Wales, as a separate people of definite historical characteristics, owes its origin under God to the accidental results of an invasion of Britain by pagan peoples from overseas. From statements by Tertullian and Origen, not to mention many other later Christian continental writers, it is safe to say that Christianity had reached Britain before the close of the second century. Its introduction is not to be ascribed to any of the pious personages who figure in the earlier or later fanciful medieval tales of Glastonbury, such as Lucius, but has to be credited in sober fact to innumerable and unknown Christians, travellers and immigrants from the Continent for the most part. These travellers and those religiously influenced by them, gradually, it is clear, formed themselves into Christian communities, each with its own bishop and presbyters and deacons. These communities of simple folk sowed the seeds of the Christian religion in many parts of Britain while Borne was still a power in the land.

The members, and still more the founders, of these British Churches were not monks, for the very simple but cogent reason that the day of continental, much less British, monasticism had not yet arrived. Monasticism was a forward movement within an existing church. It originated in Egypt in the third century; it spread westwards through Italy and Spain into Gaul (modern France), and thence through the disciples of St Martin of Tours and the influence of Larins and Marseilles, it came to Britain about A.D. 420 or soon afterwards. (Cf. Introduction to The History of Wales, A. H. Williams, Vol. I.)

The Lambeth Conference and the World Council of the Churches at Amsterdam, held this summer, have brought the question of Christian Unity once again into the forefront of consciousness, even for Catholics. Now that they are over and their results made public it seems worth while to consider from the Catholic standpoint what value their efforts are likely to have in fostering a Christian Unity which is founded upon Truth. For us in England this will mean primarily a consideration of Anglicanism, for it is very evident, even from a superficial observation of the growing desire for unity among non-Catholic Christians, that the Church of England plays a dominant part in its development and will determine to a great extent the forms it will take in the future. What is happening in the Church of England therefore is a matter of capital importance if we wish to assess the value, in terms of truth, of the work being done by the œcumenical movement.

This brings us to a fundamental question not always squarely faced by Catholics. Does it matter what happens in the Church of England or in any of the Christian bodies which owe their origin to the Reformation? What is our attitude to these bodies as organisations? Is it of the slightest importance, as far as truth and true unity are concerned, which direction they take, or what arrangements they make among themselves for furthering their own coherence?

The view of the majority of Catholics would probably be that it matters not at all.

If civilisation is to survive, if the emergent civilisation is to achieve the fulfilment of its potentialities, the coming age must be an age of spiritual as well as social integration.

Today the human mind is torn and divided between positivism and irrationalism. The endeavours of pragmatism succeeded in making important discoveries concerning a number of basic attitudes in thought and morality, and in what might be called the sociology of knowledge. As a universal system of knowledge and life, as a philosophy, however, pragmatism has been a failure.

What is essentially needed is a renewal of metaphysics. The conceptions of modern science—the unification of matter and energy, physical indeterminism, the notion of space-time, the new reality recognised both as to quality and duration—are invaluable means of deciphering material phenomena. A cosmos of electrons and stars in which the stars are the heavenly laboratories of elements, subjected everywhere to genesis and transmutation, a universe which is finite but whose limits cannot be attained because of the curvation of space, and which dynamically evolves in a definite direction, namely toward the highest forms of individuation and concentration and toward a simultaneous degradation of the quality of its total energy—all this is external description and scientific imagery rather than ontological insight. Such knowledge can never directly serve the purpose of any philosophical or metaphysical extrapolations. Yet all this constitutes at the same time a basic representation of the world incomparably more favourable to the edification of a philosophy of nature and more open to the deepening labour of metaphysical reason than the old Newtonian physics.

In the year 1924 the Society of Friends, which cherishes an ancient ‘testimony’ against the celebration of special days, waived its scruples to celebrate the birth of George Fox, who, if not exactly the founder, was the coherer of those wandering souls who became known as Quakers.

About the time the Quakers [I must be forgiven if from time to time I call them Friends] are, if not celebrating, at least turning their minds to the tercentenary of their existence as a religious body. I believe also that other religious bodies, especially Christian bodies, will according to their capacity give thanks to God for the Quakers. Even that Christian body to which I have been given the grace to belong, that body without which there could not be in any sense a Christian body, very properly and without retracting in the slightest degree from her witness to herself as Christ’s one and undivided Church outside which there is no salvation, may rejoice.

