The gulf today between body and spirit, between material things and the praise of God, is widening at a pace and to an extent never known before. It would be very easy to despair. It would be very easy to despair of this civilisation of ours; very easy to despair of the future of our race; very easy to feel that, so far from marching triumphantly forward to a golden age, we are sinking rapidly into an abyss; very easy to feel that man is doomed because all the physical side, the material side of his life and his world must continue to drag him down and degrade him till the heavens are closed to him. But no; it is just at this very moment that the voice of the Church comes to him like a challenge : we are on the contrary to shout aloud our belief in the dignity and holiness of material things; we are to affirm again our faith and our hope in the future of man’s flesh. The woman who stands in the heavens is the mother of men; and her glory is the guarantee of theirs.

That is why the definition of our Lady’s Assumption is far from having a purely domestic interest or importance. The greatest definitions have always been defensive: defensive of some more central truth which would otherwise be in danger. But the Church is not merely concerned with the guarding and defending of her own children; she is concerned with the guarding and defending of the whole world.

‘The only artist retaining the image and its allusions today is David Jones, and his paintings exhibit very clearly the enormous difficulty of finding pictorially the relation between it and the coherent whole—for unlike Rosetti and like Dante he is not content to see his image in the unknown.’

These words are found in the concluding passage of Nicolette Gray’s study of the Romantic Image and of the dilemma to which it gives rise in the art of today. Her thesis is that Dante was not content to see the vision of Beatrice as prefiguring a reality beyond herself, but in addition he needed to know what is the nature of the relation. To Dante there was available the idea of a world order as really existing. But by the end of the eighteenth century this knowledge of the whole was reduced to an abstract idea of order so attenuated ‘that it had no place for the particular’. Thus the idea of the image became divorced from order, romantic from classical art. Henceforth the artist can with certainty use no valid terms in which the mind can rest.

No one is more fully aware of the difficulty this thesis presents to the artist than Mr David Jones. He has met the difficulty frontally not only as painter but intellectually as a scholar, as shewn in his hitherto un-collected critical writing, and as a poet in In Parenthesis. He comprehends our cultural predicament and has allowed himself in his work no evasion of the formidable difficulties that arise for one who adds to an artist’s response to the material world a need to endow the result with a validity that stands the tests of the intellect.

My family were Church-and-State Tories of an untheoretical, moderate sort. Eldest sons ‘went into politics’ and younger sons ‘went into the Church’. A religious outlook was taken for granted; the religion was very sincere; so were the politics.

They served God according to their light and the King according to their light. The lights were not as dim as some people now suppose. My grandfather, a man of unostentatious piety, was well-read in theology. He was also interested in social reform and played a part in founding schools for the poor and the first reformatories.

The problem of the relations of Christianity to History has been very much complicated and, I think, obscured by the influence of nineteenth-century philosophy. Almost all the great idealist philosophers of that century, like Fichte and Schelhng and Hegel, constructed elaborate philosophies of history which had a very considerable influence on the historians, especially in Germany, and on the theologians also. All these systems were inspired or coloured by Christian ideas and they were consequently eagerly accepted by Christian theologians for apologetic purposes. And thus there arose an alliance between idealist philosophy and German theology which became characteristic of the Liberal Protestant movement and dominated religious thought both on the continent and in this country during the later nineteenth century.

Today the situation is entirely changed. Both philosophic idealism and liberal Protestantism have been widely discredited and have been replaced by logical positivism and by the dialectic theology of the Barthians. The result is that the idea of a Christian philosophy of history has also suffered from the reaction against philosophic idealism. It is difficult to distinguish the authentic and original element in the Christian view of history from the philosophic accretions and interpretations of the last century and a half, so that you will find modem representatives of orthodox Christianity like Mr C. S. Lewis questioning the possibility of a Christian interpretation of history, and declaring that the supposed connection between Christianity and Historicism is largely an illusion.

Père Daniélou has expressed in a recent book his opinion that the theology of the Holy Ghost, hitherto so little developed in the Church, will receive definitive form only when it has been formulated in the thought of India: that this indeed is the providential vocation of Indian thought, just as that of Greek thought has been to express the theology of the Incarnation.

This is certainly looking somewhat far ahead, but it will appear extravagant only to those who are wedded to a narrowly Western point of view. Such a point of view becomes ever less tenable in view of the rapid decline of Western civilisation in our day, and there is no respectable authority for persisting in it.

