The household of Faith is manifold but single: its unity demands a variety of race and culture and temporal allegiance, reconciled at the centre in Christ our Lord. In time and space, within the categories that men discern, the individuations that spring from historical change, or merely from human temperament, can seem more compelling than the hidden unity which transcends them. And an insistence on the universality that Catholic faith must bring;—the Church is one, holy, Catholic, apostolic, because in Christ there can be no division, because he is holiness, because he willed all men to be redeemed through himself and that redemption to be made accessible through his apostles—such an insistence can never ignore the integrity of men as endowed with shape and colour, with minds and wills uniquely given and to be employed in the context of the life they find. Nor can it ignore the varieties of society— enslaved or free—which the Church exists to redeem.

‘All things to all men’. It is part at least of the Christian aposto- late: the source is one, but the streams go far. And a parish, mirroring the Church herself, may include at one end a monastery, at the other a prison. And in between, the infinite gradations of holiness or the lack of it: solid families of tradition, isolated converts, the rootless and the dispossessed. Behind walls the holy, behind other walls the publicly condemned; and the mission of the Church is to those and to everyone else besides.

In a stable world, with functions regulated and accepted as such, the redemptive work of the Church may seem easier to achieve.

Ortega as a philosopher has met with opposition from some Catholic circles within the Spanish-speaking world because he not only has apparently forsaken his own Catholic tradition but has ignored religion in his own philosophical scheme. If at most he can be said to have left a place for it, the place is so far unoccupied. It is true that very early in his career Ortega gave up the practice of religion and that at no time has religion in any pietistic way interested him as a topic. It is also true that he has always treated it with respect and he includes the religious sense as one of the five elements in his theory of values. (The others are goodness, beauty, truth and justice.)

This neglect, however, is only superficial and accidental. Ortega’s thought is really profoundly religious and one is inclined to classify him as possessing the truly religious temperament of the artist as against the intellectual or mystic. Indeed, one of the difficulties about Ortega’s philosophy all through is that it is a very subtle system of thought, closely articulated, but mediated through a highly aesthetic temperament. Ortega’s philosophical aim is so fundamental that it is unlikely that he himself will ever arrive at the point of sketching the natural theology proper to it. His object is to change radically the whole approach to knowledge and being by starting from the individual experience of living and, instead of projecting concepts upon, as it were, the screen of the intellect, work to truth within that experience.

There were giants in those days’. It was in reference to the I past generation of Catholic writers that the remark was made, to the generation of Chesterton, Gill, Belloc and Baring, all those whose brilliance and wit led to talk of a Catholic revival in fashionable circles. How many of them were really giants might be questioned; but it is beyond question that a lesser breed followed in their wake, whose clever caperings and ‘told-you-so’ attitude did little credit to anyone, least of all to the ‘giants’ and the cause they served. Nor has the cause been better served by that superficial reading of the ‘giants’ which induced ill-founded reveries of an ‘age of faith’ and readily identified Christianity with dead cultures.

And the most poisonous effect of this fashionable nostalgia has been to leave a whole generation of young people thinking of themselves as inhabiting a world of winter which they can only hope will somehow turn again into a medieval summer. It will not. For despite the gloomy predictions and pessimistic determinism of the swelling band of prophet-historians, this wintry world is the one we have to live in, and, under God, it is we who must alter it. Furthermore, if only we were not so blind, if only we would take our eyes away from the past and look at the world in which we are living, we should see the summer, here already, shining in countless heroic lives. There are giants in these days. It is true, they are not given to poetry and belles-lettres, these giants of our day; they are a silent race, as becomes those who remember Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Where are they to be found? Many of them in monasteries, returning to God his choicest gifts, even the gift of speech; some live in Eastern Europe; others, perhaps, sell Catholic papers outside Lyons Corner House on dreary Saturday nights.

When you close the door behind you and start on a journey, something important begins to happen. You are making an act of faith in mankind. And if that seems too pompous a description, then at least let it be conceded that any journey is a trip to the unknown. The elaborately equipped explorer, setting out for Antarctic wastes or Himalayan mountains, is, we admit, asking for adventure, and we marvel at his news from nowhere when he returns. But the more modest wanderings of most of us—whether to the Pyrenees or the Italian lakes, or, for that matter, along the coast-line of Sussex or into the Shropshire hills: there seems little here for wonder. A stolen passport, a puncture, losing one’s way, whether on a map or on an unfamiliar menu—this is the small price we may have to pay for abandoning the safety of the holiday-camp or the boarding-house lounge on the front.

And yet the most staid of journeys is always more than it seems, for it is a human thing to do: with possibilities, therefore, which we can never guess at in advance. The most domesticated dog is incapable of travel: he is moved by the necessity of food and the demands of his kind. He is quite incapable of arriving, early or late. For travel is always a choice: something to be begun, and, let us hope, to be safely ended; but to be interrupted and altered, too. And it involves other people. However solitary a traveller may think himself to be, however silent he may stand on a peak in Darien, the point of his wonder, the purpose of his journey, is always in the end linked up with his freedom. He might have stayed at home, he might have crossed the mountains by another pass. And all would have been different.

Commenting on the recent presence in Cairo of the Egyptian Minister to the Holy See, The Times has twice alluded to the probability of some joint action by the Vatican and Islam with regard to the formation of a common front against the dangers of Communism. That some form of general rapprochement is under consideration can indeed hardly be doubted, since only last November the possibility of this was mentioned by the Holy See itself in an announcement made by the Congregation de Propaganda Fidei. This announcement was not, however, any new or sudden departure, but can be best understood if it is regarded merely as a further step in a process that plainly appears as steadily developing during recent years.

Since the Catholic and Islamic Faiths jointly account for a large proportion of the world’s inhabitants, the growth of friendly understanding between the leaders of both is of profound importance, and the details of such growth are of much significance. Islam itself has been described as a sounding-box on which an event occurring in one place immediately affects the whole. This is particularly true of Cairo, capital of Egypt, since political happenings there have speedy repercussions among the various Muslim states of the Arab League, whilst also influencing Islamic opinion as a whole, because Muslim students from all over the free world are numbered among those attending at the great University of Al Azhar, one of the main centres of Mohammedan religious thought and teaching today as it has been for ages past.