Don Salvador de Madariaga’s latest work deserves an extensive review, not only because of the importance of its subject, but because its distinguished author justly holds a position of authority among the English public as an interpreter of his country’s history and civilization.

Perhaps none of the great movements of history has been more consistently misrepresented than the Spanish conquest and colonization of America. No culture has suffered more from the ‘whig interpretation of history’ than that of Spain. For at least two centuries there existed what seemed to many Spaniards a conspiracy to belittle and distort the contribution of their country to human civilization. Of late years this tendency has been reversed, and the ‘revaluation’ of Spain’s past, in which English and North-American scholars have played a prominent part, has swept away a great deal of ignorant prejudice. As regards Spanish America in particular, there have been published in both the Americas and in Spain a large number of careful historical studies which make such prejudice no longer excusable. Most of these works will, however, be unknown to the general reader in England, and there is therefore need of a re-presentation and summing-up of the facts.

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.

As a being, man is dependent on God, the first cause of all things; as a being endowed with mind and will, powers of thought and desire, he is a close reflection of that first cause, in the knowledge and love of which, to the highest of his ability, he must And his perfection and his happiness if he is to find them at all. The first cause has not left man to develop the mere scope of his natural ability, great as that is. God has freely bestowed on him, as an overflow of his goodness, supernatural powers of knowledge and love which leave the natural pattern of human nature unimpaired, but make possible the attainment of a higher kind of perfection and a much greater happiness, consisting in consciously being so like God that man can have the same divine object of his thought and love that is proper to the life of God himself. Whether we think of man, then, as coming from God's creative hand, or as in process of conscious return to him, in either case we see ourselves as conditioned by that relationship, that company, the society of God.

It is interesting to notice how very close the Church and the world are in the subject-matter of their chief preoccupation nowadays. Secular thought is concerned as never before with man’s relation to human society, and the Church is particularly concerned to elaborate man’s place in a divine society too. This is not purely by way of reaction or correction on the part of the Church.

Weathervanes are like historians—not always infallible: whilst often they will register a change of breeze, they will repeatedly fail to detect approaching storms. Moreover although this generalisation is true, the word ‘historian’ is used advisedly: for on the one hand, there are those who colour their deductions with their own political outlook and, on the other hand, those who examine the past with what amounts to the prophetic eye in reverse. At the moment, German history is suffering from a spate of articles, pamphlets and, in some cases, books that belong to the partisan class of writer of the first group, and on no particular body has this ill-fortune acted so much as a stigma as upon the German Catholic Church.

These writers confronted with a subject such as the French Revolution seldom go beyond statistical fact: their income is largely dependent upon shoddy text-books pressed upon the young who, now considered no longer able to digest rows of figures, are treated to the same facts presented by isotype tables. That one of the principal reasons for the Revolution was because French and English philosophy had reached its acme as a science of materialism is not mentioned : still less is it hinted that the counter-blast to this materialism came from Germany.

There was once a time when people who wanted to make the working life of the working man more tolerable called themselves socialists. Fourier was not concerned with industrial efficiency so much as with establishing conditions in which the worker could take a pride and pleasure in his work. Robert Owen at New Lanark was primarily concerned with improving the conditions under which his employees lived and worked, even though his expenditure on houses and schools for his workpeople may have reduced the output of his mills’ per unit costs; that is, reduced their efficiency. In his projected Villages of Co-operation he wanted to replace the plough not by the gyrotiller but by the spade because he considered that the settlement of as many people as possible on the land raised their ‘standard of living’ in the literal sense of the words even though it might not always lead to the largest possible output of consumption goods per man per hour. In later years William Morris and others reaffirmed the view that the primary purpose of socialism was not to produce the largest possible quantity of goods but to change the quality of the life of the nation, to place a full and satisfying life within the reach of all, to free the people from the narrow struggle for a living wage and teach them to value freedom and responsibility.

Being asked to describe native mission work is rather like being asked to describe children. Each mission, like each child—or like each angel—is unique. There is only one member in each species; and it is this that makes the fascination of the world. Every missionary has to build according to his own circumstances—meeting his own problem. In visiting a mission one sees what that missionary has made of those circumstances; and one is liable to think how poor it all looks, and how much better it might have been. Which is frequently perfectly true. I shudder to think what my successor here will say and think when he takes over my job some day. Yet, in fact, many such missions are almost miracles of progress—in those circumstances.

