When I was asked to speak in English before your distinguished society and to trace the influence of St Thomas on French politics. I thought: O, I can do that all right. My English is very bad, but it is good enough for that. I shall settle quietly into my chair. I'll repeat the question. I’ll look at my audience in silence for some minutes, and I'll say: ‘Nothing'. That will be all. That will be the only answer. But after some reflection I guessed that you would not be satisfied with it, you would find it too brief. Then I went on thinking. I remembered plenty of men who had been working with us at the Vie Intellectuelle, men who are now ministers, ambassadors, prefects, chiefs of party, deputies, and so on. I remembered that great lecture in which Jacques Maritain, now French Ambassador to the Holy See. had expounded his theory concerning Catholic and political action. Andre Colin, since a Minister, was present. Georges Bidault, now Ministre des Affaires Etrangèros. was there too, and lie questioned Jacques Maritain, and lie himself gave us his idea as to what French politics should be like. A few years later I also met Maurice Schumann, who lived in London during the war and was ‘le porte-parole de la France combattante at the B.B.C. Every month he would write the chronicle of foreign politics in La Vie Intellectuelle, using various pseudonyms such as Maurice-Jacques, Sidobre, etc. I remembered my great friend, Robert Delavignette.

Early in August this year a party of 24 men set out from Bishop’s Stortford carrying a great wooden cross to Walsingham. The distance to be covered was a little more than a hundred miles; the return journey by another route was another hundred. The country between is not very populous; Catholics are extremely few, living scattered in isolated parishes. This was the first fulfilment of a hope expressed in these pages a year ago in an article describing a similar pilgrimage to Vézelay. On that occasion a British party, widely representative, carried a cross from Dieppe, one of fourteen to be set up at Vézelay in an international congress of peace. The congress itself was disappointing, but on the road there was born in the hearts of the pilgrims a new inspiration; they discovered in the following of the cross such an enrichment of life in Christ, such possibilities of apostolate, that they determined to do all they could to introduce the idea into their own country. The pilgrimage was the thing. They set up a committee to pursue this ideal.

Such an undertaking obviously lends itself to misconception. It might be taken to be, it might become, a stunt. More easily still, it might be mistaken for a romantic, rather futile gesture, the nostalgic revival of an old Christian practice. Why, after all, in these days of modern transport, walk to your shrines? Is it not medieval mummery, escaping the hard actualities of the present?

What do we mean by ‘integration”? A creature is integral when it possesses all it needs for its perfection and completeness. A thing can remain essentially intact without being whole or integral. A car on its trials with engine, wheels and chassis only is essentially a car but it has no integrity. Or again we use integrity of a character that has preserved the wholeness of a good moral life or of fidelity to truth, as opposed to the one who has compromised either of these perfections by his conduct or dishonesty—for even should he repent he will lack something; he will lack that unity of a life unbroken by sin. By integration, then, we mean that quality of wholeness which is given to a thing when it is finally completed; and when applied to human life this quality can only be gauged with respect to the whole of life from childhood to old age, a life begun with a certain perfection given by God the Creator, but with a hundred conflicting possibilities and powers which have to be co-ordinated into a whole, i.e., integrated.

It is just this element of intactness which is absent in modern life. We manage on the whole to preserve the essentials of life for we continue, at least barely, to Jive. But there is no sense of completeness about it. Our home life is one thing, our work another, our leisure another, and our religion something apart from all these: all are divided off into separate compartments.

France is reawakening. Not the France of Voltaire, but of Ste Jeanne d’Arc, not the France of Rousseau’s ‘Social Contract’, but of Péguy’s Christian social contract, the contract of universal brotherhood and charity. Charles Péguy was the day-star of that reawakening. None better than he understood the past and present of France, and none was better equipped to reconcile them. With reason he urged his fellowcountrymen to recall the soul of then race: ‘Nous sommes une veille race de moines, d’apôtres, de soldats. de maîtres d’oeuvres’. His socialism was not the socialism of Fourier and Saint Simon but of St Francis of Assisi and Ste Jeanne d’Arc. a socialism which is the very antithesis of that propounded by the German Jew. Marx, a socialism to which France, if we read the signs of the times aright, is returning. The socialism that best accords with the mind and soul of France is the charity of her saints, such as St Vincent de Paul. It would seem to be providential that Péguy was sent to lead the spirit of France, essentially Catholic and chivalrous, to new dimensions of Christian social justice.

