Scotland, more rapidly than England, is drifting into a confused but not yet convinced paganism. Calvin and Knox are fading into the background as religious heroes. Christ Himself may soon be a mere name to the multitudes unless there is a movement of re-conversion in our midst. About ten years ago the Church of Scotland published a Report which had the courage to admit that no more than 36 per cent, of the total population of this country was affiliated to organised religious bodies. It also revealed that about 150,000 children of school age were not connected with any church or Sunday school. At the present time it would probably be more correct to state that less than 25 per cent, of the people of Scotland are even nominal members of any Christian denomination. This is how Dr. George F. MacLeod, the Leader of the Presbyterian Iona Community sums up the religious situation in Scotland: “We have rejected an earlier discipline and discarded its Reformation alternative, and have left our youth with nothing.”

The Kirk, as a whole, has lost its authority over the people, although Scotland is still a Presbyterian nation so far as its established Church. Its membership is declining, while, on the other hand, the Catholic population tends to increase—through natural rather than by supernatural reasons. The statistics of birth-rate among Scoto-Irish families in the industrial Lowlands prove this fact. To-day about 13 per cent, of the total population of Scotland is Catholic. No statistics of conversions are allowed to he published as in England.

To set fire to a field of ripe wheat or to leave the ground untilled surely amounts to almost the same result? Everything in this world is made to be of service, and, because there is only what is necessary for all, the bread that is not sown, like that which is thrown away, is taken from someone. It is bad, it is monstrous to pay thousands of francs for a dinner given to Ambassadors, five hundred francs or more for a bottle of champagne at a fashionable dance, when so many people are hungry; but to put the amount in a woollen stocking, is as bad, as monstrous. Even worse sometimes. For, at least, some persons profit by these follies, and if it is a very despicable means of livelihood they have found, it may be that they themselves are not all despicable. Whilst as for this money which men pile up and set by for their hypothetical needs, to which they presently sacrifice even the satisfaction of these needs, what does it serve? There was someone in this world for whom it was indispensable and who is thus deprived of it. If we want a seed to germinate and fructify, we do not, unless we are mad, enclose it in a box. In being used it is undoubtedly destroyed, but it bears fruit a twentyfold.

In a recent work M. Denis Saurat claims that reality is rendered comprehensible only by the “complete life of Christ”. Christ, Logos and Man, is the centre from which all life flows, unfolding “into the past and into the future". No doubt M. Saurat’s thesis is expressed in pantheistic thought forms, but this does not detract from the value of the imaginatively expressed intuition by which he has discovered that it is Christ alone who gives meaning and reality to the time process, and that it is the Incarnation that makes history intelligible.

Whatever reservations a Catholic is called upon to make regarding the details of M. Saurat’s vision, we are able to recognise that he is attempting to bring home to us a darkly seen variant of St Irenaeus’s doctrine of the recapitulation of all things in Christ. For by recapitulation St Irenaeus meant a recommencement in the opposite direction by which God, reversing as it were the process whereby sin infected the earth, gathers together and reunites all creation, including matter, but specially man, in a new economy of salvation. He gathers up his entire work from the beginning to purify and sanctify it in his Incarnate Son, who in turn becomes for us a second Adam.” (E. Mersch, S.J.: The Whole Christ: p. 230).

Creation points to the Incarnation, and this Christocentric preoccupation of St Irenaeus has important repercussions on his doctrine of man. M. Saurat, arguing from the same premise, has also described man in terms of Christ.

The thought that I might have passed W.O.S.B. and have gone to England, and the thought that—had my officer not postponed my L.I.A.P. by a fortnight—I would have missed this chance of a life-time (I’m being posted to Klagenfurt after L.I.A.P. and shall thus not be returning to Italy, fills me with horror; and I will try to remember this next time I’m disappointed about something, because my plans don’t work out quite according to my ideas—and I shall remember that in that case they will work out better.

It all came about like this. We were suddenly given Monday, 12th November, ofi duty for the commemoration of Armistice on the 11th, which was a Sunday, and we would therefore be free in any case—or have the half day at least. So I started talking to a girl, who had a boy-friend in Foggia, trying to find out what the possibilities of transport were. Well, the girl said there was hardly any transport on the road, that there was nowhere to stay in Foggia as there are only officers’ clubs up there, that the district was badly bombed and desolate, and that the whole scheme was most inadvisable without transport, but if one had a car one could make it in four to five hours. Well, I got terribly excited at the thought and talked to my Irish friend Bita, and we started scheming. So we put in for a sleeping-out pass to Foggia, and said transport had been arranged.

