The first year of the Atomic Age has drawn to a close. What were its achievements? What are the lessons we have to learn?

The Bikini tests were undoubtedly the single outstanding atomic event of the past year. These tests underscored the potency of the new weapon, although they fell far short of the catastrophic results freely predicted by some members of the League of Frightened Men. At the same time, they showed that, at least for navies, the problem of atomic defense is not entirely beyond solution, even though direct hits, as is the case with most other bombs, are lethal. Atomic hits are mortal over far wider area than conventional heavy bombs, but they are still weapons which can be used only against one, two, three or perhaps half a dozen ships in comparatively close formation, rather than against entire fleets. Th effectiveness of atomic attack, therefore, depends upon the number of bombs employed—a fact which also holds true for attacks against industrial or urban targets and which has found too little attention in the current discussion.

“What shall be done with Germany upon her defeat?” For many months prior to the surrender of the Wehrmacht this vital question evoked a host of conflicting proposals, official and unofficial, in both Military Government planning staffs and in higher policy-formation circles. Despite many differences, these proposals uniformly demanded immediate disarmament, demilitarization, and—denazification.

Early plans called for the occupation of Germany with the objective of insuring that she never again would threaten her neighbors and the rest of the world. The demilitarization and disarmament of the German armed forces was undertaken rapidly and resolutely by our occupation forces and those of our Allies as a preliminary step in securing this objective. But the more difficult task of denazification—that is, the permanent elimination of the institutions, leadership, and psychology in German life which produced and supported the Nazi regime—is still far from completed.

As weak as France may be among the Great Powers the world is still interested in our reactions, our desires, our resentments, our hopes, sometimes even in our plans in the way one politely questions old ladies who have recently held positions of the first importance. Regarding what Jules Romains used to call before the war the “French-German couple”—a couple which hardly knows more than the sadistic and masochistic forms of love—the simple geographical situation of the two countries justifies, better than any vain politeness, the more or less anxious curiosity of our foreign friends. Among the immediate neighbors of Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia are too closely bound today to Russia to consider their policy independently of the general problem which the immediate or future plans of the new Russia present. Denmark, Holland, and Belgium can timidly demand modest “frontier rectifications”; for none of these involves territories of importance to the economic or political equilibrium of Germany. Besides, it seems, rightly or wrongly, that these little nations have definitely chosen the road of the “Western bloc” while France tries with an unequal success to navigate alone among the broad currents which clash in the world ocean.

The question is: how can you put a prophet in his place when, by the very character of prophecy, he is eternally slipping out of place? William Blake was not an eighteenth century or nineteenth century mind or a typically modern mind at all. What I mean to say, right at the start, is that, although well aware of his time and of time altogether, he was not in tune with the main tendencies of his or our own time. Indeed time was a barrier he was forever crashing against. Blake's talent raved through the world into the fastnesses of die past and dramatically confronted the abysses of the future. His age did not confine him. As a poet he does not seem finally to have had real spiritual or artistic rinship with any of the rationalist or romantic writers of England. As a thinker he came to despise the inadequacy of the limited revolutionary effort of the political rebels of the Romantic Revolution. Blake's name is not to be seen mounted first with that of Paine or Godwin, of Rousseau or Voltaire, of Wordsworth or Shelley or Byron or Keats. With these he has, ultimately, little or nothing in common. At any rate, his voice and mood and impact are thoroughly different from the more publicly successful voices of the period of his life, older and younger generations alike.

The history of the Catholic Church includes men who, after brilliant services to the Church, died outside her fold. Best known among them is Tertullian, the apologetic writer of the Early Church; less known is Ochino, the third vicar-general of the Capuchins, whose flight to Calvin's Geneva almost destroyed his order. In the nineteenth century there were two famous representatives of this group. Johann von Doellinger refused, when more than seventy years old, to accept the decision of the Vatican Council about papal infallibility. He passed away in 1890 unreconciled, though he had been distinguished for years as the outstanding German Catholic theologian. Félicité de la Mennais was celebrated as the new Pascal and Bossuet of his time before he became the modern Tertullian by breaking with the Church because Pope Gregory XVI rejected his views on the relations between the Church and die world. As he lay deathly ill, his niece, “Madame de Kertanguy asked him: ‘Féli, do you want a priest? Surely, you want a priest?’ Lamennais answered: ‘No.’ The niece repeated: ‘I beg of you.’ But he said with a stronger voice: ‘No, no, no.

Newman's is perhaps the most illustrious religious mind in the modern Anglo-Saxon world. Exactly half of his long life (1801–1890) was devoted to the Anglican Church, the other half to the Catholic. However clear and unequivocal his conversion, his intellectual position is nevertheless the same in both periods. The sources of his inner life stem from the revelation of the Eternal, which came to him when he was fifteen years old and never left him his whole life long. His philosophical thinking is influenced by English empiricism that involves an attitude of restraint concerning intellectual speculation. It is in conformity with the English love of the concrete, of the individual-personal element and, with due respect to the spirit of tradition, of Christian freedom. And even though Newman's theology is rooted in ancient Christian tradition, his missionary conscience is directed towards the future, towards the spiritual conflicts of the twentieth century. Their unfolding he sensed with astonishing prevision. Just as his sermons and writings are divided almost equally between the two periods of his life (with the exception of perhaps one decade at the height of his career, in which he saw himself doomed almost to inactivity because of tragic misunderstandings), so his life's work has become the common possession of all Christendom, first, in his native land and, then, increasingly in other countries. For what Newman has to say actually concerns the whole Christian world.