Bethlehem in Berkshire and .

IN THE enchanted village of' East Hendred in Berkshire, where time has not stood still but has worked hard and fruitfully, there is a small medieval chapel, so small that it would be crowded with 20 people standing before the altar.
It stands at the centre of this long thin village, on an island of grass. It's called the Chapel of Jesus of Bethlehem and though it has been knocked about, its proportions are oddly pleasing. I have long enjoyed passing it. This time I went into it.
It was built and owned by the Carthusian monks of Sheen and with a barn and a priest's house, it was probably a sound investment in real estate and agriculture. The Carthusians themselves were the most austere and uncorrupted of monks, living in a fearful solitude of small private houses round cloisters and they probably hired a curate to run the place.
It would have stood at the centre of the market place and would have been useful as a place of business and of occasional prayerful visits. It might also have served some useful purpose at public executions.
After the 'Reformation it seems to have been left derelict. The village already had a massive parish church. Then it was used variously as a barn, a pigeon loft, a wash house and a bake house.
Inside, the people's part is two storied with a fine modern staircase up to the first floor. It's hard to see what this was used for but it has been exquisitely restored. Where the tracery has gone in the windows it has been well replaced and filled with clear glass. The woodwork is graceful.
It is now in Catholic hands but since there are already two fine and flourishing Catholic churches in the village — one public, one private — it is not used as a church.
It has been turned into a humble and entertaining local museum. They will tell you where to get the keys of this 15th century fragment of our history at the post office.
Verdict: the greatest fun and beautifuly preserved and only romantics like me would long to see the Mass occasionally restored to it.
But it remains an oddity even in our odd countryside. And the parish council meets in it, which
Pilgrimage to Oxford
EACH TIME I go to Oxford, I go with a certain sense of pilgrimage. The place was created by religion — in various forms. It is more splendid than Cambridge, though I would hesitate to say it is more beautiful.
The front of Christ Church, floodlit the other night, encrusted with cardinal's hats in stone, looked more splendid in the donkilling cold than any medieval palace.
It was a good visit. It began with listening to just two Benedictine monks saying vespers in English in the pleasantly bare chapel of St Benet's. This is a Hall of Residence, part of the University, short on young monks, but as full as they wish of undergraduates. Men go later now into the Orders.
Catholics in England used to recite the office. Victorian parishes sang Vespers in church on Sunday — really letting rip at the Magnificat.
Educated families would say or even sing Compline as a form of night prayers. Now it is all largely confined to monasteries and these tend, more and more, to flourish.
But what an admirable and restrained and dignified form of prayer! The words are, rightly, not quite of this world. The atmosphere is impersonal, not gothic or baroque, but sensible.
Done like this, there is no fuss, just order and peace and, if you have ears to hear, a most gentlemanly and sweet approach to God.
But I must warn you that Compline is much easier because it changes less. And it contains quite startling beauty. The only trouble in using it at home is that old "Embarrassment Factor." Is one play-acting one's religion?
Thus, half-armed, 1 went to the Catholic Chaplaincy which is in part of a former palace of the Bishop of Oxford. They were holding a meeting oFthe Newman Society.
Unfortunately, long, long ago, I had chosen as my subject, "Turbulent Priests", which in a more sophisticated form turned out to be the subject of the Reith Lectures, given this year over the BBC by the Dean of Peterhouse (Cambridge.) I'll not report myself. But the Dean's lectures are a portent of change. They are exaggerated and over emphatic, but they show the direction of change — back to the sacramental and spiritual.
(This is the grossest generalisation.) But none of these annual lectures in recent years have attracted so much attention.
The meal for the Newman was cooked by the students in their own kitchen. Excellent — but how much these students eat! There was sherry. Oxford water is the worst in the world. They were singularly polite and gentle and far more serious than I ever used to be.
I could detect none of the endemic snobbism of the Catholic elite in this country. They were sterner than I about the use of Catholic influence in politics and really did not accept my thesis that ail Church is becoming over-politicised.
1 think they thought I was rather wet about the campaign against abortion. Two or three of them seemed bound for the priesthood. If I would fault them, I would say that they were almost too orthodox.
But in rooms that I had known presided over by Ronnie Knox when I was their age, I was rather impressed. I missed the elegance. I preferred the dedication.
Sage and mystic
C. S. LEWIS was an Oxford don, a mystic, a theologian, a novelist, an Anglican, a sage. He was at once marvellously fantastic and sensible about religion. Take this which comes from his Preface to Paradise Lost.
"The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for everyone else the proper pleasure of ritual."
Put that in your thurible and wave it at the next young priest who believes parishes should be abolished and cathedrals turned into dance halls and Mass said with a bottle of chianti and a loaf of bread with jeans for vestments and a kitchen as the only socially acceptable sanctuary.