The tide has gone out, and the great constructions of Christian thought seem to lie in their harbours like capital ships no longer in commission for active service, some destined for the breaker’s yard, others to be reprieved and to lie at their buoys, moth-balled and landlocked. Is St Thomas’s Summa among them ?

This is where the comparison between theological architecture and naval construction begins to limp. Or rather, where we should be careful about committing our idea of a capital ship to one image. For it has a constant meaning under shapes as diverse as a three-decker, a super-dreadnought, an aircraft-carrier, and a nuclear submarine, and the force of its meaning has to be brought to bear so long as sea-power is required for the life of a nation. Likewise, so long as a grasp on the reasons for things is required in the life of the Church, for in this world it must know what it means and be able to show what it means, the need will remain for the systematic and coherent articulation of the implications of divine Revelation in terms of human experience.

The foundation on which any adequate moral theology or philosophy must be built is an anthropology which does justice to the complexity of human life. The picture of the human agent enshrined in the manuals of moral theology on which the clergy of past generations were reared showed man as an intelligent being making rational decisions. Manualist man was a free agent bound in conscience by various hierarchically ordered systems of law. The ultimate ground of all morally significant law was the positive will of God. This picture has lost its credibility. The insights of contemporary philosophy have shown it to be an arid and distorted representation of the human condition, and moral theologians have already begun to enrich their understanding of man by incorporating into the picture they use elements drawn from existentialist, phenomenologist and even logical positivist analyses.

For moral theology as such, not only must an adequate picture of man be developed, there must also be a serious reconsideration of the traditional images of God. The God of the Divine Plan, Lawgiver, Judge, is no more credible in this century than is homo manualensis. Once again the work of demolition and reconstruction has already begun: philosophers and theologians (in this country one is tempted to add ‘respectively’) have already gone far in the work of dissecting and reconstructing or replacing the outmoded images of God. As yet, there is little sign of the more radical aspects of theological revaluation having a transforming influence on many moral theologians.

‘Unfortunately, in the great theatre of literature there are no authorized door-keepers: for our anonymous critics are self-elected. I shall not fear the charge of calumny if I add, that they have lost all credit with wise men, by unfair dealing: such as their refusal to receive an honest man’s money (that is, his argument) because they anticipate and dislike his opinion, while others of suspicious character and most unseemly appearance, are suffered to pass without payment, or by virtue of orders which they have themselves distributed to known partizans.’ (I, 227).

Coleridge’s comment on ‘those, who under the name of Reviewers, volunteer this office’, of the door-keepers of literature, seems to have passed unnoticed by many of his own reviewers. Of the reviews of The Friend I have seen, few have departed from the model drearily and anonymously exemplified in The Times Literary Supplement: a meticulous account, drawn almost entirely from Barbara Rooke’s scholarly introduction, of the immediate circumstances in which The Friend was first published and later revised; a few (very well-deserved) compliments on the superb editing, and a final paragraph asserting the profundity and continuing worth of Coleridge’s thought—and the job is done. Such a response is doubly inappropriate in this case: because on Coleridge’s own grounds the value of scholarship lies in the re-disclosure of the relevant in the dated, and because this particular work is concerned precisely with an attempt to outline underlying, ‘fixed principles in politics, morals and religion’ (title-page). To assert its continuing worth is to acknowledge both points; but—as Coleridge would agree—mere assertion is inadequate.

Cape Ann in Massachusetts is one of the more plentifully documented areas of the country in tourist literature and in books of local colour and history. Details of historical and literary interest are carefully noted in brochures and guide maps. Kipling’s Captains Courageous and James B. Connolly’s Gloucestermen are rightly remembered. Summer visits of minor New England literary figures are duly recorded, and reference is ubiquitous to the Reef of Norman’s Woe off the Magnolia side of Gloucester Harbour, immortalizing Longfellow’s ‘Wreck of the Hesperus’. Yet one looks in vain for any notice of Cape Ann’s most distinguished literary event, T. S. Eliot’s The Dry Salvages, despite his explicit note preceding the poem: ‘(The Dry Salvages—presumably les trois sauvages—is a small group of rocks, with a beacon, off the N.E. coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Salvages is pronounced to rhyme with assuages. Groaner: a whistling buoy.)’ I found a recent visit to the museum of the Cape Ann Scientific, Literary and Historical Association in Gloucester no more rewarding. Apart from a few of his published books, the Sawyer Free Library in the same town has only a small collection of photos of Eliot and a drawing by his sister. Even the detailed and very readable Saga of Cape Ann of Melvin Copeland and Elliott Rogers (1960) passes the poem over in silence, though it does speak of the danger to navigation offered by the rocks from which Eliot named the third of his Four Quartets.

During 1965-66, India suffered the worst drought in living memory the monsoon had failed for the third time in four years; food grain production fell by 19 per cent, and there was widespread famine. Mothers spent hours searching the cracked earth for grains of rice or wheat with which they could feed their children; and would walk miles to the nearest good well for a couple of buckets of water. Life was reduced to the absolute basics. Women would cut a sari into two and wear half each. When the Brothers to All Men (B.A.M.) team first drove into the village of Kosila the people tried to take the canvas from the jeep for clothing.

Bihar is the most backward state of India, and the Gaya district is one of the poorest in the State. Thus B.A.M. established a team of volunteers in the town of Gaya in December, 1966. The first two volunteers began a well-digging programme in the worst-affected part of the district. This work was done in conjunction with the international Relief organization AFPRO (Action for Food Production) and was completed by April, 1967.

B.A.M. started its own programme in May, 1967, employing villagers to dig emergency irrigation wells on a ‘Food for Work’ basis. For this project the National Council of Churches provided a jeep, and a supply of food grain with which to pay the villagers.