The conservative Catholic critic of socialist thought in this country is inclined to argue that at the level of explicit theory the neo-marxism of, say, Professor Laski is representative; but that the inarticulate masses in the Labour movement feel differently and would, were they articulate, express a theory more in line with the traditional Christian social philosophy. I dare say there is much truth in this argument, though whether it follows from it that the Conservative Party is closer than the Labour Party to the Christian tradition in politics is another matter, and one I do not propose to discuss. It is perfectly true that Professor Laski, with his uneasy combination of liberalism and marxism, is on the whole representative of the socialist intelligentsia. But it may be worth noticing that there is at least one socialist thinker of eminence whose work derives from the Christian tradition and is plainly of the highest order. I have in mind Professor R. H. Tawney. Certainly, his work has been less immediately influential than that of Professor Laski or Mr John Strachey. He has not been ‘put across’ by any publicity machine and, indeed, his thought is unsuitable for slick generalisation. What he writes is always the work of a scholarly historian and is academic in the best sense.

Among the many good changes made by General MacArthur I may mention here the destruction of the military machine and the secret societies, the abolition of legalised prostitution, the breaking of the power of the Zaibatsu (the mighty syndicates which controlled Japan’s industry, commerce and finance), the abolition of the feudal land system and the complete revision of the educational system. The Japanese school system was probably the most centralised in the world. The textbooks were always prepared by the Mombusho, the Ministry of Education, and distributed by the Government even to the smallest village schools in remote mountains. These textbooks really needed an overhaul. And as far as I can see the reform goes on in the right way. A normal Japanese patriotism is allowed. Furthermore Japanese history can be taught from the Japanese point of view as long as the truth is told, in short, MacArthur is determined to preserve what is distinctive and valuable in Japan. Special stress is given to one of Emperor Meiji’s rescripts which commands that ‘Intercourse with foreign countries shall in future be carried on in accordance with the public laws of the whole world’.

In his Round the World in Any Number of Days Maurice Baring says that ‘The most precious of all books are those which seem to do the work for you. You don’t have to bother; you are not aware that you are reading’. His list includes Tolstoy, Trollope, and that most lovable of writers, William De Morgan; to them we might add his own name and work. The easiest and friendliest author of our generation, and one of the most distinguished, has gone, now that he is dead; he can be matched in certain qualities, surpassed in some, but there is—there always will be—only one Maurice Baring. His peculiar charm almost eludes analysis, and analysis appears an absurdly pedantic word to use in talking of one who so deprecated pedantry; but one tries to describe his quality for the mere pleasure of writing about it.

His style is like good manners, unobtrusive, almost unnoticeable, but, like good manners, enjoyable and, also like good manners, part of himself, neither a pose nor an acquisition. In catholicity of taste and. culture he can hardly have been matched among the most scholarly writers of his generation; in this, indeed, he would seem to belong to a more suave and lettered age than ours. But he could never have ‘played the sedulous ape’ unless out of Puckish criticism, as in his delicious drolleries Dead Letters and Lost Diaries, which are so often exactly what the celebrities concerned ought to have said or written.

The Bishop of London first published this book in Australia in 1943 when he was Archbishop of Brisbane, and the present English edition includes a few alterations. In the Preface he explains how the letters were freshly translated from the Greek into an entirely modern medium, and then rewritten into a freer translation with occasional explanatory phrases. The result he has called either a free translation or a close paraphrase. A careful study of his text shows that it is frequently a very close translation, although the title of paraphrase has freed the translator’s conscience from an obligation to strict adherence to the original word—or phrase—order, has permitted the insertion of phrases or even whole sentences, and has sometimes made possible a completely English idiom to replace that of the original.

Naturally the Catholic reader will make comparisons with the Catholic versions familiar to him : the Challoner-Rheims of 1749, and the new translation of Mgr Knox of 1945. He might also compare the American Revision of 1941, which is too little known in this country apart from its use in Fr Stedman’s Daily Readings and Sunday Missal, and which is in fact a new version with great merits as a literal translation (usually very close to the Greek), which is easily readable, and which is in ‘biblical’ English with many archaisms removed and without notable Americanisms. For checking according to the Greek he will of course turn to the Westminster Version of 1931.

The temporal and moral chaos, so uniformly evident in the world today, gives clear and undeniable proof of the necessity of moral standards external to, and therefore independent of, the caprice of man. This chaos, of which only the material results are brought home to us with adequate reality, is the direct and unavoidable result of the acceptance of the theory that man is capable of legislating for himself in the moral sphere. Indeed, the deepest of truths is expressed in the oft-quoted statement that the most cogent proof of the divine origin of and the necessity of mankind for the ten commandments is given by the results which follow their being cast aside. In like manner some external, ultimate and unchangeable standards are necessary in the fields of economics and politics, sciences which of their essence have reference to man in relation to his fellows and to the physical world. These must be ultimate and unchangeable because, in his physical nature, man has unchanging fundamental needs; external, because it is by its success or failure in satisfying these very needs and not those invented by the fickle desires of the individual that any political or economic system must be judged. By what standards are we to measure such a system, what gauge are we to apply to its propositions in order that our appreciation of it may be true and our judgment just?

