The terms in which this essay is written, and the examples used to illustrate various points, are for the most part not specifically Catholic. One reason for this is a desire to present the problem in the idiom of the world with which Catholics want, or should want, to communicate, since they exist partly for its sake.

It looks as though the most primitive forms of communication were non-conscious and non-voluntary. Investigators working on animal communications as they are found in such creatures as sticklebacks, and even in more highly developed beasts like ducks, believe the evidence warrants their assuming that both stimulus and response as shown, for instance in patterns of aggression or mating behaviour, are almost automatic. Investigators conditioned by methods of modem scientific research are of course prone to believe in automatism, since it is a concept which makes their task of abstraction and generalization very much easier than would ideas of spontaneity and of feeling: and the outside observer may conclude that they are tempted to minimize the influence of factors they cannot measure and even sometimes to deny that they exist. It is incidentally fascinating to notice how, when they extend to human behaviour the methods and presuppositions of their earlier work, they seem to rationalize the belief that when man fell he fell away from the glorious liberty of the children of God into an animal automatism; an automatism which, since he is not wholly an animal, set him under the domination of the idea of mechanism and of the machines his brain created, from prayer-wheels to electronic brains and a concept of the State based on the image of a robot Leviathan.

The first part of this article, in the October Blackfriars, was designed to show that, in the Catholic view, Scripture is constitutive of the content of revelation; it embodies the Word of God in inspired writing, while Tradition is regulative of that content; for it interprets the sense of Scripture, and defines that sense by Apostolic authority to be what God’s word to men is and means. This authority, which is exercised both in the Church’s ordinary and in its supreme magisterium, is not the sole regulative element in Tradition, though it is the finally decisive one. The true direction of the developing mind of the Church is continuously maintained, though in a relative and less final sense, by a twofold operation, the lex orandi and the work of the schola theologorum. The former (through liturgy and devotion) draws out the implications of dogma in terms of living, and thus clarifies to the worshipper the full meaning and inter-connection of the truths of Faith. The latter, by the science of theology, brings rational analysis to the elucidation of revealed truth, making use of the researches of various branches of scholarship; philosophical, exegetical, historical and scientific. The function of sound learning therefore is to provide the checks by which human reason, under the guidance of Tradition, assesses new developments in the light of their coherence with the constant teaching of the Church and their consonance with the biblical data, in which the substance of the depositum fidei is embodied.

There are basically two types of process leading to the large-scale liberation of the energy locked in the nucleus of the atom: fission and fusion or, more simply, breaking up large nuclei and sticking together small ones. In the fission process, a nucleus of uranium or plutonium breaks up into two approximately equal parts, with emission of energy. A few neutrons are also emitted, and these can cause more fissions in the surrounding material, thus maintaining the reaction. Energy is also released if two nuclei of very light elements like hydrogen or helium coalesce; this is called fusion. This process will only take place if the combining nuclei have sufficient energy to overcome the powerful electrical repulsion tending to keep them apart, and this means that the hydrogen has to be at a very high temperature before the reaction will begin. The required temperature is many hundred of times greater than the highest attainable by purely chemical means but it can be produced by a nuclear fission reaction. A fission bomb is therefore used to detonate a surrounding mass of hydrogen. The resulting thermonuclear reaction, as it is called, is self-propagating until the reacting mass is blown apart by the force of the explosion.

It is usual to express the power of a nuclear bomb in terms of the weight of T.N.T. that releases the same amount of energy. The fission bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were equivalent to about 20,000 tons of T.N.T. and since then fission bombs of up to about twenty-five times this power have been developed, together with a wide range of smaller weapons for tactical use.

A Variety of books recently published on Lord Acton’s historical and political ideas testifies to a general Acton revival. His preoccupation with the safeguards of liberty in the modem State and with the problems of power has rightly been found to have a special relevance to our own times; more so than it had to the comparatively tranquil days of Acton’s own generation. But, as so often happens when people set out to discover a prophet, he defies the seekers. Rare are those wise men who follow a star, expecting to find a king, and recognize at once what they really find. In Lord Acton’s case, too, there has been a good deal of shooting at crows and hitting of pigeons, and when the controversial dust stirred up by the Acton revivalists has settled, it may be discovered that his real greatness was not primarily that of the historian or political thinker at all, important and stimulating as his ideas are. It will be found that he was not a Liberal Catholic but a Catholic Liberal, which is a very different thing; that his political and historical ideas are not the expected panacea for our own ills, but need recasting in the contemporary moulds. But Abbot Gasquet’s judgment will then not have been invalidated; it was that Acton’s greatest claim to the attention of a later generation lies in his work as a Catholic journalist and editor, and in the part he played in the mid-nineteenth century, at a critical period in the history of English Catholics.

With the completion of the third volume of his massive history, Father Philip Hughes brings the story of the Reformation in England to an end, though it is an end only in the sense that the Elizabethan settlement had reached, at the death of the queen, a certain stability in its development. The first duty of a reviewer must surely be to congratulate Father Hughes on a great achievement. He has covered the whole general ground in closely-studied detail, exploring all the printed sources with patient and accurate industry. Yet, immense as is the mass of fact he makes use of to elucidate events and the factors controlling them, we are never allowed to feel that the vital issues are obscured rather than illuminated; they stand out in his narrative with invariable clarity. The disciplined learning of his treatment of the complex evidence will make his book, for a long time to come, a classical exposition of the Catholic point of view in Reformation history. The writing is distinguished by a deep and sometimes passionate conviction, yet it is conspicuously fair; this is acknowledged by scholars who do not share Father Hughes’ presuppositions. ‘An historian’s book for historians’, it has been called by one such scholar, ‘a work of real value to all who wish to study the English Reformation at an advanced level.’

