‘Conscience’ is a word of which we ought to be I proud. It proclaims that the criterion of good and evil lies within the individual man. Whatever orders he may be called upon to obey, in the last resort a man relies on the interior judgment which says ‘Yes, I ought to act in this way’, or ‘No, it would be sinful to do that.’ Through his conscience, a man is finally accountable to himself alone; or rather, he is freed from that merely human authority under which so many people find themselves.

It was the moralists such as Cic'ero and Seneca who first gave conscience a prominent place, at least in so far as the examination of past actions is concerned. St Paul, who introduced the notion into the Christian tradition, extended it to the control of future actions as well. Here it has no easy part to play, and gives rise to many problems. The scholastic theologians who discussed the extent to which its judgments should be followed, held that it may sometimes be mistaken, for it may consider that something is good which in reality is evil, and vice versa. But it was St Thomas above all who insisted on the authority of conscience, declaring that its ruling must be followed even if it is mistaken, though he added that a man who acts in this way is not necessarily free from blame. The man must obey his erroneous conscience, but in doing so he sins if he could have corrected it; the only solution for him is to alter his conscience by bringing it into agreement with the truth.

The importance given to conscience in St Thomas’s teaching is perhaps most clearly seen in his examination of the conflict that may occur between a subject and his superior.

We are bound to obey the legitimate orders of our legitimate superiors in any society we claim to be part of.

The defendants at Nuremberg admitted themselves to be members of the Nazi State; both the defendants and the prosecutors admitted that Nazi Germany was a state in the international sense of that term, and in that state orders could be legitimately conveyed down the appropriate chain of military or civil command.

Because authority was legitimately vested in the state, it could be presumed to be properly exercised by those tn whom commands were addressed. This presumption was not irrebuttable to the ordinary European mind; but the Nazis strove to make it irrebuttable. The Nazis sought to make the state the sole society to which a Nazi could belong, and to make the head of that state the sole source of legal and moral obligation; this monolithic conception, intended to be the strength of the Nazi state, in fact became its greatest weakness. When the Fuhrer destroyed himself, he also carried the Nazi state to destruction: as he intended.

A strong society is one which allows the free growth of legitimate aspirations expressed in different forms of societies and corporations. The closed, or totalitarian, form of society looks strong from outside, it looks neat and streamlined, but internally its life tends to be cramped and to lack spontaneity when not kept young by regular blood transfusions from those who direct it and who themselves remain relatively free.

It is fashionable nowadays for some critics of the Church to compare the Church with a totalitarian state. Clearly there are resemblances between any well-organised hierarchical societies when viewed from outside: but such a comparison overlooks the essential difference in spirit between the Church and the secular state.

History reveals to us few spectacles more awesome than the long procession of mortals who, undeterred by considering their mortal frailty, have set out to revise, re-edit, redecipher, retranslate the text of the sacred scriptures. Seventy-two Greek-speaking Jews locked up in a library, a hermit in a rocky wilderness, a whole monastery given over, year after year, to the collating of photostats: should the line stretch out to the crack of doom, we may be sure that the last newcomer will still believe that where his precursors have erred, he will find the right way, the just word. We may be sure, too, that his ‘Azymes’, his ‘Feast of the Skipover’, his ‘Give each other a hearty handshake all round for my sake’ will earn for him the unkind criticisms of those by whom, usually, he has not meant his version to be read at all. The translators, the emendators, the excisors, interpolators, forgers, the Urtexter-finder have all had their way with us, and yet we still contrive, century after century, to know more or less what the Bible is about; surely a most striking fulfilment of St Matthew xxiv, 35.

The late Father Hugh Pope, o.p., was attracted to the history of these undertakings as they have affected Britain and the United States; and in English Versions of the Bible (B. Herder, London, 1952; 75s.) we have a revision, first by an anonymous Benedictine and then by Father Sebastian Bullough, o.p., of the book which he had not completed at the time of his death in 1946. It is a vast work, beginning with Caedmon and bringing us down to 1950. It is questionable whether Fr Pope was well advised in seeking to compile such an exhaustive treatment of what is not one subject but three.

