There is a form of truth known as calumny.’ This howler appeared in the first Editorial of Blackfriars. The Editor, Father Bernard Delany, followed up by Father Vincent McNabb in the first article, was expounding ‘Our Aim of Truth’. The slip was quite out of keeping with Father Bernard’s character and its like never recurred while he was Editor. If he had a fault it was excessive caution born of selfdistrust. It used to be said of him that when he came to be beatified the Breviary would have to admit ‘Nimis demisse reputabat de se’. To us, his contemporaries, this initial slip seemed a cruel misfortune, a quite unnecessary manoeuvre by his heavenly patrons to safeguard his modesty. We feared it might discourage him and intensify his habitual shyness of publicity. The way his lapse was brought home to him made that the more likely.

Six of us, at least, were given his leader to revise. It must have been over-confidence in his diffidence that blinded us, for we saw nothing wrong. Nor, as far as we knew, did anyone else, until James Britten opened his copy of the Review. Britten, then a peppery old gentleman and a militant convert of many years standing, was joint founder of the Catholic Truth Society, which at that date was in the early stages of a post-war ‘Forward Movement’. He was learned, and zealous for the exaltation of Holy Church and the overthrow of her enemies. He was also incapable of silence or of keeping out of print when anything called for contradiction or correction.

Up to a few years ago it used to be said that it was still far too early to make more than a cautious interim evaluation of the importance of the Qumrân scrolls. Today one feels almost that the opposite is true, that in a certain sense it is too late. It has been done so often already. So many popular presentations of the subject have appeared, many of them highly competent, some few sensationalist in approach and grossly misleading, but all of them attempting to answer the same basic questions: What exactly has been discovered and how? What sort of people were the members of that strange Jewish sect who owned, and in many cases who must actually have written the scrolls? What is the bearing of these documents on the origins and on the sacred books of Judaism and Christianity? These are, I think, the questions everyone would like answered. My excuse for going over the same ground again must be primarily that the answers suggested have often been so bewilderingly different.

First, then, what has been discovered is the relics of a sect whose history in its total span (c. 125 B.C. to 68 A.D.) overlapped the lifetime of Christ, and the emergence of the Christian Church from Judaism. These relics are of two kinds: documentary, and archaeological, and the one exactly complements the other. Coins and pottery from the community building which has been found are identical in type and date with coins and pottery found in the caves which contained the documentary remains.

The state of religion among Arab Muslims is much the same as among Western Christians. With both, religion survives in an active form among a minority; with both, the majority still cling to the name. Among both, men desire a high standard of living which most of them have always been denied; they have a new faith in scientific progress, which has brought about concrete results, and they accept the claim that it supersedes old beliefs. Both in Christendom and Islam there are conservatives who do not care at what cost they associate religion with inessential interests to which they are attached. Among Muslims there may be a greater pride in the name of their religion than among Christians; the national apostasy of the Arabs is as far advanced as ours if we reckon by mosque attendance, but less so if we remember their pride in being Muslim. The intellectual reaction of a minority against unbelief is less advanced among the Muslims. Our intellectuals have reached the reaction against reaction, scientific humanists against believers, and with this has come a further hardening of our differences. Among Arabs the modern intellectual approach to religion is both cruder and more fluid. These differences are not as important as the similarities. Modern preoccupations are everywhere secular. In this Arab world which is broadly similar, in detail different, to our own, can we trace the influence of religion upon the actual preoccupations of ordinary people?