The reader taking up this book for the first time may receive a confused impression. To begin with he will find some stanzas of French verse which suggest in their metre the pilgrimage which they describe in detail. It was André Gide who said that the poetry of Charles Péguy was like the repetition of some ancient litany, always similar but never quite the same. He might have said, with equal truth, that it was like the plodding of feet on a hard road, rhythmical and unrelenting; or like the washing of the sea over a shingle beach where no wave is identical but all strike variations of the same theme. Péguy’s verse has a tremendous purpose, and he was never more serious about anything than about this pilgrimage which he made to Chartres. All that he was and knew and felt—his piety and his patriotism and his subtle, involuntary presumption—went into it, and was afterwards translated into the poem he dedicated to our Lady. So much the reader of this book will quickly seize. But then he will examine the photographs, and fresh images will mingle in his mind with the image of Péguy’s pilgrimage.

Historically, from the fact of its colonization by white men from the sea, Southern Africa has been linked in men's minds rather with Europe than with the rest of the African continent, and the truly African character of its inhabitants, even of the Whites, has been too easily forgotten, in spite of the use of the name Afrikaner (meaning merely African). In recent years, however, largely owing to the war and consequent movements of troops and population, the average white inhabitant of Southern Africa has become much more conscious of his relationships with the rest of the continent and with its aboriginal inhabitants, and aware of his responsibilities and the opportunity there is for him to play a decisive part in the future of Africa south of the Sahara, now in a state of rapid social, economic, religious and political development. This new awareness, long latent in the land-consciousness of the Afrikaans-speaking population, and now making itself felt among all sections of the people, is given utterance in the words of Field-Marshal Smuts used as a title to this article, and may be traced in many recent items of news from South Africa.

It is necessary, in order to avoid misconceptions, to preface a few statements of fact about the area of which we are speaking. Southern Africa differs from the rest of Black Africa in being the only part in which a people of European origin have made a home, though it can be doubted whether this colonization will be permanently successful much further north than Pretoria or Durban or in the arid western parts of the region.

The liturgical revival, or more precisely, a renewed understanding of the liturgy, involves a biblical revival. It must be admitted that such a statement is rarely received enthusiastically. The most resolute good intentions (and it is mainly priests we have in mind, and priests who are full of zeal for souls), the most resolute good intentions, seem to falter under such a blow! ‘What?’ it will be said, ‘we must “initiate” people into the Bible? As though it were not difficult enough to “initiate” them into the liturgy alone !’ To this protest we may reply that the fact is already there. Our liturgy, the Roman liturgy, is biblical from beginning to end. Not only is it mostly composed of biblical texts (or at least biblical commentary) but even those parts which are purely ecclesiastical in composition, breathe the same atmosphere, use the same vocabulary, the same forms of thought, as the biblical texts themselves. These arguments will have little weight, however, with many of those who protest against a ‘biblical initiation’ in addition to a liturgical; and it is not difficult to see why.

By ‘liturgical initiation’ they do not understand at all an initiation into the traditional liturgy, for which they have no more taste nor interest than they have for Holy Scripture. What they envisage is rather a quite new ‘concoction’, a liturgy re-made in an emancipated form, intended to ‘make contact with the masses’ by getting rid of everything in our actual liturgy which betrays its biblical or patristic origin.

The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’, founded by I Charles the Great, was already breaking up in 1804. A decree of Francis I, its last emperor, made its death inevitable. Its underlying principle, the unity of God and the world, the civitas Dei terrena, had lost force and efficacy. But in the Austrian empire it survived the downfall of the Dual Monarchy, and notwithstanding all it lived on through Austria’s First Republic. Not until the 13th of March 1938, when Hitler's swarms imposed the Anschluss, was this last embodiment of a great political ideal eliminated.

The centuries-old unity of spiritual and secular rule had endured nowhere on the Continent of Europe so long as in Austria. Ruling and ruled alike, in the realm of State and Church respectively, saw the continued stability of this alliance as the direct, clear outcome of deliberate policy on the part of State and Church, but also as the only possible working plan for the prosperity of both realms. The throne protected the altar and the Church preached loyalty to the established government as a duty-binding Christian virtue. An acquaintance with these facts is essential if the seemingly special relationship between Church and State, the conditions inside the Church and the life of the Church in Austria are to be understood and correctly estimated.

In addition, we have the outstanding fact of nineteenth century Freemasonry and its concentric onslaught on this one surviving bulwark of the ‘dark’ Middle Ages.

The Japanese Diet has made its first use of the power secured to it under the new constitution by selecting Mr Tetsu Katayama as Prime Minister. On Saturday, May 24th, he was formally invested in office by the Emperor and he had a 30-minute conference with General MacArthur. In a wireless address he appealed to the Japanese people for their help in the task of rebuilding the country. What most Japanese—rulers and ruled alike—desired, has more or less become a fact. They can now reconstruct their national life in their own way. MacArthur’s administration has partly come to an end. Now that we have arrived at this milestone in Japanese history, we may survey the hundred years of American-Japanese relations.