Until recent years Dafydd ap Gwilym was the only Welsh poet with a high reputation outside Wales. This was not so strange. He fitted into the conventional picture of medieval poetry. He shared themes and modes with Guido Cavalcanti and with Thibaut de Champagne. He stretched a hand to Rutebeuf and another to the early Chaucer. Sir Idris Bell tackled English translations; Stern treated him as a Welsh minnesänger; a Dutch scholar, Theodor Chotzen, killed later in a Nazi prison, had in 1927 published his Recherches sur la poésie de Dafydd ap Gwilym, a large volume which remains still a most valuable survey of much of the poetry of Northern Europe in the fourteenth century. Now Professor Parry, of the University College of Bangor, gives us the long-awaited edition which is based on a study of all the manuscript sources. One must not speak of a final edition, for the simple reason that oral tradition admits of very little finality} but here are the text and critical apparatus that will be the starting point of study for the rest of this century. What I propose to attempt now is to give English readers a glimpse of Dafydd ap Gwilym from the point of view of the Welsh literary tradition.

This is no longer too difficult. The first volume of The Growth of “Literature by H. M. and N. K. Chadwick—a great and noble work despite necessary lacunae and some errors—has revealed to English students the tradition of heroic panegyric that is the main stream of Welsh poetry from the sixth century onwards. The Welsh poets themselves used to call it the tradition of Taliesin, from the sixth-century poet of that name.

During our stay in England last summer, we were constantly struck by the fact that when people—both priests and laymen—would ask, as they often did, what Order we belonged to, there would be no reaction if we said, ‘The Little Brothers of Jesus’; but if one of us were to add, ‘The Little Brothers of Father de Foucauld’, faces would immediately light up and we could see, much to our gratification, what a familiar figure this hermit of the Sahara was to our inquirers—the hermit who was murdered there in the desert in 1916, after a life completely given to God, and at the same time to the most destitute of mankind, in imitation of his Lord and Brother’s life at Nazareth. We were therefore led to conclude that, while, thanks to various writings—the most recent of which is, I believe. Desert Calling by Anne Fremantle—Father de Foucauld himself was far from unknown in England, it was not yet generally realised among English Catholics that he had given birth to a rapidly growing spiritual family, the ‘Little Brothers of Jesus’ and the ‘Little Sisters of Jesus’.

It is true that Father de Foucauld was a rather unusual kind of founder. As far back as 1905 he knew, as he wrote, that ‘Jesus wishes me to work for the establishment of this double family ... in supplication, in self-immolation; by dying to myself, sanctifying myself—by loving him, in short’; and he did so for twenty years, meanwhile drafting as many as four successive Rules for his ‘little brothers and sisters’ to come. He however waited in vain for his first disciple to appear, and died without having been able to achieve this most cherished of his human desires. ‘A grain of wheat must fall into the ground and die’, he would repeat, ‘but I am still alive!’ And, in fact, it was only seventeen years after his death that the ‘Little Brothers’ came into existence.

Last year the 24th of August fell on a Sunday. A plaintive convert coming away from High Mass that morning was heard to wonder whether the Church commemorated any saint on November 5th. He was told that in the English Calendar the day, occurring in the octave of All Saints, is appointed for the honouring of such relics as any parish church might possess: elsewhere it is sometimes observed as the Feast of the seventh-century Abbess of Chelles and sometimes as that of St Zachary. These facts were of course not what the enquirer really sought. His had been an oblique request for information about the Catholic retrospect on Gunpowder Plot. A full, probably an exhaustive answer to this demand has been given by Father Anstruther in his monograph The Voux of Harrowden.

Beginning with the fifteenth-century Northamptonshire lawyers, father and six sons who all married money, Father Anstruther follows the history of the Vaux family and their collaterals the Treshams, through prosperity to affluence; through knighthood to baronage; through recusancy to ruin; through martyrdom to 1829 and the re-establishment of their title in 1835.

That the family survived the Armageddon of the Popish plot is, says Father Anstruther, partly due to the fact that in Northamptonshire there remained scarcely any Catholics to persecute.