An Impression of the Oxford International Catholic Conference.

After the experience of the last few years the . ordinary man might be pardoned if he adapted Ecclesiastes and said : ‘Of making many conferences there is no end : and much talking is a weariness to the flesh : and this also is vanity.’

Ruined by the legacies of war, economic confusion, wastage of all sorts, and more than all by a profound psychological restlessness, the symptom of an even deeper spiritual aberratian, the nations of Europe have met in conference after conference and have sought one remedy after another until, like the poor creature of the Gospel, they ‘have suffered many things of many physicians and are nothing the better, but rather the worse'

In such circumstances, what hope for the world’s peace is to be found in further conference? Of what use to continue to chew the cud of bitter argument which the heritage of mutual distrust renders inconclusive, while the national divisions which run like fissures along the frontiers of Europe have made its peoples no less strangers than enemies? More of these international meetings would seem mockery unless some hitherto untried factor were introduced into their councils.

If it were possible that beneath all the external divisions and dissensions there were some underlying tradition of a common loyalty, and if amid the distractions of national, international, contra-national problems tugging in all directions in a variety of forlorn hopes, there were some one cause which transcended all others in urgency and was also, to use a hallowed phrase not altogether out of place, ‘the desire of all nations,’ then indeed there might be some hope that these discords would be resolved into harmony.