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As against Europe's dark backward and abysm of wars and revolutions, America was still a New World with its own democratic New Order still evolving. In an historic sense nothing very profound had as yet happened to America as a result of the war. But something had happened to Britain—something which jolted England's No. 2 churchman (with his colleague and superior, Dr. Temple) into viewing the war as not merely a struggle for survival between two political power groups, United Nations and Axis, but also as a symptom of a social disease so virulent, long-standing and neglected that only war's desperate surgery could begin to treat it. The Archbishop's three weeks' in the U.S. would give secular eyes a chance to observe at close range the No. 2 representative of England's ecclesiastical change of heart.
When the distinguished visitor gave his first press conference last week in Manhattan, Americans saw an extraordinarily mild-eyed, 69-year-old prelate whose six-foot height was dissembled in an habitual stoop of age. His was not the constrained mildness of a prince of the church whose natural fierceness of temper has been beaten and battered into benignity. It was a natural gentleness refined by devotion, austerity and great human sympathy. And there was a sense of easy power about him, fitting as comfortably as his open prelatical coat and apron, his greavelike buttoned black gaiters. The Archbishop of York has presence.
Says one character to another in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon: "Such peculiar birds as you are found only in the trees of revolution." The Archbishop of York is possibly the most peculiar social revolutionist the world has ever known. It is doubtful whether he thinks of himself as a social revolutionist at all (though, like Cardinal Manning, he might have called himself a "Mosaic Radical").
Meoe, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin. Men find it hard to read the true meaning of most things, but the hardest of all to read is the handwriting on the wall—which becomes legible to everybody only when the walls begin to totter and collapse. In mid-January, 1941, under the impact of Nazi bombs, the walls were falling on all sides of the 221 Anglican prelates, priests and laymen who under the sponsorship of Dr. Temple, then Archbishop of York, huddled in greatcoats in the unheated rooms of Malvern College. It was not only British walls that were crashing. Under the onset of the Nazi conquests the walls of the whole known world were tottering. They had been thick with scribbled warnings. The Nazis were the terrible evidence that though men cannot live by bread alone, permanent hunger (for bread, for work, for hope) starves the human spirit into permanent inhumanity.
Able to read Mene, Mene at last, the Malvern delegates unanimously voted a program for "ordering the new society" which they saw "quite evidently emerging" from the war. Its most sensational planks were:
Union Then. "After the war our aim must be the unification of Europe as a cooperative commonwealth"—a project which seemed more feasible when there was no possible way to do it than it does now. (In the U.S. the idea of a Federated Europe was just beginning to dawn.)