St Thomas is one of those people who, like Queen Victoria, have become a myth : I use the word in a Jungian sense and by no means in depreciation. She became one during her lifetime, and on that count made an earlier start; still he was already five centuries ahead, and his image has been more variously encrusted with the tastes of different periods and regions, so much so as almost to have grown into several myths.

To discover what the real person was like, the prosopon of Patristic theology, you cannot do better than go by the biographical documents edited by Father Kenelm Foster, which record the witness of those who were as near to him as we are to the characters of the 1914 war. Yet it is with the prosopon in its earlier histrionic and later juridical sense, the personage standing for a cause, the legal person and sometimes, it must be confessed, the legal fiction, that the historian of philosophy and theology is occupied, for such is the public figure that engages the gears and sets into motion the vehicles that carry the ideas of groups.

Sometimes the Holy Spirit surprises the Church. Some small decision or simple gesture turns out to be much more significant than many official pronouncements from high authority. We are pulled forward into a quite new situation by a seemingly inadequate cause. In retrospect we wonder at the modest beginnings of this new venture. But then why should the Spirit not move with a gentleness characteristic of God's grace?

This, I would suggest, is what happened when Pope John decided to invite official delegate observers from other churches to attend the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican. (It was not unnoticed that the invitations were extended to churches and not just to individuals, itself an act of considerable ecumenical importance.) One wonders what Pope John himself thought this gesture would lead to. It is no secret that his decision was criticized and opposed. All that we can suppose is that he persisted in it, despite the criticism and anxiety it aroused, simply from the warmth and fulness of his heart. It was a simple yet profound gesture which, perhaps for that reason, commended itself more to the Spirit than to men. And if there was opposition in Rome, there was a strong reluctance in some Christian communions to take it at its face value, an institutional suspicion that it might be some kind of snare. But the gesture was made, and observers are now a firm part of that vast and complicated reality which is Vatican II.

The purpose of this article is to study the outlook on Catholicism of Sir John Acton, later Lord Acton the famous historian, when he was living in Shropshire as a young bachelor. During his boyhood the provision of a chaplain had been arranged with the Bishop by his mother. Lady Granville.

A certain light is thrown on Acton's religious approach by an account of his dealings with the chaplains who served Aldenham between his coming of age and the final closing of the chapel. During the eighteenth century such chaplaincies, which were then at the hub of Catholic rural life, had been for the most part served either by the religious orders or by some relative or dependent of the squire's family. With the development of the big industrial populations, it became harder to obtain a suitable priest for work of an increasingly restricted scope. There were certain exceptional cases, like Wardour Castle, where the Jesuits had agreed to make a permanent provision. Aldenham, however, normally depended on the priests available in that section of the old Midland District.

At this time the Aldenham appointment had a quite special significance. Lord and Lady Granville had now retired to London and the priest chosen would be the daily companion of the young baronet, who lived at Aldenham when in the country. It would, therefore, appear that the Bishop of Shrewsbury had allowed Acton to make his own suggestion.

Is mysticism compatible with Christianity? With so rich a mystical tradition as that possessed by the Catholic Church, this might seem a superfluous question to ask. But the term ‘mysticism’ which for Catholics has normally meant a direct apprehension of God, initiated by God and leading to the closest union of the soul with God, has nowadays been called upon to cover a variety of states of soul which many Catholics would not consider to be mystical at all since there is no direct confrontation of person with Person, no union between the two poles and no love.

Be this as it may, I propose for the purposes of this article to include two well-known types of preternatural experience as ‘mystical’ because, in non-Catholic circles, they are usually considered to be so, and because the characteristic of each is that the ‘mystic feels himself to be transplanted beyond time and space into an eternal ‘now’ in which death can have no relevance and man's natural condition is seen to be one of certain immortality. This type of experience can be ‘extroverted', that is, the soul feels itself to be merged in the undying life of all things; or it can be ‘introverted', in which case the soul plunges into its own deepest essence from which all that is phenomenal, transient, and conditioned, falls away and it sees itself as unfractionably one and beyond all the dualities of worldly life.

The following letter, hitherto unpublished, was written by Father C. C. Martindale, S.J., to Edward Bullough, Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and subsequently Professor of Italian in the University, on the eve of his reception into the Catholic Church in February 1923. Father Martindale was a contributor to the first number of BLACKFRIARS in 1920 and remained a faithful friend of the review until his death last year. He was closely associated with Professor Bullough in the establishment of Pax Romana, the international organization of Catholic university students. And in many other fields – liturgical, missionary, literary – he was a pioneer of prophetic understanding. A classical scholar of immense distinction, he brought all the resources of a fine intelligence to bear on an apostolate which, as the letter indicates, reached an astonshing range of people. No one seemed outside the orbit of his awareness and of his love.

In Edward Bullough he found a kindred spirit. Born of a Lancashire father and a German mother, educated in Dresden and Cambridge, he taught French, German, Russian and Italian at the University. His course of lectures on aesthetics was the first of its kind at Cambridge, and the scope of his interests was reflected by his election as an Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects and by his membership of the Royal Commission on the Universities. His wife was the daughter of Eleanora Duse; his son became a Dominican priest, his daughter a Dominican nun.

Africa has been concentrated on far too long in isolation; both by exploiters and by sentimentalists. It is only recently that African history has begun to be seen as a part of world history and that attempts are being made to correlate archaeological findings in Africa, Asia and Europe. A new series which is being published from the Oxford University Press at last makes it possible to study African literary forms as an essential part of world literature.

The first four volumes of the series have now appeared. The most important of these is Somali Poetry, by W. B. Andrzejewski and I. M. Lewis, both specialists of recognized distinction. The first sixty pages deal lucidly and surely definitively with the social and cultural setting of Somali poetry, the Somali language and the characteristics of Somali verse. Biographical notes on the poets are provided. The next ninety pages consist of Somali poems with the original on one side and the English translation opposite.

Somali verse has been transmitted orally; it is a great tradition and still a living one. The editors write of one class of lyric: ‘While the origins of other types of poem go far back into the past the heelo is an innovation which was first introduced in 1945. Its creator Abdi Deeqsi, nicknamed “Cinema”, was the owner and driver of a trading lorry and composed the first heelo when his lorry broke down near Zeila. In a desolate place he sang his love song, beating the rhythm on an empty petrol tin.