The journey from Warsaw to Wloclawek was depressing: eighty-five miles of uneven road through flat featureless country, through villages poor and dirty beyond description, ankle-deep in mud and manure, the people dressed in layers of assorted garments, standing at the doors of their decrepit shanties, staring intently at our smart British car which belonged to my hosts. They had no other vehicle to stare at except long, narrow, wooden carts drawn by horses.

The journey back was more than depressing; it was frightening. For three-quarters of the way we were in thick fog, and the idea of spending the night in the car on the side of the road in that strange land was less alarming than the prospect of seeking shelter in one of the primitive villages. So we went steadily on, hardly faster than the wooden carts that sometimes trundled through the darkness. I was chilled, tired, hungry and very angry. The journey had been a waste of time and a mockery.

The day before, I was delighted to hear that my request to meet one of the bishops had been granted. The prelate I had named was Mgr Klepacz, Bishop of Lodz. Although the next day was to be my last in Poland and all my careful arrangements had to be altered, I was pleased with the thought of meeting the Chairman of the Conference of Bishops and the close friend of Cardinal Wyszynski. Then, when all these adjustments had been made, I was told that I was being escorted not to Lodz but to Wloclawek, not to see Bishop Klepacz but Bishop Pawlowski, the one bishop in Poland who agrees to, or is allowed to, receive foreigners, the one bishop of them all who is suspected of finding favour with the government.

To any believer in God it may be taken as a truism that all existing things are as he, the Creator, made them. There is a permanent and vital link between all created beings and the divine intelligence and will—which is only another way of saying that God is the first and universal cause. Nothing which exists escapes the divine causality. As the philosophers know, first among the causes is the final cause; the end hi view decides the course of action. God in creating had an end or purpose. Every creature exists for a purpose and this purpose is achieved by the attainment of its end, by the realization in each individual of his own nature.

This is true in a special way with regard to human nature. The end for which human nature exists is the knowledge and the love of God. Hence there is an ordering of human beings to God as to their final end. St Thomas speaks of this as a contemplation of divine things: ‘aliqua contemplatio divinorum’, and sees it as the natural perfection of human intelligence.

I

Were mankind committed to this order, the order of human nature and the natural knowledge of God, there would be no question of the life of faith. But man has been translated from die order of his own nature to a new order by which he is made, in St Peter’s words, a sharer in the divine nature. He is lifted into a new order of being which is so much above his own nature that it is a super-nature, and the order in which this activity takes place is known to us as the super-natural order.

This is the order of grace in which we are favoured by God— by which we are in a state of grace.

In our January number we published an article on religious translation. One of our readers, the Rev. J. B. O’Connell, who has himself collaborated in a fairly recent translation of the missal, asked the writer of the article to provide some examples which would embody the principles of translation he had formulated. This seemed a very just request, and so we are printing here four pieces of translation, two from the breviary and two from the missal. The extracts from St Leo and St Augustine were chosen for the contrast of style. These two, and the translation of the prayers from the missal, are by Fr E. Hill, O.P., the writer of the aforementioned article; the translation of the Consecration Prayer is by Fr H. McCabe, O.P. It will be observed that there are some small points on which they differ, for example on the use of ‘thou’ or ‘you’ in formal prayers to God. They would both welcome the comments and criticisms of readers.

Pilate’s guilt was certainly surpassed by the wickedness of the Jews, who made use of Caesar’s name to overawe him, and so drove him to carry out their villainy. Yet he did not come out of it guiltless either, since he forsook his own judgment and lent himself to other men’s wrongdoing. But that Pilate allowed Jesus to be ignominiously ridiculed and maltreated, that he had him flogged and crowned with thorns and dressed up in the trappings of mock grandeur, and then paraded him in such state before the gaze of his persecutors; all this he reckoned might soften the animosity of his foes and glut their hatred; it might perhaps make them think that there was no point in persecuting any further a man whom they saw so variously misused.

