Money-dealings to the religious temper of the Middle Ages were somewhat like sex-activities to that of the nineteenth century and after: they were a pity, but could be excused. Now as the condemnation of usury by canonists and moralists was based on a reading of the rôle of money afterwards displaced by another, on the rôle of capital investment, and the first was allowed to stand even when it was no longer applied to a changed economic structure, so the traditional arguments about sex are based on a reading of its function which simply does not fit in with our changed social structure. The old premise was that the primary purpose of sex was the preservation of the race. Once upon a time this was true, but not now. There is a new situation: science has enormously diminished the dangers of a pregnancy, infant-mortality, and famine; machinery supplies for a large labour-force and State welfare for the parents’ education of their children and the children's care for them; psychology enhances values in sex formerly relegated to secondary purposes; domesticity itself demands wider spacing and the standard of living for whole nations a lessened birth-rate. Let Catholic theologians then, instead of appearing evasive by the distinction they draw between contrivance and contrivances and by allowing intercourse more certainly destined to be childless than the contraception they forbid, instead of tinkering with their old apparatus and adjusting it to ‘rhythm’ and other methods which do not touch the heart of the problem, just leave it intactfor what it is worth, like the condemnation of usury, and address themselves to afresh statement adapted to modern conditions. They are not invited to preach a new morality, but to revise their arguments which appeal to reason, and to take a more balanced view of the conclusions that have been drawn from them.

Since 1950, the American novel has undergone a subtle and almost unnoticed change; there has been a break in the continuity of tradition. Before World War Two, writers like Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe could be placed by cultural historians into categories, and literary antecedents could be found: Mark Twain for Hemingway, for instance, or Walt Whitman for Wolfe. But since the war, or perhaps more accurately, since the Bomb, a kind of novel has appeared which is entirely different from the main, and even from the minor or eccentric, traditions.

True, the influence of Hemingway can be seen clearly (though in a much diluted and brutalized form) in the hard-boiled detective novel, and Thomas Wolfe has had much to do with the pose and prose of Jack Kerouac and James Jones. But the most significant works of writers like Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Hemingway and Wolfe had all been completed by the end of the war.

Since then, there have been no novelists of their stature. Nonetheless, there have been some writers of promise: James Gould Cozzens (By Love Possessed), Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny), Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky), Frederick Buechner (A Long Day's Dying), Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead, The Deer Park), and J. D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye). Both Cozzens and Wouk had relatively unnoticed pre-war careers. Indeed, their post-war careers were largely due to the political climate; each of them wrote non-experimental narratives in a reactionary, conservative, narrowly authoritarian tone during the McCarthy era. Novelists like Paul Bowles and Frederick Buechner were too esoteric, strained and mannered to contribute meaningfully to a living art form.

Probably very few people accept the ‘political’ arguments against British participation in the nuclear deterrent system; the arguments that British unilateral nuclear disarmament will encourage an Afro-Asian movement leading to multilateral disarmament, and that, whether or not the present Western deterrent is immoral, Britain is entitled to withdraw from it and expel its bases in order to cut down her risks in the event of war actually breaking out. But the traditional teaching of the Church on war and murder suggests to many Catholics that the deterrent system involves immoral risks and intentions, and must therefore be rejected on these grounds whatever the consequences may be. Now that this traditional teaching on war and murder is being clearly set out, fewer and fewer people will be able to hold that it is inapplicable to modern conditions. Yet, given this teaching, the current arguments from risks and intentions are still not strong enough to convince the majority who support nuclear deterrence. As the Revd. A. Kenny pointed out recently, even Mr Stein’s symposium has not quite succeeded in refuting the ‘theory of deterrence by bluff’: it is not selfevident that the risks involved in nuclear deterrence are too heavy to take; and because it is very difficult to show that Western governments themselves have an immoral intention to use the deterrent weapons immorally in certain circumstances, it would have been better if the symposiasts had pointed to the fact that, if the operators of the deterrent must be ready to act on governmental orders to launch the weapons against normal cities at a moment’s notice, then it is psychologically impossible for them, at least, not to have immoral intentions.

In his book, The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism, Professor R. C. Zaehner gives as an appendix Professor W. B. Henning’s critique of the work of E. E. Herzfeld and H. S. Nyberg, taken from Henning’s Zoroaster, Politician or Witch-doctor? (Oxford, 1951). It is much to be regretted that this appendix did not include the whole of that valuable short work by Professor Henning; rather than comprising only the part of it which is least tasteful and of least interest to any but those few who are arrayed in the ranks of quarrelling Zoroastrianists. Because it is to Henning’s lucid description of who Zoroaster was, where and when he lived and what he taught that the wearied and somewhat confused reader of this much larger work by Professor Zaehner wants gratefully to turn after the ordeal he has just undergone. However Professor Zaehner does satisfy the enquirer on the matter of when Zoroaster lived: he follows Henning and dates Zoroaster as Zoroastrians have traditionally done—‘258 years before Alexander’ ,i.e., Alexander’s defeat of the Achaemenids in Iran in 330 B.C., so that Zoroaster’s date may be taken as about 588 B.C. This is important because of theories which have been advanced, that Zoroaster lived much earlier; and that he lived at all has, also, I believe been put in doubt. Therefore it is refreshing to have a Henning and a Zaehner, who know the languages and the texts relative to Zoroastrianism and the prophet’s original teaching, to tell us when he lived—not so long ago after all— and also where.