Strictly and narrowly the thing called Quakerism is a heresy and as such it must be condemned and detested. As a Catholic I abjure with all my heart and mind the heresy of Quakerism. Yet very few Quakers are heretics. They are not because very few have received the sacrament of baptism. Those who have received it are those who have joined the Society of Friends from some Christian group which gives valid baptism. Looking at the Society of Friends still in this narrow way, we may doubt whether it is, in fact, a Christian body at all.

That fervent Catholic, Leon Bloy, wrote in one of his works: ‘Suppose that there were people round you continually speaking of your father and mother with the utmost contempt, who had nothing to offer them but insults and offensive sarcasms, how would you feel? Well, this is just what happens to our Lord Jesus Christ. We forget, or rather we do not wish to know, that our God made man is a Jew, nature’s most perfect Jew, the lion of Judah, that his mother is a Jewess, the flower of the Jewish race; that the Apostles were Jews, as well as all the Prophets; and finally that our whole sacred Liturgy is drawn from Jewish books. In consequence, how may one express the enormity of the outrage and blasphemy of vilifying the Jewish race?’

These words are addressed to Christians, who ought to understand them. In truth, the superficiality of Christians who believe they can possibly be anti-semites is prodigious! As a matter of fact, Christianity, in its human origins, is a religion of messianic and prophetic type, the spirit of which, as utterly foreign to Greco-Roman spiritual culture as to Hindu culture, was introduced into world religious thought by the Jewish people. The ‘Aryan’ spirit is neither messianic nor prophetic; to await the coming of the Messiah—the irruption into history of forces beyond history—is foreign to it. Moreover, the fact that German anti-semitism has evolved into anti-Christianity must be considered a highly significant symptom. A wave of anti-semitism has broken upon the world, casting away the humanitarian theories of the nineteenth century and daily threatening to submerge new lands.

This little book is introduced by a quotation from William Jennings Bryan attacking the Gold Standard but it turns out to be a plea for a restoration of a gold currency as the only kind of currency likely to maintain its value. Money is generally defined as anything—from cowrie shells to cigarettes—which is generally acceptable in settlement of debt and is not consumed but used as a medium of exchange and standard of value. The fact that gold has been used as money for thousands of years suggests that there is much to be said for its use; it is homogeneous, portable and, above all, though it may vary in value is not likely to vary very much or become valueless because the supply is limited. Paper money, on the other hand, is liable to be issued in excessive quantities, as happened in Germany after the Great War and in China, Hungary and other countries after the second world war, and to lose its value practically altogether. Even the pound, in spite of price subsidies, blocked sterling and other devices, is worth less than half what it was worth in 1930 and is likely to be worth still less, especially if people expect its value to decline further instead of recovering. The best way to maintain the value of the pound, says Mr Pepler, is to restore a gold currency; and he reinforces his argument about the solidity and intrinsic value of gold with analogies about the sun and moon, magnetism, eggs, anchors, keels and barnacles.

A difficulty constantly confronting the writer of obituary notices is the question of what mood and tense to employ, and it is a difficulty which comes very much to the fore with the death of a man like Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Somehow neither the subjunctive mood nor pluperfect tense comes readily to mind since the bereavement seems too personal and world-wide to allow of such historical impersonality; instead the loss is so great that it seems to call for something less final, less absolute. Better the present indicative, especially as there can be little doubt that his influence in India will grow rather than diminish with the years, and that the effect of such an influence on a country so vast will have repercussions which are not only global, but which internationally will be more or less immediate. Certainly the indecision as to which style to adopt in the tributes paid at his death, and the vacillating already apparent in the numerous leaders and notices over what mood and tense to choose, are proof enough of his importance, even if the true significance of that importance cannot be fully estimated until it is seen how many more similar violent deaths will flow out of that policy which he inaugurated. Upon such a determination must rest the final verdict of history. Yet, irrespective of the level of political home rule and contemporary affairs, there are other and deeper reasons for his prestige; reasons that to be genuinely understood call first for an evaluation of his philosophy since it was from that philosophy that his political actions sprang.