The varieties of religious life are but variations on a single theme, that of Christian perfection sought in a life lived in common according to rule. But a religious order in its beginnings is always an answer to a contemporary need: the centuries pass and modifications may be necessary. Circumstances change and they have to be met in a new way. But, as was suggested in speaking of the monastic order, what is essential remains—and the idea behind the life of every religious order is written throughout the Gospels: the counsel that those who want to love Christ perfectly will leave all things to follow him.

The end of the twelfth century saw grave threats to the Church’s unchanging mission of presenting the Gospel to the world. The bitter struggle between princes and the Papacy was affecting the primary work of the Church. Prelates were often largely engaged in affairs of state, while the ranks of the lower clergy were often recruited from men too ignorant or too worldly to commend the spiritual backing of the Church. In the new universities the rediscovery of Greek philosophy was making for a materialist scepticism which could attack the very roots of religion. And in France a new and terrible heresy had grown up—that of the Albigenses—in effect a revival of the Mani- chaeism against which St Augustine fought. The Albigenses taught a dualism, that there were two gods, one good and one evil, and in fact attacked the foundations of faith, and through their organization, the foundations of society itself. The spiritual life of Christians who remained faithful had itself grown careless and was grievously affected by worldliness and corruption. It was at this critical moment of the Church’s history that two men rose who were to meet the challenge of religious decline and unbelief. They were Francis and Dominic, founders of the Friars Minor and of the Order of Preachers.

Two books appeared in the course of this year, one by Professor Culler dealing with Newman’s life as a humanist, the other, edited by Fr Bouyer, publishing for the first time many of the autographical memoirs that show forth Newman very much as the delicately conscientious Christian. It would appear to be Professor Culler’s view that these two aspects in Newman’s character were never fully harmonized. In fact, one wonders whether, in the professor’s view, they could be harmonized, at least in the forms they took in Newman’s mind. So unharmonized were they in Newman’s early life, we are led to believe, that their conflict resulted in five crushing illnesses during his youth and early manhood. However, ‘as adolescence passed and as Newman moved into a religious position which was not distrustful of intellect, the conflict gradually resolved itself into the precarious balance which is achieved in the Idea of a University.’ But, though Professor Culler here says that the conflict resolved itself, it is obvious that he does not really believe that such a resolution ever took place. The author of the humanistic discourses in the Idea of a University is, according to Professor Culler, a survival of the vainglorious person who dabbled in un-Christian speculations, but who was suppressed in Newman’s youth from his conscious life, when he turned to religion. The author of the religious discourses in the same book is the other Newman, ‘the docile and submissive creature who emerged’ when the early crisis has passed. We are, then, to believe that the Idea of a University reflects two characters in rebellion against each other, one representing the spirit of humanistic and religious liberalism, the other pietistic and anti-liberal evangelicalism.

Few intellectual groups within the Church have deserved more gratitude from their fellow-Catholics than the Catechetical Society of Munich. It came into existence towards the end of the nineteenth century; a few kindred spirits among the clergy—Stieglitz, Weber, and others—gathered themselves round a periodical, Katechische Blätter, still happily flourishing, and from 1898 onwards had the conscious aim of improving the prevailing ways of teaching religion to the young. They were well aware of the educational psychology of those days, Herbart and suchlike, and they soon evolved the needed applications of it to the teaching of religion. Their Munich method, as it was called, made a point of properly organized lesson-units, instead of just ploughing steadily through a book of questions and answers. They may have seemed a shade pedantic perhaps in their insistence on the regular elements of each lesson—aim, presentation, explanation, questioning, application, expression-work and so forth. But the distinctive feature of Munich was to start from something concrete, some narrative or at least some picture, but preferably from some Scriptural story, and work up from that to the explanation of the doctrine concerned and if necessary to the relevant catechism- answer. Other methods had used Scripture for ‘examples’; Munich started from Scripture. As time went on, and the liturgical movement made itself felt especially in Germany, together with a deepening theology, the Munich catechists welcomed the new insights and incorporated them into their plans and material. Gradually the present generation of pioneers, in Germany and elsewhere, has come to see that catechetical renewal is not merely a matter of methods, of introducing a few more pictures or stories or activities, but involves reconsidering the content of the instruction itself.

