When I was considering what subject to treat in the Aquinas Lecture, which you had so kindly invited me to deliver, in the state of near-despair one reaches on such occasions I went to an Oxford bookshop where a selection of volumes may be bought for sixpence each and bought one at random in the hope that I might derive some guidance from it. The True History of Joshua Davidson (1872) was an at-one-time popular work of fiction by a socialist republican, Eliza Lynn Linton, though it was published anonymously. It is a story of Jesus returning to earth in mid-nineteenth-century England and of how he acted in the situation then confronting him. At the end of the book the authoress says that ‘if sociology is a scientific truth, then Jesus of Nazareth preached and practised not only in vain, but against unchangeable Law’. This gave me an idea for my address for, though she was speaking of the doctrines of Political Economy current at that time and as she understood them, it appeared to me that it might be of interest to you were I to discuss the attitude of sociologists, and social anthropologists in particular, towards religious faith and practice. It has been for the most part bleakly hostile.

It is scarcely possible to discuss social science in this country without some reference to its French background. We may regard it, if only for convenience, as beginning with Montesquieu in his great book L'Esprit des Lois (1748). In it he set out to discover the laws of social life, the necessary conditions of its existence in its various forms, but he did not, in my opinion, think of these laws in a deterministic or mechanical sense.

Le Phénomène Humain has been a best-seller in France since its posthumous publication in 1955. The initial impact of the recent translation, published as The Phenomenon of Man, has been considerable. Never before, one imagines, in English publishing history, has a book by a Roman Catholic priest received such remarkable tributes in all types of journals and newspapers. ‘Book of the year’ for a number of well-known critics, ‘possibly the book of the century’ for one Sunday Times contributor.

During the period when Teilhard’s works were available only in French, one had heard doubt expressed as to whether he would ever appeal to more than a few in this country. After the events of recent months there is now every indication that the teilhardian movement will become as international in character as was Teilhard himself. It looks as if the influence of this remarkable man will come to be felt more and more in many different branches of human endeavour during the next few decades. For myself, I would go so far as to say that Teilhard’s vision—he writes like a visionary but a visionary whose feet are always planted very firmly on or in terra firma— marks the most significant achievement in synthetic thinking since that of Aquinas. We cannot afford to neglect him, because, quite simply, he seems in so many matters, and those the most important, to be so essentially right. His genius has sown many seeds which, in so far as they fall on receptive and fertile ground, would seem destined to grow and flower according to the pattern of those same laws of development which lie at the heart of his system of thought.