The truth of the saying omnia abeunt in theologiam is specially observable in Reformation history. The greatest of the non-Catholic historians of the period, as Father Hughes sometimes shows, can be at a disadvantage in appreciating to the full the influence of theological presuppositions upon thought and action on both sides.

During the past half century, throughout the Christian world both Catholic and Protestant, great progress has been made in the scientific and critical study of the biblical text, more particularly of the New Testament documents, and, in continuation of this, of the history of Christian origins. The Encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu of the present Pope bears witness to the multiple sources of progress in biblical studies and gives directives concerning it which envisage and prepare for still greater progress to come by Catholic scholars in this field. The appearance two years ago of A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture, to cite only the most comprehensive instance amongst much other evidence, is witness also to the fact that in England Catholics are taking a share, fuller than hitherto, in this general movement of Christian scholarship, and that in doing so they are able gratefully to acknowledge and make use of the fruits of much of its labours.

One of the most striking effects of progress in biblical scholarship and the study of Christian origins has been a deeper realization of the fact and extent of doctrinal development down the centuries, and its bearing upon our conception of the nature and function of that Tradition by which such development has been brought about. The view one takes of the nature and function of Tradition in the development of doctrine is inevitably bound up with one’s view of the nature and function of the Church, as the receptacle, so to say, and guardian and interpreter of God’s revelation concerning his means and method of redeeming mankind.

So much of what was once held to have been ‘re-born’ about the year 1450 has since been shown to have been lustily alive in earlier generations that as a result historians are reluctant to attribute any notable changes at all to the period of the Renaissance. It is useful to be reminded by Professor Mattingly of an institution—permanent diplomatic representation—that began and rose to something like its full height between the years 1450 and 1550.

This book is not only about a formative period in the history of diplomacy, but provides a valuable contribution to one of the most fruitful of recent approaches to the past—the study of international relations. The purpose of this study is threefold; to question the motives which led countries to be concerned with one another, to describe the means they employed to get in touch and to negotiate, and lastly to suggest the background of shared ideas against which negotiations .proceeded: ideas derived from the practice of chivalry, which had provided something like an universal gentleman’s code of what might and what might not be done in time of war, the study of civil law, and the continuing pressure of Christian morality formalized in the canons of the Church—three elements which did much to compensate for the lack of formal International Law.

If ever there were grist for the Jungian mill it was, one might suppose, the Book of Job. It can be read almost as a paradigm of the ‘integration process’ as Jung himself has repeatedly described it. For here we have a man ‘perfect and upright, fearing God and eschewing evil’—as well he might, never having experienced it, and abounding in cosy piety and worldly prosperity. He has, as Satan points out, ‘a fence about him, and his house, and his substance’. Anybody can be ‘good’ in such narrow, sheltered confines as these; but he can hardly be a grown-up man let alone a hero, a prototype of the way of salvation through crucifixion and resurrection. Any psychologist should know he is heading for a crash. Any theologian should know that such easy and complacent virtue cannot continue long in this post-lapsarian world. Job’s professed love for God—and God’s for him—must grow up from this agreeable but infantile and unconscious, autoerotic phase. Job’s idol of a merely intelligible and amiable God must be smashed: he must learn the lesson which the New Testament writers were to see it was the function of the Old Testament heroes to teach: that man’s righteousness before God is not wrought by moral works without ‘faith in the Absurd’, the Unseen and the Unknown. So the psychologically and theologically inevitable happens: Job’s fences are down; evils rush in.

Before 1914, the mass of the people in this country took little real interest in international affairs, which were commonly regarded as reserved to statesmen and their expert advisers. In Parliament, foreign affairs were looked on as a nonparty matter, about which, save on rare occasions, basic agreement on policy was reached behind the scenes between the Government of the day and opposition leaders. This attitude was by no means confined to England. Since the end of the first World War, public interest in international affairs has grown steadily in all countries, though it may unfortunately be claimed that growth of the knowledge required to consider and weigh dispassionately the many complicated facts involved has not kept pace with the interest displayed.

This applies to Catholics and non-Catholics alike, but it is distressing to find that even among Catholics—and well-educated persons too—there is little realization that the proper conduct of international relations by Christians should be governed by as definite a code of Christian ethics and morality as that which should guide the private life of the individual Christian, and one which is indeed directly deduced from the same laws of personal morality as have been revealed by God in the Scriptures and are interpreted by his Church. A little thought will show that this must be so. All Catholics recognize the moral principles of the Natural Law, of the ten commandments given to Moses and of the supernatural extension of these laws declared by our Lord, upon which the Church bases her teaching of man’s moral duties and obligations towards God, the family and himself, and towards others who are not of his immediate family.

Some time ago, when in San Francisco, I visited the Flood Mansion—a perfect replica of a magnificent Italian palazzo, correct down to the least detail, set on a commanding height of the city, with a glorious view across the laguna to the mainland. The interior more than kept the promise of the exterior—from the grandiose entrance hall and its sweep of a balustraded staircase well to the lovely furniture and interior decoration of the numberless rooms, salons, corridors and landings. Yet for all this artistic splendour, the dominating feeling it evoked in me was one of profound sadness. For the palazzo was dead, as was its former owner, and the heirs, refusing to live there, were making a gift of it to a Religious Congregation, which had moved in—so far quite inconspicuously.

What makes a mansion in Europe, of which this was such a faithful copy, to be what it is, is the fact that it is the family mansion—the place where gallant ancestors had lived and where the present head of the house was carrying on a family tradition which was being handed on to another generation, now growing up within its walls. A family—which included not only the actual kin, but tenants, servants, clients and all kinds of henchmen and hangers-on, all together forming a true social unit. The Flood Mansion by contrast was just a museum piece, the costly whim of a mulish individual with no pride of ancestry nor hope of progeny.