All religious orders, however much they may vary in their origins or in the work they do, are based on a single— indeed a simple—idea: namely the search for Christian perfection. To begin with, this meant an individual’s going apart, often into the desert or a cave, where he might devote himself wholly to prayer and contemplation. The very word ‘monk’ means a solitary. But in the fourth century in Egypt the monks began to organize themselves in communities: the movement spread, and gradually a rule of life developed by which the communities were bound. The most important of them was that of St Benedict, bom in 480 in Italy, and the Benedictine rule became the dominant force in the growth of monastic life in the West.

The Rule of St Benedict, which is still followed today by the thousands of monks and nuns who bear his name throughout the world, is a sane and moderate document which provides a charter for a life to be lived in common. Its motto is ‘Pax’, the peace that comes to those who follow Christ. For it is, in St Benedict’s words, ‘a school of the Lord’s service’, in which the monk is to leam to prefer the common good to his own interests, and that common good is seen in the faithful following of Christ. The Abbot is Christ to his community, and the monk’s principal work is the Opus Dei: the work of celebrating the solemn liturgy, the praise and glory which it is man’s chief privilege to offer to God. Manual work is to be the monk’s other occupation, and the ordinary business of tilling the fields and running a house is seen to be itself a means of serving God in silence and simplicity. Labour itself is made into something holy.

Poverty and unemployment, slums and dirt were the conditions best known to those who worked amongst the under-privileged in 1925. In London and all the big cities families lived in houses that were dismal and insanitary, houses where a bathroom was an undreamed of luxury, where, as likely as not, hot water was to be obtained only from a kettle on an open fire. Walls were damp and crumbling and many women waged perpetual warfare against the ‘steam tugs’, as the Londoners called the bugs which tainted the air with their sickly smell. Families who had a four-roomed house to themselves were fortunate, for many were housed in large tenement buildings where lavatory accommodation was shared between several families and every drop of water used by the top floor tenants must be carried from upstairs a tap in the yard. In such buildings it was not unusual for babies to be bitten by rats or mice and for girls who were working in the exclusive shops of the town to be forced to keep their clothes in large paper bags that could not be invaded by the bugs at night. A bed to oneself was unheard of privacy in these overcrowded homes; there were few facilities for personal cleanliness and the family washing was done at the public washhouse. Cooking facilities were little better, and as there was no space for the storage of provisions food had to be bought in small quantities from day to day. Many spoke scornfully of the thriftlessness of the poor who had no knowledge of the conditions which forced them to live in such a hand-to-mouth fashion.

There is a passage in Francis Thompson of which Chesterton remarked that it alone proved that Thompson was a great poet because, he said, it contained as many inner meanings as outer ones; that is to say, that not only did it contain meaning after meaning, as in a Chinese box one box opens into another inwards, but at the same time, as from a stone dropped into still water, it gave rise to ever-widening rings of thou ght spreading outwards to infinity. To read the life of St Joan is to be reminded very forcibly of Chesterton’s observation. For never was there life so fraught both with inner significance and with world-wide implications. For the wider sphere it is enough to say that she created a nation; or as Michelet puts it: ‘Elle aima tant la France! Et la France, touchée, se mit à s’aimer elle-même’ The outward-spreading consequences of that single decisive act are still perceptible today. The inner significance of her life is to be found in her unique relationship to God. Flere is a mystery indeed! Not as regards the facts. There is no mystery there. We know them all; from her earliest childhood until her death, no tiling is hidden. Moreover, what is even more remarkable, all this comes down to us in the form, not of hearsay and legend, but of attested statements, for, as one of her biographers has pointed out, hers is the only story of a human life which comes to us under oath. No, it is not the facts which are in question, but rather what lies behind the facts. We know that from the age of twelve she was accompanied by three Saints—St Michael, St Catherine of Alexandria and St Margaret of Antioch; but of the peculiar significance of those particular three we remain ignorant. She referred to them as her ‘Voices’, although in fact they were much more than mere voices. They were presences whom she had frequently seen and touched and to whom on at least one occasion she had made her confession.

