In ‘A note on Welsh Education’ which he contributed to Blackfriars for March, 1948, Mr Saunders Lewis has described how, in the nineteenth century, ‘nonconformity became the very nationhood of Wales’. ‘Its entire cultural life’, he wrote, ‘was centred in the chapel. . . . Religion was three-quarters of life; it triumphed in poverty and over poverty and ennobled the bitter, ill-requited toil on land, in quarry, mine ... The education of this people was rooted in its religious and social life: its content was its evangel, its medium the Welsh language. While the society lived and kept its unity, these two were safe. During the past sixty years, however, that unity has gradually been breaking down; the ‘ideal and authority’ of the society have been destroyed. ‘Middle-class, worldly ideals, the impact of a wider, modern culture, conquered the religious unity of the Methodist peasantry.’

It would be difficult to disagree with that analysis. Wales is now going through the final stages of the disintegration of its nonconformist nationhood. Mr Saunders Lewis is in many ways the most influential personality in Wales today. The names of the contributors to a recent volume on his work are a clear proof of the extent of this influence. The editor, a Congregationalist minister, reminds us that Mr Lewis has enthusiastic disciples, ardent admirers, loyal friends—and enemies. For at least a quarter of a century he has been, to quote the words of the seventeenth-century writer Morgan Llwyd, ‘dirgelwch i rai i’w ddeall ac i eraill i w watwar, he has indeed been a disturbing mystery to many and to object of myopic scorn to others.

There are at present two moods in contemporary philosophy, the existentialist’s and the technician’s. The existentialist mood is disillusioned, sophisticated, desperately mature. The technical mood has no illusions; is without suspicion of naïveté, confidently accepts itself as adult. For they are both moods that belong to our time, one of the more terrible features of which is that its children go to the wall.

To the existentialist, the world in which he lives, with its everyday concerns, its inventions and schemes, is through and through suspect. He sees past its pretences. At its noblest, at its most pretentious, no less than in its trivialities and ignominies, he knows it to be flat and uninteresting, a substitute world, unauthentic. He sees through it to the basic nothingness that its false pretences disguise. He knows, besides, his own core of nothingness. And he dares to face his consequent consuming passion for the destruction of that substitute world which it is the doom of his own unqualified freedom to project upon the undifferentiated ground of nothingness that encompasses him. So with the emancipated cynicism of a man not only lacking hope, but lacking even the desire of hope, he descends (impregnably arrogant in his anguish) into the pit of absolute despair. He recognises his proper human status as cast there; recognises the radical absurdity of his existence at the edge of the irrational abyss of un-being.

The work of Christopher Dawson and others has made familiar the fact that each of the great religions of the world has become the matrix of a temporal culture. Less familiar is the converse truth that such a culture, richly proliferating, can almost smother with the complexities of habit, custom, usage and respectability the faith from which it originally sprang; so that for many selves religion may become at worst the handmaid of civic solidarity, at all events something accepted and taken for granted, and at best a vital pattern of rites, reactions and relationships inherent in a certain place, time, and mode of living, a pattern which fades out of the individual mind directly its circumstances change. Thus, on the one hand stands the ‘catholique non-pratiquant', who clings to the noun rather than the adjective, insists that his children should receive a Catholic education, and has a high regard for faith as the cement of a stable social structure. (This figure is perhaps commoner abroad than in this country; and was well exemplified in those portions of Latin America which abused Costa Rica as ‘Communist’ for trying to organise economic life in accordance with the social encyclicals.) In the centre sit at ease in Zion, as in an overcrowded drawing-room, ladies of pious leisure embroidering in petit point on linen cushion covers ready stencilled designs of the Sacred Heart, such as may be seen in the drapers’ shops of Bruges.

Among the discontents and grievances, real and imaginary, which help to fill the correspondence columns of newspapers, ‘B.B.C. English’ is a veteran. Those who complain usually make an assumption and a statement. They assume the existence of a type of spoken English with definable characteristics to which the term ‘B.B.C. English’ may be assigned. They state that this is an undesirable type of English and frequently, explicitly or implicitly, compare it unfavourably with their own. Critics range from the highly educated to the lunatic fringe. From whatever section of society they derive, they share strong feelings, often express themselves with vehement indignation, and accuse the B.B.C. of attempting to force millions of listeners into the strait-jacket of an accent which is in some way decadent. The adjectives used to describe it sometimes express a relation between the writer’s education, social position or home county and those of an imaginary person, the audible embodiment of the B.B.C.: ‘superior’, ‘lah-di-dah’, ‘snobbish’, ‘slipshod’, ‘Mayfair’, ‘Cockney’, ‘Oxford’, ‘drawling’, are examples of the words used to relieve real irritation. In an age when the niceties of language, spoken and written, command so little appreciation, so much emotion may seem surprising. I believe it is both natural and, in some degree, desirable. But I should not like to say why without examining the basic assumption that there is an accent called ‘B.B.C. English’.

The frequency of the name Martha in Provence from the eighth century onwards, as well as its rarity elsewhere in the West, is an indirect but significant indication of the cult of the saint who first bore it in those parts. Moreover, two charters of 964 and 967, now in the archives of the Bouches-du-Rhône, mention a terra of St Martha near Tarascon.

It is also alleged that there exist no other traditions concerning these saintly personages (Lazarus and his sisters, Martha and Mary Magdalen, Mary Salome, and Mary the mother of James), and no other church has ever claimed them. This has been contradicted by the original opponent of the tradition, the seventeenth-century scholar Launoy, and more recently by Mgr Duchesne. The latter brought forward a number of texts to show that Mary Magdalen, regarded as distinct from Mary of Bethany, had her tomb in Ephesus in the sixth century, and that Lazarus, whom certain traditions also connect with Ephesus, had a tomb in Lamaca, then called Citium, in Cyprus, in the ninth century, and that in 899 his body and that of Mary Magdalen were transferred to Constantinople by Leo VI.