This year happens to mark a double centenary of Newman, that of his Discourses on the Idea of a University in Dublin, and that of his Sermon on the Second Spring. But we do not need the excuse of a centenary to speak about Newman. Rarely, if ever, has it happened in the course of history that the interest in a man’s personality and appreciation of his importance as a thinker have grown so fast and spread to so many countries as has been the case since the 1920’s with regard to Newman. Before 1920 his was a great name, perhaps the greatest name of the nineteenth century, certainly the greatest since the Reformation as a religious thinker; but he had suffered the misfortune of being ‘adopted’ by modernists and immanentists, and had been so widely misinterpreted by men as brilliant and seemingly authoritative as Bremond, that his present triumphal progress must have been unthinkable. In 1929, when I presented a thesis to Fribourg University on his Essay on Development., many there were who warned me that it was a dangerous subject to choose. No less a man than Cardinal Lepicier, who incidentally had read Newman widely, had uncompromisingly accused him of heresy in the Essay on Development and the Grammar of Assent. I remember thinking I could justify my hardihood by the consideration that, where cardinals disagree and neither is condemned, it could not be disrespecful to defend one against the other.

This year sees the fiftieth anniversary of the death at Tegernsee of Lord Acton, and the anniversary has been commemorated by the publication of two books, one adding to the small collection of Acton’s works in book form—now all out of print—and the other an analysis of his political philosophy. The only work of Acton published in his lifetime, apart from occasional essays in innumerable reviews both British and foreign, was his inaugural lecture, on The Study of History, as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in 1895. After his death, friends and disciples collected various lectures and essays into four volumes, and these, together with some incomplete collections of letters, are all that has been left to us of the man who was acclaimed in the latter half of the nineteenth century as being the most erudite in Europe. The more welcome then is the book of Essays on Church and State which is the first volume of what is to be a complete edition of Acton’s works. These essays have been chosen by Mr Douglas Woodruff, assisted by Mr Roland Hill, from Acton’s contributions to those short-lived but impressive reviews of the 1860’s, The Rambler and the Home and Foreign Review, and were all written when Acton was in his thirties. To this volume Mr Woodruff contributes an introduction whose chief merit is to tell the story of these reviews, of how the effort of the laity came to grief in its first attempt at a lay apostolate of the Press.

A Reviewer in the August number of Theology has written that ‘Rome’s tragic rejection of the Ecumenical Movement is one of the challenges of our day, and it has yet to be faced and met’. By its context, a review of Salmon’s Infallibility of the Church, this rather cryptic sentence seems to imply that the nature of the Church (as Catholics conceive it) makes Catholicism essentially incapable of absorbing the spirit of Ecumenism. If that were actually the case it would be truer to say that Ecumenism rejects Rome, not that Rome has rejected the Ecumenical Movement.

In order to test the validity of this judgment it is necessary to define what constitutes the essential spirit of Ecumenism, and what are the aims to which it gives birth. But it is precisely here that a difficulty lies, because the Ecumenical Movement has been fluid in its development, originating in a spontaneous desire for Christian unity, due partly to the threat of world war during the first decade of the century, and partly to the problems set to missionary effort by divisions among Christians. The double source of the desire for unity resulted in the emergence of two tendencies within the growing movement. In one, emphasis was laid upon co-operation between Christian bodies, in spite of differences of doctrine.

The classical acceptance of the term ‘apologetics’ comprehends in general whatever bears upon the defence and justification of religion. And in the specifically Christian and Catholic context this becomes particularly a question of establishing the reasonable credibility of the revelation made by Christ and mediated by the Church. Hence the traditional treatises de Revelatione and de Ecclesia. But there is no question in the present paper of engaging in any discussion of these venerable themes. The problem is the more general one of communication in a certain context. It is the problem, namely, of communicating the Word of God to the contemporary mind. This is the perennial concern of every apostle. The solution brought to it will determine the whole course of his apostolate. And the first necessity of all is to recognise that the problem exists, and is novel with every new generation. Perhaps never so novel in its implications as in our own time.

By ‘communication’ I mean simply the ‘getting across’ of something to others. But it is in a particular context that we have here to do with communication—in the context of the Word of God vis-à-vis the contemporary situation. First, therefore, we should avoid the mistake of supposing that to ‘get across’ the Word of God is like ‘getting across’ anything else. For, strictly, it is not we who ‘get across’ the Word of God. He himself alone speaks to the faith of men. Nevertheless, he does use us, reasonable beings, as communicative instruments, and there is the problem of how we shall render ourselves apt tools to this work. We do, also, even in our own right act dispositively upon those to whom he, by our instrumentality, addresses his Word, and so prepare them for its reception; and this imposes upon us a problem of approach.