The flood of literature on automation which has appeared in recent months has left no one in doubt as to the importance of the subject. Most of the discussion, unfortunately, has been of the effects of automation rather than of automation itself; the public has not been allowed to acquire any background knowledge, with the result that automation remains mysterious and menacing. I came across an example of this recently, when I was asked to take part in some Staff Association negotiations on the introduction of machines into office work ‘in case they try to blind us with science’. In fact all the science needed could have been explained in five minutes, and it would then have been clear that in this case there was no need for anxiety.

Until recently it was not easy for the layman to obtain reliable information on the many topics which are grouped under the heading of automation, but this situation has been much improved by the publication of an official survey which is a model of lucidity and careful writing. This survey picks out three streams of technical progress: automatic data-processing, automatic machining, and automatic process-control. I shall discuss each of these in turn, describing first examples of the equipment involved and afterwards the kind of effect which this equipment is having.

We begin with automatic data-processing, which in its most advanced form is carried out by electronic digital computers or ‘brains’. These computers are perhaps the most remarkable of automatic machines.

To the eye of faith, and so of theology, there is no authentic Christianity apart from the Catholic Church, and the Church has an inward pattern or design centred on Christ. I say ‘inward’ to imply that this pattern is not visible to the historian as such. History can only show the development of the Church as an institution making certain claims: to interpret these historical data in terms of that pattern is the work of theology.

The pattern might be represented by two lines drawn from a central point. The point is Christ, both Saviour and Word; the lines are a line of ‘grace’ passing through sacraments to the souls of men, and a line of truth passing through faith and teaching to their minds. Grace and truth combine in Christ, and of this fulness we have all received; but grace in one way and truth in another. Life and light, identical in Christ, reach us through distinct media within the one Church: grace through the sacraments, and supremely in the Eucharist; truth through faith and the Church’s articulation of the faith and in the rules wherewith she applies it to the details of conduct. In both communications the Church, we believe, is necessary. But the manner of her mediation differs in each case.

Where sanctifying grace is concerned the Church is purely God’s instrument, in the most limited sense of the term. Her task here is simply to effect the sacred sign, to consecrate, for example, the host and administer it; the rest—granted the recipient’s response—is all God’s work. The Church here is a mere vehicle of a divine action; and this in virtue of the power conferred on every priest at ordination. And so limited is the human share in this sanctification through the sacraments that the priest’s personal moral quality makes no difference at all to the degree of grace transmitted.

The members of‘Pax’ begin by accepting the Communist revolution as an accomplished and permanent fact. Nothing is going to alter that fact. The people of Poland, of whom more than 90 per cent profess the Catholic religion, will remain indefinitely under a Communist government. Can all these people so arrange their thoughts and behaviour as to be able to live Christian lives in a Marxist regime? The members of ‘Pax’ believe that such an arrangement is not only possible but eminently desirable. Catholics should do more than give acquiescence to the new society; they should be the willing, joyful, joint-creators of it. They should joyfully co-operate for three excellent reasons: because in such co-operation lies the Church’s best chance of survival; because the Government’s social and economic work is praiseworthy in itself and historically necessary; because co-operation in the new social order could be a sublime manifestation of true Christianity. In the past, Polish Catholicism had been narrow, a matter of personal experience, based on pietistic sentiment and the fear of Hell, without thought for one’s neighbour, without social conscience, without indignation against the evil conditions that were tolerated by the clergy. Here is a glorious opportunity to change all that.

To all the obvious objections they have shrewd answers. ‘Without any doubt whatever’, says one of their official documents, ‘there is no room for the conception of God in the intellectual system of materialistic socialism.’ But they make a careful distinction. There is an atheistic humanism which has always been in conflict with Christian humanism, and the conflict will probably endure until the end of time; it is a civilized argument which can be maintained by men who are friendly in every other respect and can agree about one another’s sincerity.

The Dead Sea scrolls are still, and for a long while yet will continue to be, a matter of major interest. And now Penguin Books have devoted a volume by J. M. Allegro to this subject. The author is Lecturer in Comparative Semitic Philology at Manchester University, took part in the editing of manuscript fragments which are assembled at the Palestine Museum of Jerusalem, and has already published some of these fragments in technical journals. Up to now it has been his broadcasts and the resultant controversies that have made him known to the general public. These alone would suffice to draw attention to this book which, further, is well-written, lively, pleasant to read. As it is published at a moderate price in a series of wide circulation, the book is straightway sure to be a success. I may say that the success is deserved by reason of some real qualities in presentation and facts. But this very success may unfortunately give credit to some conclusions which are hazardous or quite simply erroneous.

