The reader taking up this book for the first time may receive a confused impression. To begin with he will find some stanzas of French verse which suggest in their metre the pilgrimage which they describe in detail. It was André Gide who said that the poetry of Charles Péguy was like the repetition of some ancient litany, always similar but never quite the same. He might have said, with equal truth, that it was like the plodding of feet on a hard road, rhythmical and unrelenting; or like the washing of the sea over a shingle beach where no wave is identical but all strike variations of the same theme. Péguy’s verse has a tremendous purpose, and he was never more serious about anything than about this pilgrimage which he made to Chartres. All that he was and knew and felt—his piety and his patriotism and his subtle, involuntary presumption—went into it, and was afterwards translated into the poem he dedicated to our Lady. So much the reader of this book will quickly seize. But then he will examine the photographs, and fresh images will mingle in his mind with the image of Péguy’s pilgrimage.

France is reawakening. Not the France of Voltaire, but of Ste Jeanne d’Arc, not the France of Rousseau’s ‘Social Contract’, but of Péguy’s Christian social contract, the contract of universal brotherhood and charity. Charles Péguy was the day-star of that reawakening. None better than he understood the past and present of France, and none was better equipped to reconcile them. With reason he urged his fellowcountrymen to recall the soul of then race: ‘Nous sommes une veille race de moines, d’apôtres, de soldats. de maîtres d’oeuvres’. His socialism was not the socialism of Fourier and Saint Simon but of St Francis of Assisi and Ste Jeanne d’Arc. a socialism which is the very antithesis of that propounded by the German Jew. Marx, a socialism to which France, if we read the signs of the times aright, is returning. The socialism that best accords with the mind and soul of France is the charity of her saints, such as St Vincent de Paul. It would seem to be providential that Péguy was sent to lead the spirit of France, essentially Catholic and chivalrous, to new dimensions of Christian social justice.

Some years have already passed since the Abbé Godin in his book France, pays de mission,’ gave us a rather sad summing up of enquiries made into the increasing paganism in French towns. The book was followed by others revealing a similar state of affairs in the country and showing clearly where effort must be made at the present time. It is comforting, therefore, to realise what steps have already been taken to meet the situation; and even if it is only a start we can hope for its success when the seed will grow and ripen.

The name of Père Loew may he familiar to some who have read the short account of his work in En mission proletarienne. Père Loew had previously written a lesser-known book, Les dockers de Marseilles; ou, comment se crée le proletariat; and he also delivered some lectures on the work he has been doing. These lectures were the most striking evidence of the sincerity of his mission; delivered without sentiment or pathos but with the simplicity of truth built on real experience they conveyed a feeling of unspeakable sorrow for the workers.

On the outskirts of Lyons a vast monolith of a hospital commemorates the secular patron of that city of martyrs—Edouard Herriot. You take the bouncing tram from Place Bellecour (the Germans stole the trolleybuses), and at Blanche Grange you enquire for the church of Notre Dame—Saint Alban. It is hidden away behind the clinical cliffs of the hospital, and there is little enough about this plain box of a church to make it remarkable. But it is precisely here, amidst a sprawling suburb of flats and hostels, of workmen's dwellings and doctors’ villas, that for the last twenty-five years the abbé Laurent Remillieux has built up a Christian community which by this is known throughout France and beyond.

How did it happen? Père Chéry, who in his Paroisse Communauté Missionaire so vividly recorded the achievement of the Abbé Michonneau in the industrial parish of Colombes, has now published an account of the Lyonese parish which goes far to answer that question. Even the casual visitor to Saint Alban is aware that this is no ordinary church; or rather that here is a most ordinary church in which is realised the true function of a house of God, the meeting-place of God’s people, a living community of the faithful made one per ipsum et cum ipso et in ipso.

In the spring of 1939 was asked by the editor of Werklätter, one of the leading periodicals of the Catholic youth-movement in Germany, to contribute to the final number which he had been permitted to publish before this periodical had to cease to exist— to save paper, as it was said. We former contributors were asked to state what we felt was the most important duty of young Catholics of our time. Since soon afterwards I left Germany, I did not receive an offprint of that article, but some while ago a friend of mine presented me with an odd copy of that issue. When I read it again, it struck me that, in spite of the world-shaking events which had taken place in the meantime, the fundamental spiritual situation which we then considered had very little changed.

The editor had given my contribution the title ‘Die lautere Wirklichkeit’, which I may perhaps translate ‘Reality, nothing but reality’. I still feel that the fundamental duty of Catholics in our time is to realise for themselves and for others that there are things which, though not belonging to the material and sensuous sphere, are real. It is the general characteristic of our age that its conception of reality is no longer derived from the external but from the internal world.

Monsignor Knox has put us under a new debt by publishing these notes which have already appeared in the pages of The Tablet. Those who read them there will remember how they are marked by that wide erudition and careful thought which we expect of him. As for those who have not seen them, perhaps it is as well to repeat the warning of the author's preface, namely, that some purchasers of the book may be in for a disappointment: ‘the over-worked parish priest who must needs compose his Sunday sermon in a few minutes snatched from the confessional ... a harassed curate, desperately turning over the pages of this book at ten minutes to eleven in the hope of extracting a pulpit message from it’. These notes are not meant for them; they, he says, are quite well catered for by the numerous devotional commentaries that already exist. Here he wishes to concentrate on the well-known difficulties of the Sunday epistles and gospels. He dreams optimistically of a Catholic family arguing hotly across the luncheon table about the meaning of the epistle and gospel they have heard from the pulpit that morning, and eventually deciding to ‘see what Knox has to say about it’.