But after all if I spend it, I shall no longer have it, that is clear!

Have you tried? One can never know a worker’s capacity, until he has been made to work.—Whoever really wishes to stop trembling with respect before his own money, and begins to put it to his service, discovers how easy it can be to deal with! Let us forget this useless, anxious care of filling one’s purse, let us think only of emptying it usefully, and we shall find it always full for the present necessity.

I like to repeat the charming absurdity that a small girl said to her mother: “ Hurry up and spend your money while you’ve got it, because afterwards you won’t have it any longer!” We must indeed hurry to make it do service for something while we have it in hand, because otherwise it will slip away without having done anything. We must hurry to use what is lent to us to-day, tomorrow perhaps we shall have it no longer, and we shall have missed the opportunity of acquiring some beautiful or useful thing, or of doing some good action, which would be worth much more than the money we had given for them.

Besides, let us be at peace; If tomorrow a similar opportunity presents itself, the money will be there again to our advantage. There is a principle which we must bear in mind because proof has been made of it. It is what may be called ‘‘the principle of air-inlet.”

It took an hour and a half in the fishing boat driven by its small paraffin motor. Jonathan, the fisherman, sitting on the box covering the engine, said it was the most perfect day for the trip; as calm as it could ever be, and November was already a week old. Everyone that morning had said it was calm: the parish priest, the man who drove us to the harbour from the north of the island at 8.15 prompt, the man at the store who had known the weather of the Islands for nearly 70 years, for them all it was a miracle of fine weather. This is an important point; for although the boat was of the size that normally takes trippers out into the Channel at Brighton, and although Jonathan’s son dextrously steered into the waves so that we never once were splashed, the boat did toss. Jonathan on his perch moved to the rhythm of the waves, but we, his two passengers leaning against a cross-beam two yards away, were alternately looking down at him and peering up at him; and once or twice we were flung brusquely against each other. The sensation was that of a boat swing. This was to be expected. The sun was out, and had been ever since we had first arrived at Castlebay; for fifteen minutes we had peered out under its rays just over the horizon to catch the first glimpse of Jonathan’s boat coming round the point from the island of Vatersay.

Philosophy—East and West, the book of the East-West Philosophers’ Conference held at Hawaii in 1939, adds to the growing evidence of a desire for rapprochement in academic circles between America and the Far East. The scope of the book is philosophical and rational, prescinding, that is, from religious questions as such, and seeking to formulate and to organise the common ground of Eastern and Western thought and thus to make more readily accessible to each what one possesses and the other lacks. The project arises from so manifest and natural a tendency—the desire of men to understand one another and so extend their understanding of the world—that any elaborate justification seems uncalled for, and in effect the majority of the Eastern contributors dispense with any such preamble. In the nature of the case the position of the Western philosophers is a more self-conscious one, and the justifications they put forward raise questions more important than the conference itself. It must be added that such a statement intends no disparagement of the book in which the proceedings of the conference are recorded, and is one in which the American contributors themselves would probably agree.

The first question, to which we may defer the answer while using it as a key to unlock others, is this: In what sense can we accept the statement that the traditions neither of the East nor of the West are wholly true or adequate to a full understanding of man? It is a proposition in which the Western and, at least, one of the Eastern contributors explicitly concur, and is in line with the objective of a “planetary philosophy“, in which the same amount of agreement is evident.

The great difficulty in discussing a Scottish type of sanctity is the exiguous character of the evidence. In the period of the Celtic Church saints are as thick as blackberries. But at this distance of time one cannot distinguish the incoming Irish Gaels from the native Piets and Britons. We cannot show that the communities deriving from SS Ninian, Drostan and Mungo fostered a type of holiness in any way different from that of Iona. The general impression is of similarity.

And when the great age of the Celts is over, how few names remain even for consideration! Saint Margaret, half-Hungarian, half-Saxon, belong to Scotland only by the geographical accident of her marriage and the warmth with which the people took her to their hearts. Then come two names from the Scottish calendar, unrecognised elsewhere. The first is King David I., Margaret’s son, founder of Holyrood and other abbeys, cannily strung along the Border in the hopes that an invader might respect church property; he was also a defender of the poor. The other, Blessed Gilbert of Moray, was a Bishop of Caithness (d. 1245) who did a valuable piece of civilising work in the North. The people were in a panic before ill-understood royal efforts to unify and consolidate the kingdom. Both his predecessors had been assassinated, and Blessed Gilbert led off by pleading for the lives of the last set of assassins. He won such confidence that he was allowed, io die in his bed after twenty years of devoted work—no mean feat on the outer confines of Christendom at that time.

