Yes, even the last ones are threatened, and it becomes a matter for congratulation, let alone relief, to catch sight of the one opposite the Palais de Justice, or the few they have left in the Latin Quarter, outside the Ecole de Médecine or opposite the Place de la Sorbonne. Other visual clichés of Parisian life are disappearing, too, for ever. A few weeks ago, unthinkable red and grey buses began to appear on a few Paris routes, heralding the disappearance of the familiar ugly green monsters with their capacious platforms, still the best, if somewhat unstable, way of seeing the city. By 1966 at least one Métro line will be running without drivers and dispensing tickets from machines (it’s always been supposed that if they allowed people to travel free on the Métro and dispensed with drivers and clippies the loss of revenue would be less than the wage-bill . . .). And an old landmark is about to disappear from the skyline at the end of the long perspective of the rue de Rennes, where the Gare Montparnasse is making way for a vast new office-block and modernised station. The present station is inadequate to deal with the vast increase of traffic, but some memories will go with it: the ghosts of Modigliani and Soutine haunt it and it was here von Choltitz surrendered to Leclerc when the city was liberated in 1944.

The Quest for Love published a year ago, is the best of the dozen books – of poetry, of criticism, of short stories, of works on teaching and of anthologies for teachers – that Mr David Holbrook has put out in the last five years. Something of his programme, and of a distinctive overtone that accompanies it, can be seen if we go back to his dispute with a Times Literary Supplement critic in 1962. Writing in reply to a fairly stinging review of Llareggub Revisited, his book on Dylan Thomas, Mr Holbrook affirmed (and that seems the right word for it): ‘It is true that I feel strongly that literature is of little value unless it brings us deeper perceptions and insights into our own nature, and the nature of our living conditions, in time and mortality. For this reason I seek to write with gravity .. .’

What he intended, he suggested, was ‘a quest for gravity, in the art of writing, and in personal living’. Yet there is a kind of quest for gravity, and a kind of quest for love, which makes us pause. To care so much is a great thing, to declare oneself openly is an honest act which we see too seldom, but aren’t the references to time and mortality uncomfortably over-large, embarrassingly imprecise? A quality of Puritanism, as Hooker knew, is to think too little of the multiple lesser needs and laws that govern our lives, to concede a kind of hypertrophy to the greatest and (at worst) to dismiss with rancour those who cultivate the less.

Mr Terry Eagleton made, in his article The Language of Renewal in the October issue of New Blackfriars, some criticisms of certain things I had said in How Corrupt is the Church? in the August issue. I am not replying in any polemical spirit: for I think that much is gravely wrong inside the Church, and that, in seeking to see what is wrong, we are all of us peering through a fog; and so I hope that what I wrote will be both criticised and supplemented. All the same, some clarification on my part may promote fruitful discussion.

Mr Eagleton accuses me of ‘accepting and reinforcing a whole social status quo’; and, in this, he regards me as representative of the defects of progressive thought. I should like to rebut this accusation. I might, indeed, claim the highest conceivable authority for the presumption with which he saddles me, that we shall have the poor always with us; but perhaps this would be a misapplication of our Lord’s words. I must, however, repudiate his implication that I regard class division and the inequitable distribution of wealth as desirable. I do not: my views are rather strongly egalitarian. But what I was concerned to suggest was how Christians should behave within a society of which inequality and class division are features. I do not say, what Mr Eagleton attributes to me, that these are the inevitable conditions of human life: but I do say that there is no immediate prospect of their disappearing, at least from Western society.

A good deal of thinking about the priest and modern society has been about the priest rather than about modern society: by this I mean that we’ve tended to begin from the theological end, with an enquiry into what difference a renewed theology makes to our conception of the priest, and then to go on from here to the sociological implications : how does this new priest with his new functions fit into modern society, and what kind of society will be created around him? But I think we need to work the other way round as well: we need to try to get some idea of the reality of our society and then see what our theological talk amounts to, in that context. The point I’ll try to make in this paper is that there are some cases in which there is a serious tension between what seems theologically sound and desirable, and the results of this in terms of a whole society. This is why theological enquiry which is basically about society – the role of the priest, for instance – can’t afford to work on vague or superficial social ideas, on social caricatures. This isn’t just an abstract warning, because caricatures of our society are frighteningly easy, and it propably isn’t a caricature to say that this is one of the significant things about our society – that it makes stock judgements and category responses easy, and offers these as convincing descriptions of our experience.