it is impossible to make moral judgments about other people is sufficiently widespread amongst Christians to be worth attacking. It is of course a Christian doctrine that it is hardly ever my business to pass adverse moral judgments on people, but that is an entirely different matter. It is Christian teaching that I am very rarely justified in killing a man by shooting him with a gun, but we ought not to confuse this with the theory that it is impossible to kill a man by shooting him with a gun. In practice the latter theory will lead to a whole lot of death; similarly the theory that moral judgments are impossible leads to a whole lot of slander.

The theory is that while we can judge the behaviour of a man and say whether his external actions are good ones or bad ones, we cannot penetrate to his soul to see if he himself is good or bad. I can say that Peter did something that was ‘objectively’ or ‘materially’ wrong, but only God can say whether Peter was ‘subjectively’ or ‘formally’ committing a sin.

Art is the servant of beauty and beauty is God, ‘Beauty’s self and Beauty’s giver’, and it is only when beauty is seen by the artist and by those who study his work as in no way reflecting God that art becomes an end in itself. We know, of course, the fame of the Church as patron of the Arts; yet her direct influence upon the kind of painting done began to slip late in the fifteenth century.

‘In the minds of many’, writes Berensen, ‘painting, although a very familiar art, was too much connected with solemn religious rites and with state ceremonies to be used at once for ends of personal pleasure. So landscape had to slide in under the patronage of St Jerome, while romantic biblical episodes, like the “Finding of Moses”, or the “Judgment of Solomon”, gave an excuse for genre, and the portrait crept in under the mantle of a patron saint.’

It was said that Mr Jones had never seen the sea and that he believed the earth to be flat. I never knew his geographical views at first hand, and I would scarcely have dared to discover. For he was a formidable man, occasional of speech and always infallible. He spent his seventy years in one place, nearly all in one house indeed (apart from the irrelevant years of childhood, which in Mr Jones you could hardly believe had ever happened). He began as hall-boy in The Court in 1890, or thereabouts, with a wasp waistcoat and a proper respect for the protocol of place in a household of thirty servants. He lived to see much change, and when he died in 1952 the family he had served so long had moved to a much smaller house, The Court had become a school, and there were even council houses in the village.

But Mr Jones was more than a family retainer who had lived on into a world he could never really understand. He was fashioned, certainly, by the circumstances of time and place: the old General was the law and prophets for him, and there could be no countryside to match the gentle borderland, with the menacing mountains beyond. Yet he gave you a wonderful sense of the complete man, for whom change and decay could never seriously disturb the given order of things.

Poetry has always a hazardous existence, is rarely held or formed in an adequate organ of words; it is too easily dissipated or clumsily fumbled back beyond the mind’s grasping. To be continually a poet, even under the most favourable conditions, requires great power and self-consecration. Today conditions are nowhere very favourable, and least of all in young countries such as Australia and New Zealand. To be a poet anywhere, but there even more, a man needs genius, or the dedication more usually found in saints.

That these countries have not an excessive share of genius, and that their writers are as mortal and divided as all the world, is the evidence of two recently published anthologies, one of Australian and the other of New Zealand verse. The intention of the editors in each has been to trace from its beginnings the evolution of a distinctly national idiom, to show the growth of a poetic tradition which is characteristically ‘Australian’ or ‘New Zealand’. In each case they have felt that the poetry of their country began to come of age in the 1930s, with the result that the earlier writers are offered mainly as an historical background to the larger number of poems by living authors. That there should be so many living writers of verse (about forty in the Australian book, and twenty-seven in the New Zealand) persistent and skilful enough to have won recognition even in their own country, shows at least the presence of a vital desire for creativity, a vital desire for poetry.