Anyone who undertakes an impartial appraisement of the book of Canon Eugene Masure “ The Christian Sacrifice “ recently translated by Dom Illtyd Trethowan, O.S.B., has a difficulty in deciding where he ought to begin if the work as a whole is to be viewed in due perspective. Perhaps the first step of the critic should be to eliminate altogether from his purview the section entitled “ The Mystery of the Incarnation,” which constitutes about a quarter of the book. From the Preface of the translator we infer that this section acquired per accidens a domicile in alien territory. We agree with the translator that it would be a pity to abridge this section of Christology. But as we also agree with him that its relevance to the main thesis is rather remote we may proceed to discuss the great variety of material that falls within our scope.

The climax of the author’s thoughts is reached in Book Three which treats of the Sacrifice of the Mass. The liturgical element though introduced for its bearing on theology calls for no special comment. The main purpose of the entire volume, so far as I can interpret the intention of the writer, is to give an answer to the question: In what consists the metaphysical essence of the Mass? or in other words: How is the scientific concept of sacrifice realised in the double consecration? Has the author shed light on this controversy on which the ingenuity of learned and holy men has been exercised for centuries?

The Synoptic Gospels are a fundamental document of ascetic theology. They present a way of life. Their rich dogmatic content is largely implicit. The key-note is struck from the very beginning of the Sermon on the Mount in words which anticipate the whole: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”. In St. Matthew’s nineteenth chapter is recorded the question of the rich young man, and our Lord’s commendation of those who have left all for his name’s sake. This passage is often claimed as the foundation charter of the religious state. Its great advantage is that it expresses far more clearly than the earlier teaching the distinction between the commandment, obedience to which is necessary for entrance into the kingdom, and the counsel offered to those who would be perfect.

In the account which we have of the infant Church at Jerusalem distinction is not clearly made between the faithful who simply obeyed the commandments and the aspirants after perfection who followed the counsels. We might gather that the converts, as a matter of course and almost without exception, entered upon a way of life not unlike that which our Lord had counselled to the rich young man, and which was to be known as the “religious life” in the centuries to come. Yet St. Peter implied that Ananias was free to give up the price of his estate or not. His sin consisted precisely in lying about it to the Holy Ghost.

In England there is great need for more houses where retreats can be made and quite as urgently for different types of retreat house. There is room for considerable variety, for a network of smaller and larger houses, in towns and out of them, religious and lay. There is a very clear need for a liturgical retreat house, more for women than for men, to whom the existing monasteries are open. There is need for a retreat house sufficiently contemplative and monastic for a genuine spirit of silence to rule; but there is also need for a home for a very free type of retreat where the Christian minority who love the Lord in a neo-pagan age can meet, and such retreats might be the beginning of many genuine friendships and much work for God.

In a retreat we break from our routine life and plunge for a time into another life, so as to turn right way up—if we were previously upside-down—but above all so as to plunge from a more superficial to a deeper and more fully lived Christian life. But if the plunge is not into another and more fully lived life, but into a vacuum with devotional frills, an appendage to a religious life going on behind closed doors, it is apt to lend an air of unreality to the whole, so that the effects fade before the “realities” of everyday life. The grace of God apart, everything then depends on the strength of prayer of the individual and the preacher’s sterling worth.

It needs a long view to assess the uses of adversity. At the time, while the intolerable thing is happening, hope itself seems hopeless. But at the heart of the disaster some new life starts springing: a new life, that is yet the recovery of something old and forgotten. For the Christian, that is only to say that no circumstance is without its providential value. Tout ce qui arrive est adorable.

In France in 1941 there seemed little room for hope. The ignominy of defeat reached deeper far than the level of a military surrender and it is easy enough to understand the mood of tortured immolation—“All that is left to France is to suffer”—which came over many Frenchmen at that time. But it is not given, to the members of Christ to despair, and the failure of human hopes, reveals all the more surely the new life we are called to share: “you will be distressed, but your distress shall be turned into joy” (John xvii: 20).

It was precisely at this time, 1941, that there came into being a movement, later to be known as the Centre de Pastorale Liturgique, which had for its aim nothing less than the recovery of the parish church as the Christian home, the place where the children of God meet and worship and whose influence extends to all they do. It might seem that there was no need to found a society to affirm what is an integral part of the Church’s function as the Mystical Body of Christ. But the Dominican founders of the C.P.L. had precise objectives in view. The German occupation brought grave difficulties for Catholic life in France.

