It is seventeen years since Blackfriars, then in its infancy, welcomed the return of the Dominicans to Oxford, and it now has the added joy of welcoming the return of the Friar- Preachers to the sister University. It is an interesting coincidence that the original foundation at Cambridge, in 1238, also took place seventeen years after the first foundation at Oxford. Both were suppressed by Henry VIII in 1538, so that Cambridge has been just four centuries without resident Dominicans, though many well-known friars have worked there individually as preachers and lecturers in the last few years. Not a few Cambridge men, moreover, have entered the Order since the suppression in 1538, the most famous being Thomas Heskins who ruled the English Friars as Vicar-Provincial during Elizabeth’s reign. He was one of the foremost champions of the Catholic cause and his well- known book, The Parliament of Christ, written in defence of the Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament, brought on him the unwelcome attention of the government. About 1566 the authorities were seeking him in Cambridge. One of the succeeding Vicars-General, Cardinal Philip Howard, who did so much for the Province in penal times, was as a youth entered by his parents at St. John’s College, Cambridge, but the outbreak of the Civil War between Charles I and the Parliament brought his stay to an abrupt end, his parents sending him for safety into Flanders.

It was not, perhaps, without a certain over-simplification that, in the course of the Middle Ages, men were pleased to qualify the great Masters of thought and Doctors of the Church by some epithet which expressed the most typical feature of their intellectual and spiritual make-up. St. Thomas was the Angelic Doctor, St. Bonaventure the Seraphic Doctor, Tauler the Ecstatic Doctor, and so on. At any rate, we must not stop short at the obvious implication of these epithets, nor limit the rich genius of these Masters under pretext of determining its characteristic. Bonaventure the Seraphic was an extremely vigorous speculative thinker, Thomas the Angelic admirably described the powers of Love, and Tauler the Mystic analysed in a most detailed manner the demands of simple asceticism. We must penetrate to the profounder significance of these epithets, and see in them, with the superabundance and variety of gifts, the type of an intellectual and spiritual life, the unifying point in which all these gifts are rooted and co-ordinated.

For a Thomist the validity of any method in patristic study can be gauged by the effort to attain to an objective knowledge of patristic thought. It is only for its own sake that truth is to be sought for if we are to chance to find it. The theologian who brings his own preconceptions to the study of the Fathers will only rediscover what he has himself preconceived. The controversialist who uses patristic texts as missiles will find them both as malleable and as harmless as snowballs. It is a futile thing to read the Fathers in relation to problems and to controversies that were beyond their imagining, for their writings can only be intelligible in terms of their own setting, not of ours. Hesitatingly and clumsily we must try to place them in the time context and the cultural pattern of their lives.

It is only gradually that such a method is becoming possible. It would be naive to ignore the value of the labour of the past. French and German Catholicism have maintained a record of continuous achievement in patristics which is only paralleled by the high tradition of Anglican scholarship. But of their nature such traditions cannot be static. Our knowledge of Hellenistic cultural factors is as new as the science of Byzantine palaeography and both are critically significant for the reading of Greek texts. The study of Hadrianic culture has been transformed since 1906, scientific Byzantinism is not yet forty years old, but Hadrianic and proto-Byzantine culture formed the setting of two out of the three decisive epochs in patristic thought.

That “to raise up hatred against hatred is to prepare the ruin of political life”; that violence is a boomerang, the attempt at violent repression of an evil merely causing it to spring up elsewhere with renewed virulence; that “Christendom will re- create itself by Christian means, or it will collapse completely”; in a word, that the “problem of means ... it of absolutely central importance’ ‘; and that only the Christian means of patience, unity, love, can do anything to save the world; these are the leading ideas in M. Maritain’s preface to Professor Mendizabel’s Aux Origines d’une Tragedie. They also form, with certain obvious reservations, the leading lines of thought in Mr. Aldous Huxley’s latest, and greatest, book; and one notes them here because of this sometimes startling similarity, extending almost to verbal parallelism.

About the goal of human endeavour, that we ought to be advancing towards an age of liberty, peace, justice and brotherly love, “there is and for long has been a very general agreement. Not so with regard to the roads which lead to that goal.” And if we search for a definition of the ideal we ought all to be becoming, we shall find here too that; if “the enslaved have held up for admiration now this model of a man, now that,” on the other hand, “at all times and in all places, the free have spoken with only one voice.”