The first half of the book covers the history of the Qumrân discoveries, the work of editing, and the excavations (pp. 15-93); this part is generally excellent despite some small errors which we need not dwell on here. Mr Allegro furnishes us with new information from reliable sources on the long-drawn negotiations which enabled certain lots to be bought; yet this new information needs to be correlated with the narratives of other writers. It will be found to complement rather than contradict. The four appendices (pp. 163-184) on John the Baptist, on ancient finds related to the Qumrân documents, on Murabba’at and the other caves outside Qumrân, on the copper scroll, are all useful and only have a few inexactitudes.

When Parliament passed the Monopolies and Restrictive Practices Act in 1948, it acted on the belief that monopolies were capable of harming the public interest, although they did not necessarily do so. It provided for the establishment of a Commission which would, at the request of the Board of Trade, investigate the behaviour of particular monopolies, and would report whether or not these monopolies were behaving in an anti-social manner. If they were acting contrary to the public interest the Government might make an Order requiring the monopoly to amend its behaviour, although in the majority of cases it has, in fact, chosen to rely upon reaching an informal agreement with the monopoly. The Monopolies Commission has completed eleven such investigations, and the Government has already acted upon most of the Commission’s reports. About the middle of 1955 the Commission completed its first report on a ‘general reference’. In the case of such a reference the Commission was required to consider the general effect, over the whole of industry, of specified restrictive practices. The Act made no provision for Government action on such a report, which would therefore have no effect unless industry voluntarily amended its practices in the light of the Commission’s judgments, or unless the Government made the report the basis of new legislation. The Government has now introduced a Bill to deal with the practices covered in this report.

Rembrandt’s art reveals a unique reverence and appetite for life which originated in an entirely different attitude and vision from the extrovert thirst for sensual excitement animating the tavern scenes by Jan Steen and other Dutch painters. Rather he evinced an insatiable curiosity about reality, about matter informed by spirit, and if he depicted genre scenes they indicated a pervasive intangible quality beyond the facts of their immediate physical appearance. The acuteness of his observation enabled him to translate the most complicated forms and structures—struggling children, wild beasts, carriages—into drawings where their particular essentials are seized with an inimitable assurance and spontaneity: a single calligraphic curve defines the receding plane of an upturned nose, a bold prolonged oval stroke the thrust and fulness of an abdomen. Like Constable he was an intuitive rather than a scientific draughtsman: that his results are objectively convincing is a triumph of optical and manual coordination.

However, it is not mere technical virtuosity which provides the key to his perennial fascination. His oeuvre represents a continual and gradual elimination of superfluities in an unending quest for visual equivalents of the fundamental mystery which lies at the heart of all human experience. Contrary to the usual pattern of responsiveness, his sense of wonder increased with age, and compassionate wonder became the ultimate theme of his art, culminating in the painting of the ‘Prodigal Son’ with its universal and personal hope of Divine mercy.

In any period men’s thoughts about the past tend to harden and simplify into conventional praise or disparagement. This in turn, as fashion and then prejudice, affects the present and the future; until a new generation finds it an intolerable cliche. It is then criticized and perhaps discarded. Modem scholars cannot stomach the old cliches about the Renaissance. To go further back, Voltaire’s generation sneered at Dante, whom it did not read, and thought Gothic a style for barbarians; and both these views, with their implications, had become conventional, not to say stale, by the mid-eighteenth century. When, with the new century, the tide turned, the motive was largely religious; a revival of Christian piety, a new interest in theology. But the new outlook could be equally one-sided. Pugin thought Gothic the only Christian style in building and Ruskin thundered against the neo-classical style of the Renaissance—‘pagan in its origin, proud and unholy in its revival, paralysed in its old age . . . an architecture invented, as it seems, to make plagiarists of its architects, slaves of its workmen, and sybarites of its inhabitants’. And from this attitude, become in turn a convention as stale as neo-classicism, we inherit (do we not?) much highly unpractical ugliness. Nor is the association of prayer with pointed arches quite dead yet.

