It is not always easy for a teacher to advise a student on the choice of a subject for a long essay or a thesis. But I do remember one case where the task was easy and exciting. That was when Colin Jory came into my room in the Australian National University to discuss a research topic. That was in those golden years of University teaching when students and teachers had faith and tolerance, the years before the muddying of the waters.
Colin Jory was one of many students in those years who believed that historical research could make life more intelligible. He had his own faith: he was a Catholic both by birth and by persuasion. He wanted to find out how others had been inspired by that vigorous and creative Catholicism which he had known when a boy at school in Ballarat and Albury. We decided quite quickly that he might find what he was looking for in an examination of the history of the Campion Society.
At that time we both believed with John Henry Newman in the coming encounter between Catholic Christendom and the sons of the Enlightenment. It may be that the future will prove the children of this generation to be wiser than the children of light. Colin Jory belongs to the ages of faith. In this work, strengthened by his faith, he looks back from an age of ruins at the hopes and actions of men who were inspired by his own high-minded vision of the world.
Manning Clark