Hitler’s revolt was not mild. It challenged the entire concept of international lending, and established as the basis of trade the mutual exchange of goods, without recourse to the usurers. There had been pioneers before Hitler. Kemal Ataturk had carried through the reconstruction of Turkey without borrowing a penny from abroad. Mussolini had safeguarded Italian currency against foreign speculators and striven as far as possible to build up for his people a self-contained economy. He was to have successors in Spain and Portugal. After the emergence of Hitler, however, it became clear that the international financial system was in mortal danger and that only by another war could it ever regain control over its vast empire—the empire built and maintained by debt. As it happened, Hitler was only too happy to oblige, and war came. War would have come in any case. As Josef Stalin has put on record: ‘It would be incorrect to think that the war arose accidentally or as the result of the fault of some of the statesmen. Although those faults did exist, the war arose in reality as the inevitable result of the development of the world economic and political forces on the basis of monopoly capitalism.’

The realisation of the significance of Harappa and the excavation of Mohenjo Daro are events of outstanding importance in the progress of archaeology during the last fifty years. Harappa, a very old town- site in the Montgomery District of the Punjab, has been known for some time and a few small softstone seals and other objects have been found. Only gradually did it become clear that these remains had no relation to any other civilization of India. Harappa had suffered for many years from the inroads of brick-robbers and offered, by itself, little prospect of further significant information. The enthusiasm of Sir John Marshall led to the search for other sites of a similar nature. In 1922 such a site was discovered in the lower valley of the River Indus in the Province of Sind, south of the Baluchistan frontier. Since then other sites have been found and it has been possible to estimate, to some extent, the territorial expansion of an entirely unknown civilization which had attained an exceedingly high degree of development.

Most of the work has centred round Mohanjo Daro, the site discovered in 1922, and, with the exception of Harappa, a great deal remains to be done before the full significance of the other sites can be made known. Such conclusions as have been reached are based mainly upon the excavations in Mohanjo Daro and to a lesser, though important degree, upon the findings in Harappa. That we have at present only a very unsatisfactory picture, is obvious from the opinion of Marshall that the Monhanjo Daro culture extended from beyond Harappa to the mouth of the Indus ‘in a south-easterly direction at least as far as the Gulf of Cambay. ‘

The following essay by Dr Coomaraswamy is offered to Black- friars readers for the very high degree of interest which attaches to the approach from an unfamiliar standpoint to the familiar problem of the relation of science to religion.

The metaphysical focus of the essay may perhaps be best obtained from the brilliant paragraph on the Cogito of Descartes. Here the startling character of the thought is due to the contrast of the respective ways in which the imagination of East and West lends support to the concept of being. If the West, especially in that caricature of itself which is called modem philosophy, has tended to imagine reality in terms of visible solids, thus colouring the concept of being with an externality and a rigidity of outline not wholly its own, the imagination of the East has generally been more suggestive of a conception of being as an act, personal or impersonal as the point of view changes.

For St Thomas also, being is an ‘act’ to which, ultimately, even substance among the categories is potential, and, to that extent, relative. From no other position available to the West can fruitful contact be made with the tradition Dr Coomaraswamy represents.

From a deepened understanding of the principles of St Thomas’s metaphysics, it may be possible, now that Eastern writers are more readily available to explain their own thought to us, to carry the understanding of Eastern tradition further than the position outlined in the De Unitate Intellectus contra Averrhoistas. In any case it is certain that the unity, or rather the non-duality, of consciousness of which Dr Coomaraswamy speaks, has nothing to do with the evolutionary and sentimental conceptions of theological modernism.

It is dangerous to disagree with so learned a man as Dr. Chaytor, but I cannot pretend that his recent interesting and scholarly work on medieval literature does not put one in a quarrelsome mood. A number of the views contained in it are highly disputable, and I feel that much of the rest of it is misleading, even if it cannot be definitely contradicted. The issues it raises, however, are tricky and delicate; nor are Dr. Chaytor’s own positions always perfectly clear. Still, there is so much in his book that seems quite definitely misleading that a reviewer can hardly avoid hostilities, even while he acknowledges that. Dr. Chaytor’s learning has once again made English students of- the Middle Ages his debtors.

Dr. Chaytor’s purpose is to examine and characterise medieval literature from the point of view, in particular, of the way in which it reached its public; and it reached it either orally or through script, but not through print. It is in this sense that he speaks of the “importance of the difference between the literary and critical methods of the early middle ages and those of modern times”, between the age of script and the age of print. We are to be shown how to understand medieval writings in the light of the fact that they were not printed.

The romantic gloss that adheres to the crofter, his homestead and way of life, has given ample target for the shafts of the critics. They point out, with some justice, the poverty and hardship frequently entailed and the ambition of many crofters to send their sons to the cities. With less justice, probably none, they claim greater efficiency for larger units of cultivation. These critics are essentially children of the Industrial Age, as ever overlooking the more acute destitution that no reform has as yet eradicated from the way of life begotten of their own concepts. They have ever a notion that urban hardship can be eliminated with just a few more rules, regulations and by-laws. Unconsciously, they pay the crofter tribute in recognising that his life is not so easily directed.

We can hardly assess the value of the crofter to a civilised community without considering certain fundamentals. The root of the problem lies at the very quick of the question: is man an individual servant of God, or a servant of society? I do not think this is an over-simplification of the issue. Throughout the world today that same issue is being disputed. Everywhere, peasant societies are the backbone of resistance to authoritarianism and the subjection of man to society as vested in the State.

