The wind and the rain

I've been gradually cataloguing my books on the computer and while going though them came across one called The wind and the rain, described as an Easter book for 1962. My mother had bought it back then, and after her death it had sat on the shelf and I only looked at it quite recently.

It is an anthology of literary essays, fiction, poetry, drawings etc. About half of them were about Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit palaeontologist, whose books were much in vogue at the time (probably due for a comeback; they might inject some variety into the sterile "creation versus evolution" debates on Usenet and elsewhere). There was a poem about Corfe Castle, written by John Cooper Powys at the age of 12, a hitherto unpublished essay by Walter Bagehot on Tennyson's Idylls of the king, and more.

What I liked best, however, was the opening paragraph of the introduction.

Editors must be born lucky. In 1940 The Wind and the rain was founded by a group of schoolboys whose ambition was to produce a quarterly that would 'interpret the Christian Order in the light of current affairs, philosophy, literature and the arts'. Three attempts were made to print it on a hand press; all were abysmal failures, and eventually it was sent to some printers in Gloucestershire. The title proved lucky. A number of bookshops ordered copies in the belief that it was a reprint of a successful thirties farce about medical strudents. The copies sold out and they reordered more.

I rather liked the aim, and I could say that that is also the aim of this blog: to interpret the Christian Order in the light of current affairs, philosophy, literature and the arts -- to which I would add, "and vice versa".

I think I'll steal it for the description.