“As at other epochs in the history of the Church we face a world that has once again fallen into paganism.” These words of the Holy Father must have found an echo in the serious-minded of many countries, and in France we find them abundantly justified. In most of her institutions paganism is rife, in her literature, schools, theatres, cinemas and radio. One can discern it in her economic outlook and in the manners and customs of our contemporaries; and, most insidiously, it is penetrating the lives of an appreciable number of Christians, attached to the Church by sentiment and tradition but exposed to the worst forms of selfindulgence by their lukewarmness and lives of ease.

Rather than enumerate the various spheres where this neo-paganism is specially rampant, I will give you some recent statistics. Something like 10% of the French people are unbaptized, not a quarter fulfil their Easter duties, and not quite a fifth attend Mass regularly on Sunday. This sufficiently indicates the state of Catholicity in France to-day, the France of the Crusader, the France of Saint Louis.

The source of most of the cruelty and at least half the folly of the world is ignorance. What we do not know may on rare occasions be magnificent. It is more frequently alarming and odious. Ineradicable ignorance of one another among the nations is the fruitful cause of war, and similar ignorance between the various classes of society is responsible for much that is unjust and indefensible in the social system. But ignorance has seldom been more harmful than when it disguises the real nature of a conflict.

In all the ancient civilizations we find the spirit of gain, and in uncivilized races also. It is one of the natural qualities which distinguish man from the other animals. There are men who rise superior to it, when they have enough to live upon without gain, and some there are who will take the chance of having enough. But for the mass it holds good under every economic system. A man wants to improve on his condition. In a money economy it is easier, because a man can save more readily. In our own civilization we find it at work in the period before the dominance of capitalism. There is the striking case of St. Godric, the Norfolk lad who began life at the bottom, then started as a pedlar and did so well that presently he acquired a vessel, took partners and traded along the East Coast and overseas with such success that in sixteen years he amassed magnas opurn divitias. His parents were pious folk and he was a devoted son of the Church.

The animating principle of the Christian life is love: the Christian life at every stage is shot through with suffering. God is good and omnipotent: physical and moral evil never cease to abound. The least reflective intelligence is apt to be given pause by these conjunctions. To face the attacks of unbelievers and to reduce, if may be, our own perplexities, we do well to draw certain distinctions. God is perfect but the creatures he made could not fail to be imperfect. A greater good is achieved by creating free intelligent beings whose nature involves a real possibility of moral evil than by refraining from communicating his being beyond the confines of the inner life of the Trinity. Crudely, the order we must see things in is: God, angels, satan, man capable of achieving destiny without falling into moral evil, man falling into moral evil with consequent privation of supernatural and preternatural attributes, man restored to the supernatural, i.e., heaven made available, but without the preternatural impassibility, immortality, etc. And that brings us to ourselves. All this is penny catechism matter, but worth having in mind, if we are to avoid asking ourselves questions which have no legitimacy for Christian men.

Sir,—Baron von Hugel was not a professional theologian. He was devoted to the philosophy of religion and to theology because he was a Christian and a Catholic, but he was profoundly more than a theologian because he was an integral Catholic.

To ask whether he was centrally Catholic and to examine his theological credentials alone is not enough. A religious personality can be psychologically heterodox under a number of aspects, of which the two more important are the theological and spiritual. A man can be theologically immaculate and spiritually lop-sided, in which case he is not centrally, i.e., integrally, Christian. I do not intend to add the slick correlative that a man may be spiritually impregnable and theologically nebulous, because both speculation and history prove that this is not true. But a mind which is mistaken on single propositions in a time of crisis may most emphatically possess spiritual grandeur of an outstanding kind. Moreover, even the greatest Saints are not normally without sin and moral wavering until after the biographers have plastered up the chinks, and some of the noblest religious personalities in history have value for us precisely because of their bearing in face of their own moral contractions and mistakes. Baron von Hugel is for some the greatest example of this that our age has known, and his spiritual message would carry infinitely less meaning for us were there none of these contractions and subsequent gigantic renunciations of his life. Von Hugel’s soul is first and foremost a synthesis of opposed moral forces: a neurotic, violent, easily jarred character constantly transformed and driven into massive unity by divine love.