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.

The second world war has brought about considerable changes in the British Commonwealth of Nations. These changes are, to a great extent, the further evolution of a process which began early in those colonies now called Dominions. The dependent status given to the colonists did not satisfy them for long. Agitation for self-government began early in the nineteenth century and, as a result of immigration from European countries and the example of the United States, became so widespread that it was granted during the second half of the century. Once the colonies obtained a degree of self-government, a reaction set in, motivated by economic considerations, which prevented the urge for independence from ending in separation from England. The colonists were content with jurisdiction over local affairs, to which later had to be added some rights in the regulation of their foreign commerce. The major aspects of foreign policy and defense remained within England's bailiwick. But as the colonies grew into “adulthood” they claimed a share in this last monopoly of the mother country also.

Among the ancients Aristotle is the only thinker who furnishes us with a fully developed philosophical conception of man's relationship to the world about him, and then uses this conception as a basis for the determination of man's life in relationship with nature. Part of this philosophy finds its source in certain conceptions reigning among the ancient Greeks, ideas which he as a product of ancient life and civilization most naturally accepted; but another part of it, and a significant part too, is the result of Aristotle's own insight into human life and its meaning. In such studies we must remember that Aristotle was very critical of much in the Greek city-state; and, as a Macedonian he was more sympathetic with an agrarian economy than with the Ionian city economy. We can never understand Aristotle if we take him to be an Athenian, and assume that his sympathies were with Athenian mercantile democracy. He is not bound down to any one ancient economy and has a critical attitude towards all of them. What he has in mind are certain norms or ideals for human life and its relationship to nature, and on these he bases his whole system of social and economic thought and thus throws light upon the systems of social and economic life historically developed.

Friedrich Meinecke in his recent book on The German Catastrophe quotes a Danish friend and historian as saying to him during the Hitler regime: “You know, that I cannot love Bismarck, but in the present situation I must say: Bismarck belonged to our world.” It would be easy to contrast this nicely balanced statement with innumerable others which, in the last years, indulged in indictments of the founder of the German Reich as a “Nazi forefather” or threw him into the line of descent which is supposed to lead from Frederick IPs attack on Silesia in 1740 to Hitler's attack on Poland in 1939. Thus the myth of the “Iron Chancellor,” of the man “in high dragoon's boots” revived and, amazingly enough, the Nazi trick of appropriating “Prussianism” as epitomized in the pageantry of the so-called “day of Potsdam,” was given full credit by many of their very adversaries. But there were also the voices of those who, in a more careful and responsible way, tried to find out what links may possibly connect the beginnings with the end of the Prusso-German Reich or may point ahead from 1866 and 1871 or from 1879 to the potentialities of the Hitler regime. Meinecke's treatise is one of the finest examples of such conscientious scrutiny carried out by Germans themselves. From whatever angle this question is raised the towering and baffling figure of Bismarck undoubtedly has won a new actuality. And it can easily be understood that in the recent crisis of statesmanship and particularly in view of the disaster which Germany brought upon herself and the world, attention turned back to the man who stands for decisive changes in the external setup as well as in the intellectual and moral, the political and social climate of nineteenth century Europe.

In Men and Saints, a second volume of selections, translated with fidelity and intelligence by Anne and Julian Green, the choice of texts offers the American reader the best opportunity to become acquainted with a mind whose true significance is just beginning to be recognized. It was an excellent idea to have first emphasized the humanism on which Péguy's significance is based, a unique humanism which is not fashioned in the quiet of a scholar's retreat, but rather in the anguish of impending destruction: “It is a dreadful anguish,” writes Péguy, “to foresee and to see collective death, whether it be that a whole people goes under in the blood of a massacre, whether it be that a whole people reels and succumbs in the retrenchments of battle.” Before anything else this humanism is a “resistance,” a supreme call-to-arms.