Missions may be divided into various types—like children. There is the mission in a town which has no industries, where the natives are mostly domestic servants; and there is the country mission where there are no adjacent towns and the natives are farm labourers. Both of these have a fairly settled population. There is the industrial centre mission—as in Johannesburg—where there is no country and hardly any settled population. Then there are the missions in the tribal areas, which are again quite a different order of work.

The mission I am describing is one that embraces a country town and its surrounding district. There are no important industries apart from farming—and even that is scarcely important, for the yield on the whole is poor.

We are gathered to do reverence to the memory of a great priest, a great apostle, a great Dominican. We are gathered to offer the Holy Sacrifice to God to the end that he may speedily receive into his eternal peace the soul of one who was for all who knew him an inspiration and an example, a veritable man of God, one who was for so many of us a loving father, a patient teacher, a wise counsellor and an understanding friend. It is written in Holy Scripture: Praise not a man before his death, for a man is known by his children. Those of us who knew Father Hugh Pope best have not been able to refrain from praising him even while he yet lived; but now there can be no withholding that praise on the part of any; for he is indeed known by his children, known by the offspring of his apostolic mind, known by the many souls he brought to God, known by the brethren of his Order whom he nurtured by his paternal care and affection.

In his recent allocution to the General Chapter of the Order of Preachers the Holy Father fastened upon the very pillars of true Dominican life when he reminded all Dominicans that, in the words of their Constitutions, they must be ‘resolute in peace, assiduous in study and fervent in preaching’ if they would prove themselves worthy of their honoured name and high calling. When we look back over the long course of Father Hugh's life in the Dominican Order we realise that he set himself from the outset to attain an ideal which he pursued unwaveringly to the very end.

In the spring of 1939 was asked by the editor of Werklätter, one of the leading periodicals of the Catholic youth-movement in Germany, to contribute to the final number which he had been permitted to publish before this periodical had to cease to exist— to save paper, as it was said. We former contributors were asked to state what we felt was the most important duty of young Catholics of our time. Since soon afterwards I left Germany, I did not receive an offprint of that article, but some while ago a friend of mine presented me with an odd copy of that issue. When I read it again, it struck me that, in spite of the world-shaking events which had taken place in the meantime, the fundamental spiritual situation which we then considered had very little changed.

The editor had given my contribution the title ‘Die lautere Wirklichkeit’, which I may perhaps translate ‘Reality, nothing but reality’. I still feel that the fundamental duty of Catholics in our time is to realise for themselves and for others that there are things which, though not belonging to the material and sensuous sphere, are real. It is the general characteristic of our age that its conception of reality is no longer derived from the external but from the internal world.

As the catalogues of the publishers show there is a great revival of interest in the study of the Fathers, especially the Greek Fathers, so long overshadowed by their better known and more accessible Latin brethren. If we read that the Editions du Cerf have already brought out translations of authors as comparatively little known as the apologist Athenagoras, the Cappadocian Gregory of Nyssa, John Moschus and Maximus Confessor, a new spring of patristic studies seems indeed to be upon us, and from America there come the translations of St Clement’s Epistle to the Corinthians and of the Seven Letters of St Ignatius. Will England, whose interest in the Greek Fathers has always been particularly keen (we need only remember the work of Newman and Pusey, of Lightfoot and Prestige) take no part in this renaissance?

It is hoped that, in a few years’ time, there will be brought out in this country a great and fundamental work, which has been in preparation for about forty years. We are referring to the Lexicon of Patristic Greek, begun in Cambridge in 1906 under the editorship of Dr H. B. Swete, and transferred to Oxford in 1915, for which material has been steadily collected throughout these years. Under the editorship of Dr F. L. Cross, the present Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford, assisted by a small and harmonious team of Catholic and Anglican collaborators, this work has now entered on its final stage, in which the immense material, assembled in a large room in the New Bodleian Building, is being sifted and put into shape.

