THE TABLET, Decemberk22nd¿1961

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

VOL. 198, No. 5822

FOUNDED IN 1840

LONDON, DECEMBER 22nd, 1951

*

NINEPENCE

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

THE KNEELING FIGURES The Incarnation and the Divine Authority

UNPUBLISHED RECOLLECTIONS OF DR. JOHNSON

By Frances Reynolds, Sister to Sir Joshua Reynolds

AN ORDINATION IN MAINZ [A Papal Dispensation for a Married ex-Lutheran

THE INFANCY OF CHRIST Ancient Traditions in the Apocryphal Gospels. By J. C. Marsh-Edwards

CHRISTMAS IN PROVENCE Customs of the Season. By Betty Gordon Joseph

CHRISTMAS VERSES

A LATIN CROSSWORD

REASSURANCE TO FRANCE T HE communique issued on Mr. Churchill’s departure from Paris followed the common formula of all such announcements, telling the world, a little superfluously, that the obvious matters had indeed been discussed, and rather exiguously speaking of the agreement that had, of course, been reached. These communiqués very often prove to mean very little, because both parties have the same interests in minimizing divergencies. Mr. Churchill was certainly much more restrained than he had been on his other visits to the European mainland, before he reassumed the Premiership. But he saw all the right people, and if he might have done more in direct relations with the French public, and did not choose to do so, that is perhaps because he is a much preoccupied man, with a vivid sense of the military dangers, and a statesman’s sad knowledge of how easy it is, under the conditions of modern political life, for statesmen to lose control of events and to blunder into wars.

Britain’s special position than there is in Britain of the feeling and the needs of the Western Europeans. Suspicion of the Unfamiliar

What the British do not understand is the vast importance psychologically of some demonstrable and warm British participation. It is an ironical situation. The British, in the organization of their own Commonwealth, excel in getting at one and the same time many of the real advantages of union with all the advantages of practical effective independence. But they become narrowly legalistic, and show quite a different spirit, the spirit of the pettifogging attorney, when their European neighbours beg them to bring some of their expertness in combining in practice things which logically and mathematically look contradictory and irreconcilable.

There are a good many indications that his master-thought is still to try, after Washington, to hold a personal meeting with Stalin, as the one man in Russia with the power, and perhaps the good sense, to make some reorientation of Soviet policy. It is easy to understand that to Mr. Churchill, who has been so unfairly assailed and whispered about by his political opponents at home, the notion of such a meeting, even if it proved quite abortive, has a good deal to be said for it. This perhaps explains a certain change of key that everyone has noted, that he is no longer calling upon Europe for “one spasm of resolve” to unite, perhaps considering that General Eisenhower can do that work while he himself can more usefully place himself rather to one side, casting a different role for Britain and himself in the international tension. The chief assurance made publicly is that Britain will continue to keep troops in Europe ; but it is a sign how things have been allowed to deteriorate that so obvious an assurance should have been necessary.

Mr. Churchill and Mr. Eden in Paris were welcomed as friends, of long standing, but often incomprehensible and undependable. Here was the Mr. Churchill who had proposed eleven years ago to merge the citizenship o f Britain and France in a common citizenship ; who has been calling on Europeans during these last years for “one spasm of resolve” to transcend the psychological and legal limitations of the enclosing doctrine of national sovereignty in which they have all grown up but which does not match the emergencies of the twentieth century. There is on the continent, amid all the sense of urgency, a much clearer realization of

The truth is that the Government Departments in Whitehall have only too many men in their top positions who could write minutes tearing the Commonwealth to pieces, if it did not exist and they had not grown up with it. They would demonstrate that the relationships existing in the Commonwealth did not make sense, and could not be entertained, and the same politicians who, as things are, have grown up with the habit of making Commonwealth perorations, would believe these permanent officials and accept their briefs.

I t is partly that the British love what is familiar and are for a long time disconcerted and uncomfortable when they are asked to entertain large new ideas. They understand perfectly a world of sovereign nation-States. They understand imperialism. In the last generation they accustomed themselves to the idea of permanent international bodies in which Governments meet. Still beyond the horizon are other conceptions which also have a great place in the world of tomorrow, of which perhaps the chief is that national communities are enduring realities apart from States, and that there is much more in them than can be expressed by their Governments, which are at best but partially representative. Nation and State in France

No man, however professionally a politician, can go to France without immediately realizing that the French nation is something very different from the French State ; that the two words are not interchangeable. It is precisely because the French know this that they have fought so fiercely in the past to seize and control the State, and to use it against the other Frenchmen with whom they disagree ; for the French Revolution separated the French into two camps, divided on the great question whether France should be a Catholic or an