What I wish to do here is to touch upon some points in the intellectual and cultural situation in South Africa. This means that I must confine myself to a picture of what Europeans are doing, since the disadvantages under which non-Europeans are labouring have not made possible for them much acquisition of the natural goods. The Church in South Africa is above all an African church. Europeans, and especially European Catholics, are in a minority. Hence I shall be dealing with a minority which has largely monopolised the privileges of education and which must therefore be held peculiarly accountable for the use of the treasure which it has appropriated. My further reason for thus confining my field is the large part being played in the conversion of South Africa by the Dominicans who are so well versed in grafting the Faith upon the higher activities of the natural man.

In estimating the influences which have formed the mind of South African Europeans one must be careful to give full weight to the positive contribution of Calvinism, especially the Calvinism of the Dutch Reformed Church. The original colonists were Dutch and French Protestants, and the great majority of their descendants still hold to that confession, seriously and conservatively, as a rural population will. It is a tradition which has fostered Bible-reading, a strong and genuine family life, and the virtues enjoined by the Decalogue. It has been favourable to the formation of a legalistic and patriarchal temper of mind, and has kept alive a strong antipapist animus. It is not within my province to estimate the religious situation, but rather to call attention to certain repercussions in the cultural sphere.

That the majority of American colleges, even those started under strongly Christian auspices, have become secularized with amazing rapidity—within the last fifty or sixty years— is an obvious fact to be deplored or applauded according to the point of view. For the natural sciences which fought against the domination of theology secularization is, of course, a victory and one so complete that not only does religion not dominate, it is not accorded equality. This is the more striking in the highly endowed schools of the Atlantic seaboard because they were founded as theological seminaries, Harvard to ‘supply the spiritual needs of the colonies’, Yale as a Calvinist stronghold when Harvard became Unitarian, Amherst to prepare ‘poor boys to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ’. Until 1800 all of the Fellows of the governing body of Harvard were clergymen; after 1884 no ministers were included. In 1800 the Professor of Divinity at Yale, Dr Wright, was also president of the college; by 1900 such a combination had become unthinkable.

The women’s colleges have a similar history. It is interesting to trace the change in religion at Mt Holyoke, for example, from the dogmatic Calvinism of Mary Lyon (which included a belief in total depravity) to the present day Universalism, a religion broad enough, according to the address given in 1937 by the retiring secretary of the Y.W.C.A., to include Catholic, Protestant and Jew in the worship of the one God, Father of all.

As the theological faculties declined in dignity and influence the scientific faculties increased.

Nothing that an art-critic can say about the relationship between art and the Church can have very much value. By his very nature, the art-critic is bound to tackle the problem from the wrong end. The proper person to speak with authority would be the church-critic, but since church-criticism is not a recognized occupation, and since, even if it were, I would not be competent to undertake it, I can only envisage the problem from the end nearest to me—the wrong end, I admit, but at least an end.

The problem, as I see it, is this. The Church is certainly one among the various employers who recognise that the artist can be of service to them—the manufacturers who use his posters, the writers who use him as an illustrator, the personages who want him to paint their portraits and thereby preserve their memory for posterity. But, oddly enough, the Church is the most timid of them all. Poster designers and illustrators, though not usually in the front-rank of illustrative artists, at least tend to use the current idiom: they are ‘modem’ in the sense that they have learned their language from men of their own generation. But the artists employed by churchmen use, on the whole, an idiom that was developed in Italy in the 15th century, was superseded by the Baroque 17th century, forgotten by the frivolous 18th, revived, diluted and sweetened by the piously sentimental 19th and which survives into the 20th because it has been commercialised and further devitalised by firms of Church decorators.

I would like to begin by reminding you of an episode in the history of modern philosophy in this country which is not altogether without significance, and that is the revolt against the Hegelian absolutism which one associates with such writers as Bosanquet and Edward Caird by a very powerful collection of thinkers at once philosophical and theological, of whom perhaps the best known in philosophical circles is the late Professor A. E. Taylor and in theological circles that profound and passionate writer Peter Taylor Forsyth. I mention Taylor and Forsyth together. I knew Taylor: I did not know Forsyth personally, but to judge from the latter’s biography there was very little temperamental kinship between the two men. But both Taylor and Forsyth had this in common, that they welcomed Kant’s intense moralism. I well remember Taylor saying to me: ‘You know, MacKinnon, Kant is a very great moralist indeed. The Hegelian criticism of him is largely irrelevant. Hegel was a man without a conscience and could never understand anyone who took the moral struggle as seriously as Kant did’. Forsyth, too, in his writings found in Kant’s intense moralism—his insistence on the inescapable demand of the moral law—a rock firm to withstand the moral frivolousness that he supposed to be ultimately implicit in the Hegelian attitude; and certainly if any of you have read Bosanquet’s book, Some Suggestions in Ethics (a book well worth reading) you will agree, I think, that Bosanquet does leave little foothold for an ultimate moral seriousness—for the kind of almost existential engagement that seems involved in moral choice.

