HISTORY has a sphere and the world a place where Athens and Rome seem for ever linked together: civilization and Jerusalem! The civilization of the ancient world owed its spirit to Athens, and its law and order to Rome: both played a part, under the providence of God, in forming that world in which, in the fulness of time, the Word was made flesh. But it was from Jerusalem that both Rome and Athens received the faith of Christ—the faith which is now their life, and in which both were reborn. Since the time of the apostles, these two cities have looked to Jerusalem as the eartlily shadow of their heavenly capital and the cradle of their common hope.

But if that common hope of theirs, in the person of our Saviour, were to return today to the holy city where he prayed and preached and suffered and died for love of us, in order to establish his kingdom in our midst, he would fmd there, alas, no greater unity than he found before.

Fr George Florovsky is a Russian Orthodox theologian of repute, at present teaching at Harvard in the United States. We are happy to print here a translation of an article which first appeared in Russian in the Messenger of the Russian Christian Students Movement, and then in a French translation in Vers L'Unité Chrétienne./rom which this translation is made. We thank the editors of both journals for permission to publish an article so remarkable for its calm objectivity and its understanding and appreciation of the Roman Catholic position.

The Vatican Council (1869-70), by the reckoning of the Roman Church, was the last ‘ecumenical council'. This council has never been formally closed. Its labours were only temporarily interrupted by the pressure of outside events, the occupation of the Papal States and the city of Rome by the troops of nationalist Italy, which at the time appeared to threaten the freedom of the council's decisions and even the freedom of the Church itself.

In writing, not long ago, of what he has found in the Movement for a Better World, Fr Ludwig Tovini, Italian Dominican member of the movement's promoting group, referred, amongst other things, to an equilibrium between the grandiose wish to change the world and the realistically moderated belief in the possibility of change, and advocacy of it, without Utopian optimism that would banish the existence of evil from the earth. Such equilibrium, difficult to maintain on account of continually having to avoid die danger of falling into one excess or another, is not so common, Fr Tovini went on to say, even in the Catholic field, ours being an age when ‘whimsical hankerings after originality often lead to the taking up of unbalanced or eccentric positions …'.

A ‘better world’ Pope Pius XII defined as being a world ‘more according to the heart of God', giving to this relative concept an essentially Christian value.

July is the usual time for articles about SS. Cyril and Methodius, whose feast is kept on July 7th. Most of these are written by Czechs who think of the two brothers as their own and other Slavs’ apostles. It is true, of course, that these two Greeks did bring the gospel to the eighth-century Slavs living in central Europe, but excessive concentration on that aspect of their life and work may make us forgetful of their much wider significance. Perhaps it is not a bad thing to think of them, for a change, not primarily as the men who brought Christianity to a particular people nor in connection with their feast and die ‘Apostolate of SS. Cyril and Methodius’ but as men whose lives contributed to the growth and the unity of the Church. The Church indeed grows and is made one in a particular place among definite people, but the importance of that growth and unity comes from its universality, not from its particularity.