As a philosopher St Thomas had very little to say that was his own, and I suspect he would have looked askance at anyone who might have suggested that he was an original philosopher. If you try the experiment of dipping into one of his commentaries on Aristotle, I think you will get a vivid illustration of what I have in mind. Take any of his commentaries—on the Metaphysics or the Ethics, the de Anima or the logical works—open it at random, and what you will find is something like this: first you will have reproduced the Latin version which he used; this will normally be the word-by-word translation prepared by William of Moerbeke. This is practically incomprehensible, unless you go through the labour of turning it back into Greek first. Then the commentary. The standard pattern of this is to begin by relating the passage to be considered in each particular lecture to what has gone before: ‘having dealt with so-and-so, the Philosopher now discusses . . .’. The problem under discussion is stated, the reason why it is necessary to discuss this problem and discuss it at this stage; then you have the steps in the argument distinguished and their logical structure displayed, the various reasons given by Aristotle for holding a view tabulated, and so on. Within each of the closely mapped out divisions the text of Aristotle is paraphrased, usually in a slightly extended form. Criticism or disagreement is almost totally absent; the nearest we get to that is in the occasional hints in the interpretations adopted by St Thomas, the shifts of emphasis, the unobtrusive play of overtones.

In these days, when it is fashionable to pay lip-service to what everyone calls democracy, one hears a good deal of verbal by-play with Rousseau’s phrase ‘All men are born equal’. No greater fallacy than that has ever been reiterated with more determined disregard of obvious truth. No matter how bitter it is, the fact remains that none of us has been born equal to anyone. Individually, we all enter and remain in this world either richer or poorer, cleverer or duller, stronger or weaker, quicker or slower, than everyone with whom we come into contact in our daily lives. This inequality of endowment stares us in the face even more conspicuously when we consider nationalities than it does on the plane of purely personal relationships. And nowhere in the international sphere does it stand out more clearly than when white men and black stand side by side amid the cataclysmic changes now taking place in Africa.

Today we live in an era when, throughout that continent, hitherto unsophisticated peoples are forming themselves into national organizations, which, although rudimentary and experimental by Western standards, will ultimately exert a very considerable influence upon our own national interests by their participation and possibly their opposition, vote for vote, in the great council chambers of the world.

It is therefore necessary for us to know something of the physical and mental heritage of African peoples in general, that our future relations with them, whether in commerce, in politics, in academics or in the mission field, may be conducted at least with understanding, if not with agreement.

It is surely no accident that the two most important books to be discussed here are products of the ecumenical debate; they are important, that is, not merely for professional ‘ecumenicists’ but for theologians generally. The point made by Père Congar many years ago, that Catholic theologians have something to learn from non-Catholic theology, is being verified in particular examples of constructive theological work, in a response to the insights of faithful dissident Christians which takes those insights seriously and positively and seeks critically to assimilate them into a fuller Catholic theology rather than to controvert them merely from what can now be recognized as often too narrow a basis. How intimate the debate has become abroad may be seen from the remarkable collection of studies offered to Otto Karrer on his seventieth birthday, edited by Maximilian Roesle, O.S.B., and Oscar Cullmann. In this large volume of nearly seven hundred pages, Catholic and Protestant writers pair off with each other to study in turn topics which have for centuries been regarded as purely controversial; Catholic writers include Vögtle, Schlier, Geiselmann, Küng, Jedin, Mörsdorf, Fries, Alois Müller, Sartory, and among the Protestants are Asmussen, Stauffer, von Allmen, Stählin, to mention only names known to me. The long study of Peter and the ‘rock’ text by the Protestant Johannes Ringger is particularly striking; it is an extraordinary fact that Catholic theologians, even since the appearance of Cullmann’s Peter (recently published in a revised German edition), have been much more interested in the apologetic case for Peter than in his theological significance, which is not, after all, exhausted in the Vatican decrees which define it.