Human systems of thought, no less than the political systems described by Plato, have each their germs of decay which will eventually work themselves out unless neutralised by the influence of another system. While making due allowance for the influence of divine providence in the Christian thought of the West, we must not forget that grace worked by adapting and combining diverse natural elements, and has in fact so worked in producing the Catholic synthesis that we know, built up as it is with stones from Jerusalem, Athens, Antioch, Alexandria, Rome and many other places.

A thousand years of schism were bound to make our synthesis somewhat lopsided in a Westerly direction. The Latin scholastic element has been allowed to grow somewhat disproportionately and has not been slow in manifesting its peculiar danger: a too rigid conceptualism, tending towards rationalism and legalism.

In ‘A note on Welsh Education’ which he contributed to Blackfriars for March, 1948, Mr Saunders Lewis has described how, in the nineteenth century, ‘nonconformity became the very nationhood of Wales’. ‘Its entire cultural life’, he wrote, ‘was centred in the chapel. . . . Religion was three-quarters of life; it triumphed in poverty and over poverty and ennobled the bitter, ill-requited toil on land, in quarry, mine ... The education of this people was rooted in its religious and social life: its content was its evangel, its medium the Welsh language. While the society lived and kept its unity, these two were safe. During the past sixty years, however, that unity has gradually been breaking down; the ‘ideal and authority’ of the society have been destroyed. ‘Middle-class, worldly ideals, the impact of a wider, modern culture, conquered the religious unity of the Methodist peasantry.’

It would be difficult to disagree with that analysis. Wales is now going through the final stages of the disintegration of its nonconformist nationhood. Mr Saunders Lewis is in many ways the most influential personality in Wales today. The names of the contributors to a recent volume on his work are a clear proof of the extent of this influence. The editor, a Congregationalist minister, reminds us that Mr Lewis has enthusiastic disciples, ardent admirers, loyal friends—and enemies. For at least a quarter of a century he has been, to quote the words of the seventeenth-century writer Morgan Llwyd, ‘dirgelwch i rai i’w ddeall ac i eraill i w watwar, he has indeed been a disturbing mystery to many and to object of myopic scorn to others.

Eric had an engagingly boyish, at times almost infantile, sense of humour. He delighted in a stock of comic stories which he retailed with inexhaustible relish both for their formal nearness and for their garnered wisdom. Among these was a dialogue between three men in a railway-carriage:—

First man: ‘What lights are those?’

Second man: ‘They’re the lights of Hanwell.’

First man: ‘How strange they look!’

Third man: ‘Not half so strange as the lights of the train look from Hanwell!’

Perhaps this unassuming little allegory may enlighten the chequered history of the Money-changers from its thwarted beginnings in 1916 to its recent and painful aftermath in 1949.

rA representation of the turning-out of the money-changers has been chosen for a war memorial, for it commemorates the most just of all wars—the war of Justice against Cupidity—a war raged by Christ Himself.’

The sculptor had long dreamed of a great monument which should embody this struggle and at the same time be his crowning achievement. The original design—for a bronze group in the round—done in 1916 for a competition as a monument for L.C.C. employees, was rejected. It may be seen reproduced in Eric Gill published by Ernest Benn in 1927; it is also extant in a wood engraving. The upsurging rhythm of this bronze group is finer than the more geometrical movement of the relief ultimately carved in stone at Leeds.

Observers surveying the political scene in Western Germany immediately after the Second World War were apt to agree that the good understanding between Catholics and Protestants was one of the few positive results of the ghastly experience of Nazism, war and defeat. Everything seemed to point to the permanence of this new harmony. Catholic and Protestant Christians had both suffered for the same reason, both had learned to understand one another faced as they were by the totalitarian menace—first Nazi and later Communist. And both had reason to regard themselves as the ‘saving remnant’ that had redeemed the soul of Germany. The temporary disappearance of a German state had led finally to the emergence of the two Churches as the only remaining pillars of native authority which could give guidance and solace to a despairing and bewildered people.

The situation is unfortunately radically different today. As long as the majority of Germans remained stunned by defeat and preoccupied with the burden of day-to-day existence, old feuds and rivalries seemed meaningless. The stabilisation of their currency, however, with its almost magical effect on the living standard, together with the re-emergence of German statehood—even though with limited sovereignty—have once more led to conditions in which echoes of the past can be heard with increasing and alarming clarity.