I have just returned from the burial of Herbert Read at Kirkdale Minster, in the same remote churchyard where he himself saw his father buried, by the church of grey stone with slated roof and against the dark wood of firs.

As I try to collect my thoughts about him, I wonder if others will find it easier than myself to say what he stood for most. He had many friends and many audiences, but they were often, I think, isolated from each other. Teachers and children inspirited by his books or presence to find new confidence in their own painting might be dismayed by the bloodless forms of geometrical art which he praised elsewhere; painters and sculptors of the vanguard, who owed him much and who often seemed his predilection, were baffled perhaps by his acceptance of this or that Old Master, by his enjoyment of eighteenth-century porcelain or glass, by his admiration of recent things that were not of the vanguard at all—the early ‘non-abstract’ work of Ben Nicholson, the engravings and paintings of David Jones, the pictures and letters of Stanley Spencer, certain drawings of children by Eric Gill. His continued encouragement of new and experimental writers went side by side with an unquenchable devotion to Shelley and Emily Bronte, to Flaubert and Henry James; and the acute and sensitive interpreter of these classics was perhaps not known also as the masterly and precise and imaginative writer of The Green Child and the autobiographies.

Although the oikumene is the whole inhabited world, the term Ecumenism has been appropriated to relations between Christians. Therefore Fr Eugene Hillman, treating of non-Christian relations with the Church, had to qualify it as The Wider Ecumenism in the title of his new book, which develops previous writings of his.

The relaxation of obstacles, largely legal, to relations of Catholics with other Christians has resulted in a short time in widespread changes of attitudes. These, in their turn, are exerting pressures on theology to review old positions, for ecumenical charity finds certain apparently established views incompatible with its experiences. Of such a nature seem to be the calls to revise the theology of the validity of orders, and of intercommunion.

In the case of the wider ecumenism with non-Christians, the obstacles have been more theological, and, indeed, due largely to a lack of any theology of other religions. The elements of such a theology are to be found in tradition, and in recent years it has been developing in academic circles, especially in Germany. But so far these developments have had little impact on those who live and work in non-Christian places, where the old views and the consequent attitudes persist, with increasing tension being felt by Catholics and all Christians between them and the signs of the times.

One of the most welcome features of the contemporary Christian scene is the drive towards ecumenism. This is not only because of the potential achievement of a single united Church which alone makes sense but because the gradual removal of these virulent, self-inflicted wounds of denominational partisanship is likely to free Christians to face alternative urgent challenges. The picture is sombre and no one who really cares about the Christian faith can have any doubts that the majority of our fellow human beings find organized religion as we have known and practised it an irrelevancy. We have now reached the stage when we can no longer take refuge behind stoutly held rationalizations that this massive withdrawal of interest is the responsibility of every one except ourselves. Such anodynes are no longer effective because no one outside the Christian circles believed in them before and now we, too, have rejected them. Stripped of our customary but gradually ineffective defences, we find ourselves in a whirlpool of multitudinous and often contradictory ideologies, explanations and solutions for our difficulties. Like a person who is recovering from concussion, the Christian Church is experiencing the world round it with hazy, dimmed and often blurred reactions desperately longing, at times, to return to the tranquillity of unconsciousness.

In 1942 Fritz Redl put forward a paper in which he considered group formation around a central person. He formulated ten categories and one of these seems of especial interest when we consider the formation around Christ at the time of the Last Supper.

One might have thought that the apostolic group would have fallen into Redl’s fourth category, that of a group which has ‘The central person as a love object’. Tentatively it is here suggested that this was not the case and that the apostolic group might more fittingly be considered as falling into Redl’s fifth category, that of a group that has ‘The central person as the object of aggressive drives’.

It must be stated at the outset that the suggestions put forward by Redl concerned a group in which there was recognition of the aggression that was prevalent. For the purpose of this article it is assumed that the apostolic group not only gave no overt sign of their aggression but it is likely that it was so repressed that they did not even know it was there.

The statement by Enoch Powell last May had all the inevitability, if none of the elegance, of the climax to a Greek tragedy. It was inevitable that a man who had already made frequent use of the rather tawdry rhetoric of largely fictitious statistics about the ‘flood’ of immigrants and who fancies himself as a poet should begin to talk about rivers of blood. Just as bad a parody of Greek tragedy was represented by the chorus from the respectable press. From pompous phrases about ‘dangerous nonsense’ in the Economist to the somewhat more tart strictures of The Times leader, the respectable press offered no insight into the significance of Mr Powell’s speech, but merely demonstrated its own moral rectitude and an incredible belief in the power of pure liberal reason. Many commentators appeared to believe that the fact that some of the dockers had mis-spelled their slogans proved their impotence. But many of the saints and many of the S.S. were near-illiterate. If intellectuals wish to contribute to the fight against racialism they must do so not by proving that racist myths are myths (that is old hat) but by analysing the nature of English racialism to see more clearly how it can be fought. In particular we must decide whether racialism in England is an aberration of individuals and groups or whether it is something essential to our society, whether England is or is not ‘racialist’.