All but five of Father Houghton’s sixty-three years of priesthood were spent in the care of a small and scattered missionary centre in the unobtrusive way of life forced on priests by the still-active penal code; a seclusion however that undoubtedly made possible the literary activity which was a marked characteristic of the Catholic clergy in the half-century preceding the Act of Emancipation. On literary grounds more than a score of Father Houghton’s clerical contemporaries have been included with him in the Dictionary of National Biography, whilst at least an equal number appear in Gillow’s extensive Bibliographical Dictionary of English Catholics. When we reflect that the total number of priests in England during Houghton’s life never exceeded four hundred, it can be seen that the percentage of those who wrote was very high. Moreover, there must have been many studious priests who from an excusable diffidence never published what they wrote. One remembers that even so industrious a scholar as the eminent historian Père Mandonnet admitted his dislike of putting pen to paper, leaving on his desk when he died a note with these words: ‘Lire, joie; penser, délices; écrire, supplice’.

Father Houghton was born in 1736 in the hundred of West Derby, Lancashire, where his family, a branch of the Catholic family of Hoghton Tower, near Preston, had lived for some generations. In baptism he received the names of William and Narcissus, the second one for its classical flavour being much to his taste in later life and he kept it in constant use.

At a time when the upward trend in crime continues steadily and our annual total of indictable offences in 1960 is certain to be the highest ever recorded by the police, it is perhaps not unreasonable that many who are concerned with the day-to-day administration of the criminal law and the treatment of offenders, are doubting whether all this recent activity and expenditure in criminological research can produce results likely to be of practical value in dealing with this phenomenon of lawlessness, now universally regarded as a major social problem of contemporary society.

A survey of the results of research by sociologists and others in their efforts to solve delinquency problems which was published only two years ago by Lady Wootton offers little encouragement. In it she seriously questioned the methods used and many of the conclusions reached by workers in this field. In fact, it was pointed out that current theories in criminology are so numerous that they can easily accommodate any facts, however mutually contradictory they may be! In fact, ‘A lament for criminology’ might have been the subtitle of this admirable book. It is true that since then the situation has to some extent improved, and in recent years the Government has strengthened the arm of research by its support and practical tokens of its interest.

But on the basis of past experience, it would, nevertheless, be unwise to expect in the near future any spectacular results from research which could possibly lead to an immediate and substantial diminution in the annual volume of crime.

The monumental tradition of stained glass has so closely tied its creator to the architect that as an art of its own, with a unique territory for the imagination to explore, it is as yet scarcely known. But things are changing, and the Arts Council’s travelling exhibition of modern stained glass (which will visit most of the principal cities of England and Wales during 1961) is an encouraging sign of the emergence of an independent art, freed from the near-monopoly of the commercial firms who up to now alone had the resources for its complex and expensive manufacture. And the recent exhibition at the Arthur Jeffress Gallery in London of the work of Patrick Reyntiens revealed an artist who combines a superb mastery of the technical problems of this most exacting of crafts with a rich and original imagination.

The stained glass artist can rarely know the freedom the painter or the sculptor enjoys. His work is almost always commissioned, usually by clergy, and he is often expected to conform to structural patterns as well as to conventions of design. His failures are the most permanent of all, as a glance at almost any church built during the last hundred years or so will clearly prove. So vigorous a discipline is not necessarily a limitation, and the windows of Chartres or Fairford are there to declare it. Since the war, intelligent commissions (not, alas, from any Catholic source) have enabled artists such as John Piper to design windows on the heroic scale—as in the baptistery of Coventry Cathedral and in the chapel of Eton College.

A small anthology from the region of Cardiff claims to be of Anglo-Welsh verse. How can one tell Anglo-Welsh from Anglo-English verse? The blurb suggests ‘a Celtic sensitivity for the pattern of word and image’, but this seems to me to be taking refuge in the undefinable. This kind of sensitivity, without which a poet is not a poet, is the same the whole world over and what determines it is the extent to which his mind is moulded by the language and past of his people or moved to write by the problems of their present. In the context, as an example of the first, that is of a poet whose imagery and language seem to continue the life of Welsh poetry, I would give Vernon Watkins, who does not appear here and must be outside the terms of reference; and of the second, R. S. Thomas whose verse in the wider technical sense is hardly more Welsh than Edmund Blunden’s but who is concerned deeply with the scene and the soul of Wales. If the meaning I have tried to give to the term is accepted, in this anthology the poems of Glyn Jones fall into the first category, ‘Nonconformist’ by Robin Moffet into the second, but the majority could have been written by Englishmen in England. I sound harsher than I mean to: there are some good Anglo-English poems among them. There are more Anglo-Welsh poems in Mr Conlan’s volume from the same publisher and they are the best ones in it.