Twice in the course of history America has forcibly opened Japan to the world and has brought her into peaceful intercourse with other nations. Twice she has made the opportunity of exerting a tremendous influence on the history and development of the Japanese Empire and the Japanese people.

The first occasion was after her more than two centuries’ long seclusion, and was brought about through the mission of Commodore Matthew Galbraith Perry.

On 24th November, 1852, he sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, in the steam frigate Mississippi. His squadron was assembled in Shanghai, and on 8th July, 1853, he entered the Bay of Yedo with four ships of war. The Japanese were not completely unprepared for his arrival, for in 1844 William II, King of Holland, had addressed a letter to the Shogun warning him of the impossibility of maintaining any longer the policy of seclusion.

That there is something seriously wrong with the world and that this could and should be put right, are two commonplaces so commonly held as to verge on triteness. This universal consensus however is quickly turned into a discord of clamant and contradictory voices, when, preparatory to any attempt at curing the ill, an explanation is sought of the cause and origin of it.

On the one hand there is Jean Jacques Rousseau and all his spiritual descendants, who premising that man himself was originally perfect, happy and free, believe that man lost his happiness and his freedom when first he bowed to authority. In this line of thought we get philosophical anarchists, like Kuropatkin and Tolstoy, who go the whole way, maintaining that if only one did away with all government all ills would automatically disappear too and the Golden Age of humanity reappear. Some do not go as far as that, though agreeing that government must be reduced to a minimum if things are to right themselves: to which tribe belong Proudhon and the syndicalists who consider local government permissible but rule out anything approaching government on a national scale. There are also the doctrinaire liberals who, without becoming specific, hold generally that the less government there is the better. From this we shade off into rugged individualism and into the belief that, to make the world happy, all that is needed is to give it the vote.

Mr G. K. Chesterton tells us in one of his essays of a man who went to Rome and missed seeing the Pope because he stood too long staring at the Papal Guard. We can have more sympathy with that sort of absence of mind than with the more serious kind of tourist who, Baedeker in hand, ‘does’ Rome dutifully and grimly and comes home exhausted and dazed with a blur of memories. Sight-seeing ‘according to plan’ is one of the penitential exercises of the pilgrim: much better to keep your eyes open and let the sights seek you, and you will stumble on surprises at every turn and be rewarded with thrills all the time.

When you go to Rome to attend a General Chapter there is not much time or opportunity for sight-seeing: in a sense you become part of the picture; for the time being you are one of the sights yourself. But even so, you can’t help noticing things and there are wonders for your delight on every hand. When we came down from the sky it was a very abrupt change from the wet winds and cold rains of the North to the parched, dusty airfield at Chiampino blazing in the sun. The tropical dress of the R.A.F. men in contrast with ourselves dressed in the attire of a less torrid climate made us feel even warmer than we actually were; but we positively gasped and perspired when from the bus that took us to Rome we saw a football match being played before a cheering crowd at a terrific pace while the themometer registered nearly a hundred degrees.

Mr Aldous Huxley once wrote an essay on vulgarity in literature. But literature reflects human life; and implicitly he has written many books on vulgarity in human life, on the squalor of humanity. The figures of the fifth Earl of Gonister and his companions at the end of After Many a Summer, undying and unliving, intolerable in their sordid brutishness, represent something that recurs again and again in different forms in his works. ‘Vivre?’ he quoted in Vulgarity in Literature, ‘nos valets le feront pour nous’. That disgust with life, and in particular with the corporeal, still seems to lie at the root of his view of reality; and to colour his approach to Reality.

Some critics of The Perennial Philosophy have waxed indignant at the idea of describing as philosophy a book in which Plato and Aristotle are barely mentioned; others have taken the opposite line, and vindicated the author by viewing western philosophy as pseudophilosophy because of its exclusive reliance on discursive reasoning: if the way to knowledge of Reality is humility, poverty of spirit, purity of heart, how can we describe as philosophers, as ‘lovers of wisdom’, any but those who take this way? The truth surely lies midway between these two extremes. As some of the great Christian mystics have shown in their own lives, there are three wisdoms: the natural investigations of reason, the study of theology, the direct mystical awareness of God; and they can each be valid and valuable in their own spheres, and each help and fortify the others.

To be asked to speak in praise of St Thomas is an honour which dismays as much as it flatters; for who could claim to be master of such a subject?

Yet to venture to praise St Thomas is already to claim to know him, not completely of course, but enough to recognise, in and through his work, a man distinct from all others and the work itself as an expression of reality differing in certain important respects from all others. But to know anyone is to claim a certain equality and likeness to him; as indeed we must do who dare to represent St Thomas to our generation. Representation is a kind of imitation; if we are not somehow like him inwardly how can we express his doctrine outwardly? Yet, doubtless, all of us would readily admit our inferiority to him, and would think that in this we were the more conformed to his own spirit which was so utterly unpretentious. And no doubt each of us is greatly his inferior in intelligence, let alone in holiness. But there is, I suppose, a special sense in which all of us, however gifted, are bound to be his inferiors; for we are all historically his followers, and heirs to an achievement which cannot in fact ever be supplanted. For workers in the tradition to which he made so extraordinary a contribution, St Thomas remains forever a master.