In a noble tribute to the late Hilaire Belloc at the Requiem Mass in Westminster Cathedral last year Monsignor Knox spoke in passing of Father Vincent McNabb—the champion-in-arms and inspiration of Belloc and Chesterton and the brilliant group of Catholics among whom they moved; ‘Father Vincent’, he said, ‘who has left us so little record of his splendid gifts’. Some of us could not help wondering what exactly the preacher meant by that little aside. Was it an appraisement of Father Vincent’s thirty-eight published books and the many pamphlets and articles which he buried in the back numbers of innumerable journals and reviews? Perhaps it only meant that Father Vincent has left us no great massive work of primary importance, accepted as a permanent contribution to knowledge. His acute mind, extraordinary capacity for original thought, and the vital intellectual energy he poured into everything he did would seem to have made such a magnum opus possible. His two earliest books on Faith and Prayer (recently republished in one volume) showed promise that his theological writing might have developed on the highest classical level. Those who knew him may be inclined to say that he was too much the poet and artist to be tied down to technical theology and that anyhow his romantic temperament gave another bent to his genius. But whatever the explanation, although there is so much that is profound, original and stimulating in his published writings, he has left us no full-length, sustained study comparable to one or other of the major works of Cardinal Newman. He has given us no Apologia or Summa.

It is now some thirty years since a group of High Anglicans, moved by the disorder of the times—the first world war having recently ended and the promises of its ending being unfulfilled—were inspired to study and promote a Christian sociology which would be based on definite doctrinal assumptions. Before their decision, two approaches to the social problem were in vogue in the Church of England, the one an attempt to encourage amity between employers and their men, an endeavour illustrated by the work of the Industrial Christian Fellowship, a cautious movement encouraged of late years by many of the Bishops, and the other, more specifically aggressive and political, a propaganda which found expression in the Church Socialist League by a body indifferent, on the whole, to doctrine, but persuaded that Socialism was not incompatible with, if not essential to, true modern Christian practice.

To neither of these objective did the new ‘League of the Kingdom of God’ (later to be renamed the ‘Christendom’ group) subscribe. Its principal inspirer, much influenced by the earlier beliefs of Maurice and his follower, Canon Widdrington, insisted that Christian living postulated a common life in which Christian values are embodied. He criticized what he called the ‘Mani- cheism’ of the modem Church in ignoring social justice as essential. The loss of the regulative, basic idea of the Kingdom of God, come out of the Passion, the Resurrection and the Ascension, had been disastrous.

Mr Aldous Huxley has recently published yet another book. It is not a very good book; nor is it a very attractive book; but it is, alas, in its way an important book. Its importance consists in this: that anyone who may feel an inclination to enjoy, here and now, what Christians call the Beatific Vision or the experience which the Zen Buddhists call satori, has merely to buy himself three-pennyworth of mescalin at the nearest chemist’s, and behold, the ineffable vision is his. Whether or not the drug is available in this country in commercial quantities, I am afraid I have been too idle to find out. However, there it is for any who may care to make the experiment—heaven in a capsule.

It may be surprising to learn that Mr Huxley, who has for so long written in a tone of such great authority on mysticism and the mystical experience, confesses that before he achieved ‘liberation’ though mescalin, he had not actually had a mystical experience of any kind himself. ‘For’, says he, ‘until this morning I had known contemplation only in its humble, its more ordinary forms—as discursive thinking; as a rapt absorption in poetry or painting or music; as a patient waiting upon those inspirations, without which even the prosiest writer cannot hope to accomplish anything; as occasional glimpses in nature, of Wordsworth’s “something far more deeply interfused”; as systematic silence, leading, sometimes, to hints of an obscure knowledge.’

The Italians are used to visitors. Once over the Alps, as the train runs down to Turin or Milan, you are in a country that is vividly different from every other, but which nothing from outside ever seems to surprise. Italy, after all, has been civilized longer than any land to the north or west of her; and though many centuries have passed since Europe was governed from Rome, she has remained in a sense the continent’s centre of gravity, if only as the common focus of historical memories. Is she the world’s most visited country? At any rate the foreigner has been coming here since Rome was Rome: pilgrims, priests and conquerors, students, soldiers and tourists, marching up and down the peninsula, roaming, ravaging, ridiculing and revering it. If countries can be revered, there is only one more reverend than Italy. Yet politically she had no national existence until less than a hundred years ago, and has not had a very secure one since. She achieved national unity too late (apart from other considerations) seriously to rival other western nations in the political field, and the fall of Fascism only confirmed this situation. Obviously, the greatness of Italy has little to do with political or military power: indeed her historical achievement, her culture, is not national in the sense that English, French, Spanish or even German culture is national. It has never been centred in one capital or one court.

In an interesting recent study of Manzoni, Mr Bernard Wall notes this cultural regionalism of Italy, together with another effect of the absence of a strong national focus.