The excitement with which the conferring of the Red Hat on Cardinal Gracias was greeted in Bombay had a special quality. It was not just that it came to the first Indian Cardinal; it was rather like the enthusiasm of Preston or Bolton on receiving the Cup. The Cup, clearly, is won. So in a real sense was the Hat, and that is the difference between East and West.

There had been no attempt to disguise the disappointment felt when about a month earlier all twenty-four hats had gone to the West. Indian Catholics had seen overwhelming reason to hope for at least one more Asian Cardinal in the seventy; in general what the Westerner says about the decision of a superior, the best Eastern Christian likes to say to a superior; in that he is already much nearer to apostolic Christianity. But if there was an Indian Archbishop in Bombay at all to receive the Hat, that was a situation which had been earned also. This is not the place to dilate on the subject. Immense as the joy in India has been in the first Indian Cardinal, I think that there may be more joy in Heaven on what the East can give back to the West.

The coronation service is not a picturesque anachronism, of purely secular interest. It is an historical drama of great antiquity. The central feature is the hallowing of the Queen effected by the anointing, as expressive of her own self-dedication to the service of God and of her people. At the crowning of the Emperor the whole ritual was called ordo ad benedicendum imperatorem, quando coronatur. Regal coronation therefore takes the form of a blessing imparted with great solemnity, with the Mass as its natural setting and culminating point. In origin it is a sacramental conjoined to a sacrament.

The Queen herself, in her broadcast last Christmas, asked for the prayers of her people, no matter what religion they belonged to, that she might be blessed by God, and be made faithful to the promises she would make before the altar of Westminster Abbey on the day of her coronation. Catholics will not be slow in responding to the deeply religious appeal publicly made by her Majesty.

In remote times the crowning and investiture of the Emperor was without religious character. When Leo II was crowned (473) we find the Patriarch reciting a prayer, and at length it became the duty of the Patriarch of Constantinople to set the diadem on the head of the Emperor. With the crowning in church of Phocas (602), the ceremonial assumed a formal and religious character.

No one who studies savage societies would say, today, that there are modes of thought which are confined to primitive peoples. It is rather that we ourselves have specialised ways of apprehending reality. The contributors to this series may, indeed, have described notions which we do not easily take for granted, but which are commonplace among many peoples without our modern science and technology. But any historical sense of proportion—and our historical thought, our sense of relativities, is among our distinguishing characteristics—reminds us that it is some of our own habits of thought which are newly-formed and uncommon. We stand more or less alone, for example, in not taking witchcraft seriously, or distant kinship; and our indifference in such matters divides us equally from savages, and from those ancient cultures whose civilisation, in other respects, we are proud to inherit.

Further, since the eighteenth century at least, we have been rather disposed to forget that a satisfying representation of reality may be sought in more than one way, that reasoning is not the only way of thinking, that there is a place for meditative and imaginative thought.

No event has so stirred up the dormant forces of anti-clericalism, anti-semitism and nationalism in post-war France as has the recent Affaire Finaly. The fate of two Jewish children, Robert and Gerard Finaly, who were baptised and taken to Spain by their Catholic protectors when the court had ordered that they should be given up to their Jewish relatives, have become a national scandal comparable to the Dreyfus affair. The Church and individual Catholics have been the targets of bitter attacks in the French press and radio, and the old cleavage between Catholic and anti-Catholic Frenchmen, barely healed in the last war and in the changed political atmosphere since 1945, seems to have opened up again.

The facts of the case are briefly these: The Jewish doctor, Fritz Finaly, and his wife, who had found refuge in France after the Nazi occupation of Austria, were arrested in Grenoble by the Gestapo on February 14, 1944. They were sent to Buchenwald concentration camp where they were killed in the gas chamber. Shortly before their deportation they had entrusted their two children, then aged two and three years, to the Sisters of St Vincent de Paul. The mother superior of that convent was unable to keep them and approached the Sisters of Notre Dame de Sion who handed the children to Mlle Brun, the head of the municipal orphanage, who was already hiding ten other Jewish children.

Many mathematicians know their details but are ignorant of the philosophical characterisation of their science.’ It was A. N. Whitehead who wrote this. He himself made an admirable effort to supply the defect. Assuming that no recognised philosopher knew enough of the details of mathematical science to give a reliable account of it, he read, besides Plato and Aristotle, a selection of seventeenth-century writers—particularly Descartes, Newton, Locke, Hume, Kant—who either knew enough about mathematics to be helpful, or little enough to show in what new way philosophy must be handled to meet the mathematicians’ need. He then wrote Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology, which he delivered as the Gifford Lectures for 1927-28 and published in book form in 1929. It is less exclusively addressed to mathematicians than the earlier work he had begun with Bertrand Russell and then abandoned; but its whole drive aims at setting the sciences that use mathematics in their full philosophical and spiritual context. By the time it was finished the revolution worked in physics by the theories of quanta and relativity was firmly established. The work took into account, with full approval, the new cosmological outlook the change implied.