Some time ago, when in San Francisco, I visited the Flood Mansion—a perfect replica of a magnificent Italian palazzo, correct down to the least detail, set on a commanding height of the city, with a glorious view across the laguna to the mainland. The interior more than kept the promise of the exterior—from the grandiose entrance hall and its sweep of a balustraded staircase well to the lovely furniture and interior decoration of the numberless rooms, salons, corridors and landings. Yet for all this artistic splendour, the dominating feeling it evoked in me was one of profound sadness. For the palazzo was dead, as was its former owner, and the heirs, refusing to live there, were making a gift of it to a Religious Congregation, which had moved in—so far quite inconspicuously.

What makes a mansion in Europe, of which this was such a faithful copy, to be what it is, is the fact that it is the family mansion—the place where gallant ancestors had lived and where the present head of the house was carrying on a family tradition which was being handed on to another generation, now growing up within its walls. A family—which included not only the actual kin, but tenants, servants, clients and all kinds of henchmen and hangers-on, all together forming a true social unit. The Flood Mansion by contrast was just a museum piece, the costly whim of a mulish individual with no pride of ancestry nor hope of progeny.

The bus conductor knew where the prison was, of course. ‘I suppose you’ll be a visitor’, he remarked, with the beginning of a smile. ‘I see them every day, lots of them— visitors, I mean. I reckon there’d be a good deal less nonsense in the papers if the reporters had my job. Crime doesn’t just mean blokes behind bars: it’s mothers and brothers and wives. We’re all of us in it one way or another, I reckon.’

The bus conductor was right. The frowning walls of a Wandsworth can be society’s final alibi: the publicly condemned, out of sight, out of mind unless there’s a riot or an execution, are hostages to many of our miseries and reflect much more than the crimes they have committed. This is not to deny their responsibility nor to condone the violence that, since the war and especially among young criminals, has become so grievous a social problem. And sentimentality is in this context the worst of counsellors. Yet the isolation of crime, of which the very structure of a prison is the symbol, can mask its further meaning. To arrest the wrongdoer, to demand his exclusion from society, satisfies the natural need of society to be protected from its aggressors. And punishment must remain a sanction to vindicate the claims of law. Yet for a Christian conscience the crimes of the member are the affair of the whole body. ‘All mankind is in Christ one man, and the unity of Christians is one Man’, St Augustine reminds us, and the shared life of the Body does not cease when the members rebel.

The origin of this work goes back to the winter of 1942 when a Conference of Allied Ministers of Education met in London to consider the possibility of producing a European history ‘of an objective character’ which might be available for general use after the war. The results of their deliberations are three volumes on the history of European civilization which, the editors hope, may be translated into other languages in order to communicate ‘to the youth of Europe, as dispassionately and as justly as possible, some sense of the inheritance of Europe and the influence of that inheritance’.

In the dark days of the last war England was the hope of an oppressed Continent, and it would have been invaluable if the liberation of Europe, having had its point of departure in this country, could have been followed by an intellectual assessment of the spiritual values of the European past to meet the hopes of a despairing world. If the First World War can be regarded as the real end of the nineteenth century, there are grounds for seeing in the Second World War the end of a whole phase of European history which we would describe as the triumph and fall of human reason. Europe was confronted by a barbarian revolt of unreason. What was this Europe? What could, and indeed can, be salvaged from the past? Or should the question really be: what is the new view of man which the European inheritance compels us to accept?

The Apostles’ Creed, like all creeds, is a formal summary of salient points in the tradition—in the paradosis, what is handed over in the spirit from the Apostles to the end of time. Though it was not drawn up by the Apostles it does represent a systematic elaboration of the trinitarian formulae and clauses found in the Epistles of St Paul. The evidence suggests that in the primitive Church the creeds take shape first in association with the interrogations which are part of the baptismal rite, and secondly in the catechetical instructions. Be that as it may, there is no evidence for fixed official creeds till the turn of the second century when the Roman Creed was formulated as a declaratory creed for catechumens—this is the creed which, with some modifications, we know as the Apostles’ Creed. This creed follows a basic trinitarian pattern—the first article treating of God the Father, the second to the seventh with God the Son, and the eighth to the twelfth with God the Holy Spirit.

Simple though the creed is in language and structure as compared with the creeds for bishops characteristic of the fourth century, each article states a mystery of faith—it is, says St Thomas, the task of an article of a creed to give guidance to the mind of the faithful on points where there are distinguishable reasons for asserting that faith here carries us beyond reason. Hence it is clear that creed-saying is an activity of faith and that the creeds are concerned to direct the faithful mind to supernatural truth.

At Intervals during the past hundred years the historical novel has turned away from the court and the camp to occupy itself with religion, often with enormous popular success. Between Hypatia and II Santo two of the best sellers of their day were Quo Vadis? and John Inglesant. They are still to be found on bookshelves from which those other historical novels, Barabbas and The Sorrows of Satan, have been cast out. Religion in itself; the religious adventure; the problems of conduct and belief; the opposition of the Church—all have long occupied, and continue to occupy modem writers; but it is only in the present decade, with Miss H. F. M. Prescott’s Man on a Donkey, that historical fiction has returned to the Age of Faith.

The immediate gain is immense. We escape from investigations of tortured conscience and the conflicts of post-Reformation theology and practice and are once more involved in the crowded freedom of action based on an accepted creed, an obeyed authority. Haugenier de Linnières, the newly knighted hero of Madame Oldenbourg’s novel, The Corner Stone, goes none too willingly with the pseudo-crusade against the Albigenses. He had heard it said ‘that Raymond of Toulouse had never worshipped the devil; that war against him was not really a holy war. He thought these were quibbling considerations. You go to God’s defence or you do not.’ You also play at I’amour courtois—liberal shepherds give it a grosser name—with another man’s wife who plays at virtue in exquisite raiment and in exquisite vernal settings.