The multitude of new things and new
people that I've seen the last two months, added to the uprooting from my own
world, has left me rather dazed. I haven't yet managed to master or digest the
mass of strange impressions and outlooks that I have briefly and superficially come up against—at an age, too, when my mind
is already losing its elasticity. My strongest impression at the
moment is a confused one that the human world (to look no further
than that) is a huge and disparate thing, just about as
coherent, at the moment, as the surface of a rough sea. I still
believe, for reasons imbued with mysticism and metaphysics, that
this incoherence is the prelude to a unification. I have also
noted, I think (in visiting some of the large Catholic centres of social
work in Hongkong and Shanghai) that Catholicism has an extraordinary power
of penetrating and re-shaping souls (I have met
children, old people and nuns, Chinese men and women, who really
seemed to look at me with that man-to-man communication which
I might have expected to find from Europeans). The fact
remains, however,
that the multiplicity of human elements and
human points of view revealed by a journey in the Far East is so ' overwhelming that one cannot conceive of a religious
life, a religious organism,
assimilating such a mass without being
profoundly modified and enriched by it—unless a preliminary effort to
introduce intellectual and social uniformity should succeed in
levelling-out the deep diversity which still separates oriental
peoples from our Mediterranean civilisation
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