The glad commemoration of the feast which is kept to-day, Very Reverend Fathers, urges us to continue rejoicing in the praises ofthe most holy Body of Christ. For what is more sweet, what more delightful to the hearts of the elect, than to proclaim the depth ofdivine charity and to praise the fires of abounding love? By the hands of his priests, at the table of the New Covenant, he offers unceasingly his flesh for food and his precious blood for drink, to his sons, the heirs of the kingdom which God has promised to those who love him.

These works are thine, O Christ of immense power and overflowing goodness, who in this most sacred and supersubstantial bread hast devised a truly adorable and wonderful traffic, a memorial of former wonders; so that they who by eating of the forbidden tree fell sick and lost the unfading crown of eternal glory, may find a cure by feeding on the spotless and undefiled Lamb, Jesus Christ.

O ceaseless outpouring of divine goodness and most generous compassion, wonderful in our eyes and worthy of all praise, in which is set forth among us in this sacrament the fulfilment of all sacrifice until the end of time; by which the sons of adoption are refreshed with the bread of angels and made drunk with the charity of the sons of God!

O singular lowliness! pleasing unto God and proclaimed by him, which dreads no one’s dwelling nor fears the shelter offered by any man’s belly.

The men of the Hebrides smile tolerantly when the stranger from the south, after a week’s visit, decides that the only possible life to-day is one of retirement, the eremitical life lived alone on a croft among these sea-bound strips of land. The natives are used to this type of enthusiasm; it “takes” many people in this way. But when the stranger has returned to his own place on the mainland, he soon decides that electric light and heat, railways and twice-daily posts, are his happy portion and that the life on the isles is a romantic dream. And so the natives out there, battling with their gales, scraping a hard livelihood from the rocky ground or netting it from the petulant sea, are led to laugh at these effervescent dreams.

And yet the “call of the isles” is real enough, and even though it has resulted only in a few sophisticated settlers bringing their complacent materialism in their industrially-fed cheque books to a well apportioned cottage here and there, why should this call be ridiculed? It may cover a genuine vocation only superficially allied to a romantic taste for islands and sea. At least we must admit the modern need for the eremitical vocation as such and if there are certain places where that vocation manifests itself rather than in others, that is no more than the desert was to the early fathers. Modern industrial city life is as corrupt now as was the decaying urban society of the third century, though it is painted in less lurid colours.

“How can prudent foresight be wastefulness? It doesn’t do to talk absurdities!”

It all becomes clear and easy if we once understand that God knows what he is saying ! With what simplification should we not be enriched if we would be persuaded that not one of his words is useless, not one of his commandments thrown at hazard and without a profound reason, that their end, since he loves us, is none other than our greatest good, our surest happiness. And then, that he is always right.

It is not sufficient, in order to put h'm in the wrong, that we should understand the necessity of what he ordains. It may be we lack some of the elements that would enable us to judge. God sees continually, and in the light of eternity, the totality of creation. As for ourselves, have we taken into consideration that our hand held before our eyes suffices to hide from them the narrow section that they embrace of our limited, terrestrial and changing horizon? How then should it not be that the greater part of God’s motives escape us? . . . Before judging God, let us first follow his teaching a little while to discover where it leads.

Let us see what trouble God takes to prove to us, by daily, unfailing experience, that foresight such as we understand it, is a bad speculation, whatever we may think of it.

The Hebrews would not listen to him, and believed themselves well advised to make a provision of manna for the following day, but it began to be full of worms, and it putrified.

With pleasure we welcome once more the arrival of the Vie Spirituelle in this country. It was not found wanting in the time of trial for it continued to appear throughout the occupation and has maintained its high standard. We wish it prosperity in the future and judging from the vitality of the first two numbers for 1946, it will play an important part in the work of spiritual reconstruction. Everyone knows the chaos of the present world, but few have any definite ideas as to what is to be done to remedy this state of affairs. The Vie Spirituelle tackles the problems in a most concrete and realistic way. The January number has a searching article on the nature and purpose of religious life, for the religious has to provide a concrete pattern of holiness to the world. Another article deals with the aims and methods of thè formation of seminary students. Both make fundamental suggestions and criticisms. There is also in this same number a most moving account of the charity shown by German catholics to Frenchmen conscripted for labour in Germany. As chaplains were not allowed to accompany these workers, priests went in disguise among them. The writer of the article, Fr J. Doyen, O.P., gives numerous instances of the help he was given by Germans, frequently with considerable danger to their own safety. One incident, particularly worthy of mention, records how he was able to say Mass every evening in a parish church without fear of being betrayed, although the whole parish knew about it.