If one wishes to know the reasons for the decline and ultimate failure of the Austrian Republic in the space of some fifteen years, one cannot do better than read Miss Alary Macdonald's succinct, clear, well-informed and amply documented account. The documentation, especially in the form of lengthy quotations in German, is perhaps too full for the average reader; but the latter may be confidently recommended to restrict himself to the text, for the author's knowledge and control of her sources are beyond dispute. Not that there ever was any serious dispute about either the facts or the records: differences of opinion have been largely ideological, the tendency to see a bloodthirsty fascist in every opponent of the Vienna Socialists or. on the other hand, the fear of the red hand of Bolshevism in every expression of a democratic spirit. These were extremes, but a middle way was rendered difficult by excesses on both sides and the inevitably limited capacity of the not ignoble men who tried to take it.

The elements of dissolution at once showed themselves in 191K. Austrians who had formed the habit of living in an empire could not easily conceive the possibility of a single nation-state within their sadly shrunken frontiers; Vienna was an imperial, capital or nothing. Hence the attempt to create still smaller states out of the Lauder. or for such a province as Vorarlberg to seek union with Switzerland—the nearest neighbour, with a people speaking almost a common dialect and offering an economic prosperity such as even a united Austria could scarcely hope to create.

Criticism begins in an act of reason. Beason separates individual qualities from a previously undifferentiated whole. Judgment then steps in to appraise the result. Criticism in art results from the detachment of the spectator from the artist and from his work. It works in two ways. It gives awareness of the qualities in the object surveyed. It also reveals to the critic his own attitude towards it. Criticism is, therefore, an advance from the unquestioning acceptance or rejection of an undeveloped mind.

The ancient Greeks lived in an age of great sculpture. We do not find in their writings praise or blame of such works. Criticism originally arose with them in connection with the decline of Hellenic drama, in the Middle Ages books of aesthetics, pointing out the aims, the failures or successes of the architectural magnificence springing up in town and country, were unthinkable. When man has lost the power to create things of beauty he becomes aware of the nature of these. He becomes a critic.

To become aware of the nature of any idea or state of being is to have passed, for better or for worse, beyond it. With the loss of innocence came knowledge of both man’s physical nakedness and his need for a covering. Constant preoccupation with an idea is usually symptomatic of immediate unattainability.

The contributors to this volume, as Dr Kirk tells us in his foreword, ‘found themselves, some six years ago, united in the conviction that the whole subject of the Christian ministry, its doctrine, its continuity, its place in the full scheme of Christian doctrine, was ripe for a fresh survey’. Convinced that one of the most hopeful features of modern religion is the movement towards reunion, and persuaded that the crux of this movement is the doctrine of the ministry, they agreed to collaborate in the production of a constructive historical and theological survey of the origins, meaning and importance of the episcopacy in the Christian Church. The whole is considered with special reference to the interests of the Church of England and to the difficulties in this regard felt by non-episcopal communions. This involves a large variety of subjects of research in the ten essays of the volume. All the essays are by well-known scholars of the Catholic school of thought in the Church of England.

So did I consider myself after the 853 pages in which Lord Russell apparently sets himself to the task of diminishing all the most valuable things of our European heritage. I wanted to pass the book by with a shrug, but the editor wanted a review. So I wrote angrily, but of course anger defeated itself. I cried the editor mercy, but he had old-fashioned ideas of justice and insisted on a review. Then I happened, to read Bishop Berkeley, and in his contributions to the Guardian and in Alciphron I found a curiously familiar figure. Whose was it? ‘Poland's? Voltaire's? Russell’s? Why, yes, it was Russell himself. Russell down to the ground. Not the formidable Russell, Russell the brilliant logician, but Russell the iconoclast, I had almost said the septuagenarian adolescent, Russell the minute philosopher.

It is regrettable that Dr Inge did not preface his Lecture with the following passage from Origen:

The Lecture itself is very briefsome twenty-three pages. I have read it four times and each time I have found myself wondering what the audience gathered from it. Personally I was deeply disappointed. For like St Jerome I have read all Origen’s extant works (Ep. lxxxiv. 4), and, like the Hermit of Bethlehem, found them hard to understand.

