When I was asked to speak in English before your distinguished society and to trace the influence of St Thomas on French politics. I thought: O, I can do that all right. My English is very bad, but it is good enough for that. I shall settle quietly into my chair. I'll repeat the question. I’ll look at my audience in silence for some minutes, and I'll say: ‘Nothing'. That will be all. That will be the only answer. But after some reflection I guessed that you would not be satisfied with it, you would find it too brief. Then I went on thinking. I remembered plenty of men who had been working with us at the Vie Intellectuelle, men who are now ministers, ambassadors, prefects, chiefs of party, deputies, and so on. I remembered that great lecture in which Jacques Maritain, now French Ambassador to the Holy See. had expounded his theory concerning Catholic and political action. Andre Colin, since a Minister, was present. Georges Bidault, now Ministre des Affaires Etrangèros. was there too, and lie questioned Jacques Maritain, and lie himself gave us his idea as to what French politics should be like. A few years later I also met Maurice Schumann, who lived in London during the war and was ‘le porte-parole de la France combattante at the B.B.C. Every month he would write the chronicle of foreign politics in La Vie Intellectuelle, using various pseudonyms such as Maurice-Jacques, Sidobre, etc. I remembered my great friend, Robert Delavignette.

Among the many good changes made by General MacArthur I may mention here the destruction of the military machine and the secret societies, the abolition of legalised prostitution, the breaking of the power of the Zaibatsu (the mighty syndicates which controlled Japan’s industry, commerce and finance), the abolition of the feudal land system and the complete revision of the educational system. The Japanese school system was probably the most centralised in the world. The textbooks were always prepared by the Mombusho, the Ministry of Education, and distributed by the Government even to the smallest village schools in remote mountains. These textbooks really needed an overhaul. And as far as I can see the reform goes on in the right way. A normal Japanese patriotism is allowed. Furthermore Japanese history can be taught from the Japanese point of view as long as the truth is told, in short, MacArthur is determined to preserve what is distinctive and valuable in Japan. Special stress is given to one of Emperor Meiji’s rescripts which commands that ‘Intercourse with foreign countries shall in future be carried on in accordance with the public laws of the whole world’.

As a being, man is dependent on God, the first cause of all things; as a being endowed with mind and will, powers of thought and desire, he is a close reflection of that first cause, in the knowledge and love of which, to the highest of his ability, he must And his perfection and his happiness if he is to find them at all. The first cause has not left man to develop the mere scope of his natural ability, great as that is. God has freely bestowed on him, as an overflow of his goodness, supernatural powers of knowledge and love which leave the natural pattern of human nature unimpaired, but make possible the attainment of a higher kind of perfection and a much greater happiness, consisting in consciously being so like God that man can have the same divine object of his thought and love that is proper to the life of God himself. Whether we think of man, then, as coming from God's creative hand, or as in process of conscious return to him, in either case we see ourselves as conditioned by that relationship, that company, the society of God.

It is interesting to notice how very close the Church and the world are in the subject-matter of their chief preoccupation nowadays. Secular thought is concerned as never before with man’s relation to human society, and the Church is particularly concerned to elaborate man’s place in a divine society too. This is not purely by way of reaction or correction on the part of the Church.

As the catalogues of the publishers show there is a great revival of interest in the study of the Fathers, especially the Greek Fathers, so long overshadowed by their better known and more accessible Latin brethren. If we read that the Editions du Cerf have already brought out translations of authors as comparatively little known as the apologist Athenagoras, the Cappadocian Gregory of Nyssa, John Moschus and Maximus Confessor, a new spring of patristic studies seems indeed to be upon us, and from America there come the translations of St Clement’s Epistle to the Corinthians and of the Seven Letters of St Ignatius. Will England, whose interest in the Greek Fathers has always been particularly keen (we need only remember the work of Newman and Pusey, of Lightfoot and Prestige) take no part in this renaissance?

It is hoped that, in a few years’ time, there will be brought out in this country a great and fundamental work, which has been in preparation for about forty years. We are referring to the Lexicon of Patristic Greek, begun in Cambridge in 1906 under the editorship of Dr H. B. Swete, and transferred to Oxford in 1915, for which material has been steadily collected throughout these years. Under the editorship of Dr F. L. Cross, the present Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford, assisted by a small and harmonious team of Catholic and Anglican collaborators, this work has now entered on its final stage, in which the immense material, assembled in a large room in the New Bodleian Building, is being sifted and put into shape.