The present century’s slow movement away from Gothic in ecclesiastical architecture has not however implied any loss of interest in the Middle Ages on the part of scholars or indeed of the educated public in general. Far from it. Never have the philosophy, art and literature of the Middle Ages been so thoroughly studied or keenly appreciated as in recent years.

Electronic digital computers or ‘brains’ were originally designed, as we saw previously, for use in the computations which occur in business and in scientific research; they carry out at great speed ‘programmes’ of elementary arithmetical and logical instructions which have been precisely formulated in advance. But there are many scientists, from linguists on the one hand to neurologists on the other, who are not confronted with heavy computation but who are keenly interested in other applications of electronic computers. In this article I shall discuss briefly a few of these applications, because although they are of less immediate practical importance they are fascinating in themselves, and in one case at least they have helped in the formation of a new discipline, that of cybernetics, which is helping to break down a little of the excessive specialization which is the curse of modem science.

Machines which play games. The mathematical theory of games which has been developed in recent years can be applied to much more serious matters such as economics and even military strategy. The possibility of similar applications of game-playing machines may help to justify the time and money which have been spent on programming a computer to play such games as noughts-and-crosses, draughts, chess and two-handed whist.

The Welshman’s premium as a music-hall joke is at a low ebb. Instead he is becoming a curio, an oddity to be discovered on a walking holiday in the Welsh mountains or during a stay at one of the remoter resorts. Strange things emanate from the land of Wales—the hidden meanings of a Dylan Thomas, the mystic spirit which captures the soul of a David Jones even before he sets foot in the country, the suspect magic in the oratory of a Lloyd George, the religious fervour of a rugger crowd swaying on the touch-line. For those who have the courage to penetrate there might be a glimpse of a woman in a tall Welsh hat (specially provided by the Tourist Board), the music of miners going to their work, the lilt of a language as old as Taliesin and as dark as Eryri. There is a growing feeling that there are strangers in our midst—their very name of Welsh means that.

The attitude of the outsider is normally one of two extremes— it is either an unstinted adulation based on an acquaintance with the great names of Wales or else one of a slightly contemptuous indifference based on a few unpleasant encounters with Welshmen and an impatience with a nation which has no right to survive beyond a quaint desire to preserve an archaic language and a tradition which, rich and picturesque though it might have been, is now only of use to the antiquarian.

The right of a nation to have its tradition and its culture recognized is a fundamental Christian value. Belief in the Incarnation does more than breed a respect for the sacf edness of the individual, for the individual implies the context into which he is inserted, the society in which he lives. Salvation is worked out here and now. It is dishonest to want to be someone else—and being ‘me’ means being me as member of this nation with its tradition and temperament, its culture and character.

At first sight it may seem strange to call some orders ‘active’ and others not. In one sense the contemplative orders are the most active of all: a Cistercian monk who rises at two in the morning, and spends many hours in prayer but as many in hard manual work, could scarcely be called idle. But in die technical sense those orders called ‘active’ are deliberately concerned with the works of active charity—whether spiritual (as in missionary work) or temporal (as in the care of the sick or in educating children). They, like all religious orders from the very beginning, are concerned with the following of the counsels of the Gospels in an organized life according to rule, but the monastic features of stability and a liturgical structure, as well as the characteristic organization of the frairs, are sacrificed in order that dieir particular active work can be more effectively pursued.

Strictly speaking these orders are not orders at all, since they do not take the solemn vows that are the mark of the monks and the friars. But this is a technicality of the canon law which scarcely concerns our present purpose in describing their work. For the active orders first came into being, as did the monks and the friars in their time, to meet a need of the Church and were constituted to meet that need. The Reformation was an immense challenge to the Church, and it was soon evident that new methods were needed to win back people lost to Catholic allegiance and to stimulate the spiritual life of the faithful. It was the Jesuits most of all who were to be the instrument of the reform within the Church that was to be the answer to the Reformation which had caused so great a breach in Christian unity.