Religious sociology, as an academic study in its own right, is scarcely twenty years old, and as yet its true dimensions have hardly been realized. Indeed Professor Gabriel Le Bras, its virtual founder, can speak with pardonable rhetoric of its ‘limitless horizons', since it ‘embraces all times, all countries, all man's dreams of time and the infinite'. Of course there is a sense in which the material which the religious sociologist considers has always been there. The Church exists among men, in time and place, and even the old testament provides ample evidence of the close connection between men's worship of God and the social setting in which it is to be achieved.

The structure of the Church's organized life is a palimpsest of her history. To that extent it is a matter of chance, or perhaps one should say of the providence that ordained her growth in terms of particular cultures and societies.

If American businessmen are right in the way most of them live now, then all the wise of the ages, then all the wise of the ages, the prophets and the saints were fools. If the saints were not fools, then the businessmen must be.

Such is the stern, uncompromising beginning of a leading article in Fortune when the Chancellor of the Jewish Seminary writes on ‘The American Businessman's Moral Failure'. He realizes that, in an industrial society especially, the manager bears tremendous responsibility: his customs, morals and attitudes pervade the whole life of the country. The tragedy, as this article stresses, is that most managers have lost sight of the moral sources of economic strength and that no country can reach the height of economic success achieved by Britain or the United States without a philosophy and a faith more concerned with the human spirit than the comfort of the body.

Nearly two years ago, the British Institute of Management programmed for official discussion: ‘Are we failing to stress sufficiently in our selection and development of management the spiritual aspects?’ and within the last two months Belgian employers have discussed—for the first time—'Evangelical Poverty and the Christian Employer'.

Religion is caught not taught—an old tag—and with secondary education for all there is now more time for the catching. Secondary modern schools (or ‘streams’ in comprehensive schools) cater for seventy per cent or more of the population of the country, a large proportion of school-aged children not suited, in the judgment of the educationalist, to acadernic or intellectual study. For these the proven methods of the grammar school are not applicable, as anyone who has stood in front of forty such will acknowledge. ‘Teach us if you can', they seem to say, as we hesitate, searching desperately for some grain of knowledge remaining from yesterday's lesson on which to build today's. It has taken, and indeed still takes, a long time for many people to realize that what served for secondary education for the educated and educable classes for the past centuries will not serve for the secondary modern child.

A christian is a man who believes that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, the Son of the Living God. In saying this he does not mean that Christ was begotten of ‘a god’ and a human mother, as the Greeks and Romans conceived of their heroes, or that he was a kind of superman as some Christian denominations seem to think. Christ was-is-God himself, in some mysterious way identical with and yet distinct from the God or the old testament who thundered on Sinai.

A mature Christian is a man or woman who lives the life Christ brought us as an integrated personality. All his powers, intellect, will and heart, are fully developed, working in harmony to do God's will. By the heart I mean that centre of our being which responds to reality as a whole. It is the seat of our response to physical and moral beauty, to all values.

After twenty-one years’ commissioned service in the army, the writer's feelings are largely of regret. Regret at opportunities missed, duties neglected or perfunctorily performed; in short a lively sense of failure.

The failure was in part due to ignorance, and it is in the hope of assisting young officers that this paper is written. Si jeunesse savait…. This is not the place for detailed statistics, even were there any accurate ones available, but this paper is written with the following premises in mind:

1. 1. Catholics are about 14 per cent of the army.

2. 2. Of Catholics in the army, very approximately, one third have abandoned their faith, one third practise intermittently, and one third practise as fully as circumstances and human frailty permit.

3. 3. There is about one priest to two thousand Catholic soldiers.

4. 4. The general religious climate in the services is the same as that in the country at large. Most soldiers would call themselves Christian, though on analysis, as the Incarnation is regarded as an improbable theory at best, a vague theism, is perhaps a better term.

The is a legend that Giles in his early manhood bartered his soul for a knowledge of the dark secrets of nature with a view to obtaining a position of wealth and rank in the medical world. Setting out for Paris where he hoped to study medicine, he was accosted on the way by a charming stranger who persuaded him to abandon his journey to France and to turn aside to Toledo, where he spent seven years as an apprentice in the art of magic and agreed to trade his soul for the fulfilment of his ambition. He then resumed his journey to Paris where he obtained both riches and fame, performing miracles of healing; but being converted by a frightful vision he returned to Spain and sought the habit of the order at Valencia, where after seven years of the severest penance and the greatest agony of mind on account of his infamous bargain

Every Catholic knows, dearly beloved, that today's feast is among the greatest of the year; none doubts how muck reverence is due to that day which the Holy Spirit sealed with the miracle of his gift. Today is the tenth day since the Lord ascended above all heavens to sit at the right hand of God the Father, and the fiftieth since his resurrection; and in it is contained a great mystery comprising God's saving acts both old and new. For as on the fiftieth day after the sacrifice of the passover lamb the law was given on Sinai to the Hebrews who had escaped from Egypt, so after the passion of Christ, in which the true Lamb of God was sacrificed, and fifty days from his resurrection, the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles and the gathering of the faithful.