The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’, founded by I Charles the Great, was already breaking up in 1804. A decree of Francis I, its last emperor, made its death inevitable. Its underlying principle, the unity of God and the world, the civitas Dei terrena, had lost force and efficacy. But in the Austrian empire it survived the downfall of the Dual Monarchy, and notwithstanding all it lived on through Austria’s First Republic. Not until the 13th of March 1938, when Hitler's swarms imposed the Anschluss, was this last embodiment of a great political ideal eliminated.

The centuries-old unity of spiritual and secular rule had endured nowhere on the Continent of Europe so long as in Austria. Ruling and ruled alike, in the realm of State and Church respectively, saw the continued stability of this alliance as the direct, clear outcome of deliberate policy on the part of State and Church, but also as the only possible working plan for the prosperity of both realms. The throne protected the altar and the Church preached loyalty to the established government as a duty-binding Christian virtue. An acquaintance with these facts is essential if the seemingly special relationship between Church and State, the conditions inside the Church and the life of the Church in Austria are to be understood and correctly estimated.

In addition, we have the outstanding fact of nineteenth century Freemasonry and its concentric onslaught on this one surviving bulwark of the ‘dark’ Middle Ages.

In Styria, or at least in a wide region around the Benedictine house of Seckau, the first week-end of August is a pilgrimage week-end to the tiny church of Maria-Schnee, in honour of the Feast of Our Lady of the Snows on August 5th, this year Bank Holiday Monday.

A truck-load of sundry Graz welfare workers—Fiirsorgerinnen proper and Caritas voluntary workers and myself representing the Red Cross and C.C.R.A.—set off on the Saturday morning, made a tour of the beautiful church at Seckau, and then scattered to our various billets. Three of us were staying at a neighbouring farmhouse, the bunch of Fiirsorgerinnen were going two-thirds of the way up the mountain that night, to sleep in a hayloft and have a shorter walk to the top at daybreak. The farmhouse where we stayed was of the indescribably attractive small-holding variety, not lovely, rather poor and cramped, but satisfactory because the people were completely satisfactory. It is a one-man show, with wife and two daughters, one of them a teacher at the village school. The household is overshadowed by the loss of both sons, always a double tragedy in a peasant’s family, and news of the second death, over a year old, had only recently come through from Germany, after the reopening of postal services.

There was a small lake to bathe in and a cool, musical stream running through the orchard—it provided the water supply for the household. There was a charming hospitality, piety in the old sense of the word and good, honest garden and farm produce to eat and drink in exchange for bulkier but tinned British rations.

To all young people equally, whether students, young workers, young teachers or others, we say: Look around you, witness the hunger and the poverty, and help in whatever way you can. And to all leaders and teachers of youth we say: Take your young people seriously. Don’t suppose that you can give them as an ideal a sort of game of Red Indians or that Strong Man cult which belongs to a time which is now, thank God, passed. Do not be afraid of introducing them to hard facts, to the need that is all around us and to their duty .to help as Christians. They will understand you better than perhaps you imagine. When you can show them all this clearly, you will have done more for their lives than any amount of book learning can do.

We meet weekly. We begin with Our Father and then we beg St Vincent de Paul and St Elisabeth to stand by us. Then we read a chapter from a book or a paper having direct bearing on our work: we shall doubtless have to find new ways of doing things and we need to be shown how. This summer we took passages from Dostoevsky, from the Gospel, from Novalis, from a book of eleventh century prayers, from Lives of the Saints, from Professor Geramp’s Styrian Folk Tales, from the Letters of St Justinus. In the light of what we have read we discuss our plans.

If one wishes to know the reasons for the decline and ultimate failure of the Austrian Republic in the space of some fifteen years, one cannot do better than read Miss Alary Macdonald's succinct, clear, well-informed and amply documented account. The documentation, especially in the form of lengthy quotations in German, is perhaps too full for the average reader; but the latter may be confidently recommended to restrict himself to the text, for the author's knowledge and control of her sources are beyond dispute. Not that there ever was any serious dispute about either the facts or the records: differences of opinion have been largely ideological, the tendency to see a bloodthirsty fascist in every opponent of the Vienna Socialists or. on the other hand, the fear of the red hand of Bolshevism in every expression of a democratic spirit. These were extremes, but a middle way was rendered difficult by excesses on both sides and the inevitably limited capacity of the not ignoble men who tried to take it.

The elements of dissolution at once showed themselves in 191K. Austrians who had formed the habit of living in an empire could not easily conceive the possibility of a single nation-state within their sadly shrunken frontiers; Vienna was an imperial, capital or nothing. Hence the attempt to create still smaller states out of the Lauder. or for such a province as Vorarlberg to seek union with Switzerland—the nearest neighbour, with a people speaking almost a common dialect and offering an economic prosperity such as even a united Austria could scarcely hope to create.

A Few weeks ago I heard an Austrian historian—a thinker and a practising Catholic—describe Austria as ‘perhaps the most corrupt country in Europe’. Similar judgments are made by Englishmen in Austria on the strength of the Black Market and the power of the cigarette as a means of getting things done. But in the mouth of an Austrian it has a very different value and significance. Not only does it embody the mood of searching self-criticism which is prevalent among thinking Catholics in Austria; it also recognizes and points to a sickness in the Austrian nation far deeper-seated than the Black Market—which will, here as elsewhere, disappear only when there is a sufficiency of food and cigarettes, but which is relatively a superficial ill. Objective love and inside knowledge are the pre-requisites of a true diagnosis, and these are hard to come by for a foreigner, who may be fascinated or repelled by irrelevant details—the peasant's Grüss Gott, or the incurable unpunctuality of Austrians in keeping appointments. This article is therefore not a statement of personal opinion but a synthesis of the views of one or two Austrian Catholics, whose interpretation seems to fit the facts as they now-appear and in whom self-criticism and an earnest truth-seeking guarantee a certain degree of objectivity.

That Austria was physically incapacitated by the collapse and dismemberment of the old Austrian empire is generally known, though Englishmen are apt to underrate the effects both of economic distress and of the psychological shock of becoming, suddenly, a small nation in turning the minds of Austrians towards union with Germany as a cure for their ills.

As in the lecture room, so in writing. Sir Edmund Whittaker's presentation of his material is made attractive by a certain elegance. It is apt to fill his hearers and readers with at least a temporary sense that new realms of thought have been rendered thoroughly intelligible to them. His Donellan Lectures (1946) were no exception, if we may judge by this book which holds the substance of them. But elegance is the least important quality of an enquiry so serious in its import as to be concerned with the capability of man’s reason to demonstrate that God exists. Hereafter we shall give evidence for what we can only call the scientific levity with which this grave subject is here treated. Let us first express our immense disappointment that the author should handle with such evident lack of understanding, not to say lack of knowledge of what is being talked about, matters that do not pertain to his own science. This is particularly regrettable on the part of one who is so hot against the misdemeanours of philosophers and theologians in their approach to technicalities of physics in which they may be without expert competence. He specifies, grounds of serious complaint against the Aristotelians of the seventeenth century. Today it clearly appears that there are equally serious ones on the other side.

It is deplorable that the prestige of great attainments should be lent to 140 pages of misunderstanding that results in continual verbal equivocation. The ‘analogy’ here defined and depreciated is not the analogy of the metaphysician and of the Five Ways.