Almost anything that one may say about the situation in Germany today is trite and commonplace. It has all been said a thousand times already, and everyone would seem to be quite well aware of what is happening. Certainly many people have by now heard most of the facts; yet comparatively few seem to realise what they mean for Germany. Somewhere at the bottom of this gap in our minds there is the very understandable view that we have enough worries to deal with in our own country at present, and that we cannot spend ourselves wholeheartedly in trying to solve Germany’s difficulties; ‘Who won the war anyway?’ Then of course the older generations have seen all this before; ‘We became too sentimental after the 1914-18 war’, we are told, ‘with the result that on the first possible occasion the Germans armed again and got their own back; do you think we want to let them start again?’ But one does not need to be very worldly-wise to know that an excess of sympathy is always as dangerous as an excess of severity. It is however no cure for emotional stupidity in the past (if this indeed was the case) to refuse to be troubled over present matters which are bound to touch our feeelings, if we are human at all. I have no expert political or economic knowledge, I have no specialised ‘inside information’; I only want to mention one or two of the problems as they strike someone who has seen something of what they mean to the Germans, and who is afraid that the public conscience is insufficiently aroused.

Poor people do not differ from rich people in this natural characteristic, that they both like to have individual medical attention and realise that the best way to obtain this is to pay a reasonable fee to the doctor of their choice. Nevertheless one meets many people of all classes who make, sometimes grudgingly, the admission that they think a State Medical Service would be a good thing.

There are several causes of this discrepancy. In the first place, it is by no means confined to medical matters. More than ever since the Second War, some commodities are badly distributed and many of us have got into the way of thinking that nationalisation, or control by the State, offers a satisfactory solution. This is a trend of the times, and statistical statements have got us into the habit of supposing a ‘trend’ to be something inevitable. Eor instance, this was the defeatist talk some years ago of many doctors who were by temperament, by training and by reasoned conviction opposed to State Medicine as a bad thing for the people: they summed up wearily by saying that it was all a trend of the times and there was no resisting it. Another attitude, less easy to dispose of, was, and is, to point to the many defects in our present medical services and to suggest that State control at least offers a remedy, no other being available.

Anti-Semitism is the most horrible blow our Lord has received in his Passion; it is everlasting, it is the most bloody and unforgivable, for he receives it on the face of his mother and from the hand of Christians.—Léon Bloy.

Destinees D’Israel was written during those war years when anti-Semitism reached a greater degree of virulence than Léon Bloy anticipated even in his most pessimistic prophecies; and he has foretold only too accurately the great disaster of our time. The Abbé Journet’s book which completes and corrects the ideas set forth in the Salut par les Juifs offers an exhaustive theological explanation of the destinies of the chosen people.

‘Salvation is of the Jews.’ These are the words of Christ to the Samaritan woman. This race has been preferred to others by a mysterious choice, incomprehensible to human intelligence; consequently its spiritual and temporal destinies are for ever dependent on the great mystery of the Redemption. This dependence is made clear in the course of history in a manner always supernatural but varying according to the three successive attitudes of Israel towards its Messiah, first expectation and preparation, then denial, finally acceptance. (This last has not yet taken place, but we know by divine revelation that it cannot fail to come about.)

An African becoming a Christian in South Africa passes through a remarkable experience of two complete worlds; two religions wholly contradictory, two social systems as different, and two methods of church organisation adapted to the separate social systems. Most natives are still born in tribal circumstances, either in the Reserve Territories, Zululand, Basutoland, Swaziland and the others in which natives are under their own chiefs and ancient tribal laws; or at least they are born on European farms on the veldt, where their immediate family and social life is the tribal one, although they are not within a tribe.

Let us suppose a heathen becoming a Christian, for most of our adult Christians are still first-generation Christians, and consider his experience.

He is born into a wide sunlit land, an awe-inspiring creation whether it is the limitless, treeless sweeps of the veld or the great black barren ‘Dragon’ mountains. He lives in some sort of an oasis, valley or riverside or near water on the veld. He lives under a burning sun the year round, but with tremendous cold at night in winter, violent short rains and hailstorms, peril of crops and beasts. The earth is not friendly as in temperate climates. Insects are dangerous. There are snakes. It is not a land to rest on the grass, or splash in the water. But it has a stirring beauty, vastness, stillness, wonderful fruits, sudden grass and flowers after a brief rain, a light that is polished and air like wine. You may see red hills in South Africa and a green cloud; it is exotic, and the brown men who live in it love colour.