Among the more valuable by-products of the recent war was the work which was done in the residential treatment of difficult children. Unostentatiously and quietly carried on, knowledge of this work, as a whole, might never have reached the general public if the Ministry of Health had not published, a year or so ago, a most interesting and informative pamphlet about it. It is with one small piece of this work—Barns Hostel School—that this paper is concerned.

A passing reference to Barns, in a recent Brackfriars, suggested that the school was started by the Q Camps Committee, which had been responsible for Hawkspur Camp. This is an excusable error, but may perhaps take this opportunity to make it clear that the Q Camps Committee is entirely unconnected with Barns House, and has no connection with the Society of Friends; the Q does not stand for Quaker.

The work at Barns Hostel School, however, was initiated by the Society of Friends, and attempted to express Friends’ principles. As Friends have never committed themselves to a credal statement it is not easy to say, shortly and clearly, what those principles are; but at any rate they are likely to be in the nature of corollaries to the one belief that has been described as the foundation stone upon which Quakerism is built. This is the belief in the “Inner Light”—in “That of God in every man”. The authoritative Quaker history claims that all the distinguishing views of Friends flow from this main proposition. It is not possible in this short paper to trace the connection between the various aspects of the work at Barns House on the one hand, and this fundamental proposition and its corollaries on the other.

I am only too conscious of the impertinence of this heading: What value could such memories have? And how far are they trustworthy? Yet they are my memories, and though some sixty years have elapsed, they remain as fresh in my mind as though they had happened but yesterday.

When I was just over four years old my mother took me to a dairy kept by a Mr. Godwin, who had been Newman’s butler in Ireland. He put me on his knee and said: “Do you know Jack Smallman?” I did, for Smallman—whom I had always thought of as Mister Smallman—was a carpenter who fascinated me by working with saw and chisels, which I longed to handle. “Well,” said Godwin, “I was JJr. .Newman s butler and the lad Smallman was the ‘buttons!.” I saw my mother smiling at this; she was probably wondering what I was making of the term ‘buttons’.

“Young Smallman,” continued the old man, “was sometimes impertinent. So one day I put him over my knee and smacked him well” I gasped at the bare idea of smacking the man of chisels and saws. Gut the old man continued: “What do you think that lad said when I had done my duty by him? He said to me: ‘You must feel very exhausted after that, Mr. Godwin. Let me draw you a glass of beer’.” *

A few years later, it must have been in 1878 or 1879, a man leaning on the gate, which in those days separated the school premises from the part of the cloister by which people came to church, astonished me by saying: “Say, I reckon if I hang on this gate long enough I might see ‘Nooman’ pass this way?” I was very doubtful, for I had never seen the future Cardinal there.

There are before me three books: The Scripture Textbooks for Catholic Schools, edited by Mgr John M. T. Barton, and published by Burns Oates and Washbourne. They are uniform and each costs 4/6. The binding is very good for the price.

The foreword by Cardinal Griffin states the fundamental point: ‘So many people are taught all about the Scriptures, but few are taught to read them’. That set me thinking. It is certain that an inconsiderable number do read the New Testament. Our aim is to persuade them. There is no need for persuasion with the children; they take what is given them by their masters. So the first question arises: do three more books on the New Testament make it more or less likely that the people who read them will read the New Testament itself? Many times I have set about reading, particularly the Old Testament, and found myself very soon reading a commentary instead. Will these books have the same effect on the children?

To begin with the Lives of our Lord. One is for small children, but is so written that it could be read with pleasure by a person of any age; the other is for school children in their teens. The method employed in both is to make a straightforward account of the life of our Lord drawn from all four Gospels, with occasional digressions and enlargements on local history, geography, liturgy, and so on. They both read easily and have a telling style, but not so telling as that of the New Testament writers, for these have a brevity and economy of words truly breath-taking, while the use of direct speech in the New Testament is so much more suitable to children than the indirect which both these authors favour. Nothing pleases children more than the dramatic style.

Dr. Sperry points out, we are each inclined to lift our eyebrows at the other’s problems and close our eyes to our own. The two great denominational differences between the States and Britain are that they now have no established Churches, while their Catholic numbers are about ten times ours. Twenty-three millions makes the Catholic Church in America now the largest of all the religious bodies: though that is surpassed by the twenty-five millions the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ can muster. Catholic growth is largely due to the influx of immigrants from European Catholic countries, and their greater birth rate, but also to the considerable number of converts. What has probably contributed to this growth is the fact that there has been little real persecution on either side; Church and State are separated, and so here is a free field and no favour, in which conditions the Catholic Church is not only winning easily, but it likely soon to dominate the situation. At this Americans are getting afraid, and Dean Sperry, while refusing to give way to any of the lower prejudices, does confess that he appreciates the fears others feel. It is feared that Catholicism, if and when it wins, will want Church and State to be united, and will no longer prove tolerant; though he gratefully admits that the first State to make religious toleration part of its constitution was Maryland, a Catholic foundation. He would obviously see with regret the disappearance of the strong individualist element in religion which Protestantism has fostered, and America, in particular, has emphasised as part of its independent and democratic spirit. He suspects that Catholicism is tempted to favour Totalitarianism. If the Dean fails a little, for all his determination to understand, where Catholicism is concerned, it remains to be wondered if any Catholic could have written such a sympathetic, friendly and understanding book.