When General Simuts delivered his much-discussed Thoughts on the New World, he gave utterance to some home-truths which badly needed enunciating. As he warned his audience, his remarks were intended to be stimulating, lacking in ‘diplomatic ‘qualification, not to be an expression of carefully-balanced policy. Especially have his remarks about France provoked reaction. ‘A nation,’ he said, ‘that has been overtaken by a catastrophe such as she has suffered, reaching to the foundations of her nationhood, will not easily resume her nationhood again. We may talk about her as a Great Power, but talking will not help her much.’

There have been protests against these blunt, almost brutal, words, by those who love and long for the culture of France. But these protests are not to the point; the culture of a nation survives and is of influence long after that nation has ceased to be a political reality, and French culture will be no exception. But to be a political reality a nation must have a State-will which can be made effective both for national life and for external preservation, and such a State-will demands at least a measure of national unity. The prospects of French unity—and this General Smuts must have had in mind—fill her friends with dismay, if not despair. News from Algiers does not suggest the development of a wide national coalition of French statesmen and the prospect is more easily foreseen in the words of a charming French actress, depicted in Picture Post of Nov. 27th, 1943, as saying : ‘After the war there will be a lot of people to be shot in France. Then we will start again.’

London was founded for practical reasons on ia gravel terrace, some two miles broad, lying north of the Thames and east of the River Fleet, and almost certainly it stood there before the Roman invasion. The Romans built a wall round it, and are primarily responsible for its commercial importance since they made it the chief centre of their road system. The Romans left London not only defensible but also accessible by roads as well as by waterways. So it became the capital first of the kingdom of Essex and then of England; it was the diocesan town of a see instituted by Pope Gregory of which the first ibishop was ordained by Saint Augustine.

Who were the men who first dared or were obliged to live outside the walls, forgoing the safety and privileges these enclosed, the men who began the expansion of London? The earliest evidence of suburban building occurs in the tenth century when the Danes, whom the Londoners barred at Ludgate, made the settlement along the river strand which was to name the church of St. Clement Danes. Outcasts of one kind or another : such were most of the mediaeval suburbanites. About the eastern and northern gates—Cripplegate, Aldgate, Aldersgate, Bishopsgate—unenfranchised and poor labourers lodged themselves as best they could. The southern bank, the Borough of Southwark, was a rath'er disreputable quarter, for it contained both prisons and certain areas in which immunity from legal arrest was enjoyed. It-was the Bohemia of mediaeval London, and maintained this character in the sixteenth century when playhouses were set up on the southern bank, the city being inhospitable to dramatic art.

God is. A New Order cannot be made without God. To some these things will seem banal; to others, conventionally devout nonsense. Nothing is more important, few things more urgent, than to show they are neither banal nor nonsensical. It needs no showing, once understood the meaning of those first two words, ‘God is’; but we are in unprecedented danger of not understanding. Men have attained such control over the natural order and such sufficiency in the artificial (successful war does but further the process) as to have lost nearly all sense of dependency and insufficiency. With that sense goes the natural sense of God. Ideas of God may survive, but too often notional only, conventional; and sometimes, in journalism almost always, useful. As long as we are not as serious and at as great pains at knowing-and realising God for Who He Is as are secular investigators at planning and reorganising, we have only ourselves to blame that the public be interested in plans and! not in churches. Nor should we too glibly prophesy the ruin of the godless order; planning is not a whit the less efficient and administrable in the short run for being without God; it is merely soulless; only in the very long run is it doomed. But its spiritual poverty as long as it lasts, and its final ruin woud be imputable not to the planners, but to ourselves who failed to plan divinely; who failed to sift the dross of religious sentimentality and convention from the gold of God, and left God to be abandoned.

Consider, dear child, the shame of wretches in love with wealth, who will not follow the lights that nature gives them to win the sovereign and everlasting Good. This was not beyond the pagan philosophers, who for love of knowledge cast riches from them; they saw them to be a hindrance. Yet the men I speak of wish to make riches their god, witness their greater grief to lose temporal wealth and substance than to lose me, the sovereign eternal riches. All manner of evil, if you but think a little, issues from this ungoverned will and desire for wealth.

Pride issues from it—the desire to be the greater; injustice to self and others; greed, which in lust for money rriakes no scruple to rob a brother or steal what belongs to Holy Church, bought though it is with the blood of my Son, my Word, my only-begotten. There issues also the trafficking in time and in neighbours’ flesh and blood (so with usurers, who sell like thieves what is not their own). Gluttony issues from it, with excess of foods and ungoverned eating; licentiousness too, for if a man had no wealth to spend, he would often not keep such sorry company. There are murders too; hatred and uncharitableness; cruelty; faithlessness towards me; and selfpresumption, as though it were thanks to themselves that men had wealth. Unperceiving that it is through me alone that they either get or keep it, they lose trust in me and trust only in it—idly, for it drops from them unawares, whether lost in this life by my provision and for their good, or whether lost at their death; thus they learn at length the hollowness and the fickleness of wealth.

In a recent article designed to cope with certain types of penitents, it is said that the penitent has the right to expect the confessor to be judicial, in the sense of objective. But that we cannot expect the priest to decide for us whether or not we have been sinning, or to what extent: he can tell us what is objectively moral or immoral, not what is our particular measure of guilt (Blackfriars, 1943;, p. 409). This statement, if it is not to be misleading to both confessors and penitents, calls for further clarification. There is no possibility of doubt that it is the duty of the confessor, as divinely appointed, to judge the objective and subjective morality of sins, and, as far as he is able on the evidence, to assess the objective and subjective measure of guilt. In this respect the penitent has every right to expect the confessor to be judicial, and to be able to advise him on his subjective state.

In a parallel and an anonymous article, translated from the French, entitled ‘A Spiritual ‘Cure for Scrupulosity,’ it is asserted but not proved that the juridical element, herein after to be called ‘precise legalism,’ introduced by moral theologians is responsible for the disease of scrupulosity. Experience, however, shows that scrupulosity may be found in the simplest of individuals, who have not had the remotest connection with the so-called legalism of theologians.