It is but fitting that we should receive in a joyful and loving spirit you, the Dominican brethren, who are celebrating at Rome the duly appointed assembly of your religious family, or General Chapter, the proceedings and labours of which we are following with close attention. Nor have we any doubt but that it will bring forth the good results and consequences that are desired of it, so that, with its discipline strengthened and its powers increased, your Order may more and more contribute to the saving triumphs of the Gospel.

That this expectation may indeed be realised the new Master General, chosen by your votes, inspires us to hope. It gives us joy, therefore, to greet him now present here; it gives us joy, also, to recognise publicly the abundant merits which our beloved son Martin Gillet has earned for himself during his long term of office as your supreme moderator.

While we were considering and weighing in our mind what matters we might most fittingly and usefully touch upon in our address to you, our eyes lighted upon certain words, contained in your constitutions, which seemed worthy indeed of meditation: ‘Resolute in peace, assiduous in study, fervent in preaching’ (No. 452). Brief in statement, but big with meaning; a narrow compass of words, but a weighty mass of precept; for therein is emblazoned the form of those special virtues which will be the promise, the goal, the guiding star of the glorious path that lies before the chosen and beloved family of Saint Dominic.

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.

Some years have already passed since the Abbé Godin in his book France, pays de mission,’ gave us a rather sad summing up of enquiries made into the increasing paganism in French towns. The book was followed by others revealing a similar state of affairs in the country and showing clearly where effort must be made at the present time. It is comforting, therefore, to realise what steps have already been taken to meet the situation; and even if it is only a start we can hope for its success when the seed will grow and ripen.

The name of Père Loew may he familiar to some who have read the short account of his work in En mission proletarienne. Père Loew had previously written a lesser-known book, Les dockers de Marseilles; ou, comment se crée le proletariat; and he also delivered some lectures on the work he has been doing. These lectures were the most striking evidence of the sincerity of his mission; delivered without sentiment or pathos but with the simplicity of truth built on real experience they conveyed a feeling of unspeakable sorrow for the workers.

In England it all started in the respectable years of the early industrial development, when common sense was valued above sensibility and far above spirituality, and when church-going was done more for the sake of propriety than to worship God. In that time the pious vaguely felt that art was wrong and the artists were sure that religion was silly. The Church glared at the artist and the artist at the Church, both mutually suspicious. And there was no growing school of religious art—none in the Protestant Church for the state of affairs indicated above, and none in the Catholic Church because Catholics at that time had neither status nor money.

At the eleventh hour who should turn up but the Pre-Raphaelites. They swept Puritan prejudice before them and proceeded to paint religious subjects and even to make a lot of money out of their productions. But the Pre-Raphaelites did us no good. By their superior pastiche they put the clocks of appreciation right back and the sentimental ‘Light of the World’ is still influencing public taste.

But in spite even of the Pre-Raphaelites the average middle-class educated man still refused to take art seriously. He considered it as a furbelow in his house and far less important than comfort. He gave no thought to art in the church whatsoever. The churches were as bad. Even they had the idea that art was something that had been taken up by the Church as an extra glory in the Middle Ages, but as soon as art showed up in the Renaissance as a truly pagan business, then it had to be rejected as dangerous.

On the outskirts of Lyons a vast monolith of a hospital commemorates the secular patron of that city of martyrs—Edouard Herriot. You take the bouncing tram from Place Bellecour (the Germans stole the trolleybuses), and at Blanche Grange you enquire for the church of Notre Dame—Saint Alban. It is hidden away behind the clinical cliffs of the hospital, and there is little enough about this plain box of a church to make it remarkable. But it is precisely here, amidst a sprawling suburb of flats and hostels, of workmen's dwellings and doctors’ villas, that for the last twenty-five years the abbé Laurent Remillieux has built up a Christian community which by this is known throughout France and beyond.

How did it happen? Père Chéry, who in his Paroisse Communauté Missionaire so vividly recorded the achievement of the Abbé Michonneau in the industrial parish of Colombes, has now published an account of the Lyonese parish which goes far to answer that question. Even the casual visitor to Saint Alban is aware that this is no ordinary church; or rather that here is a most ordinary church in which is realised the true function of a house of God, the meeting-place of God’s people, a living community of the faithful made one per ipsum et cum ipso et in ipso.

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.