“Pope Denounces Communism.” But we must read his words carefully, and see just what it is he denounces and why he denounces it, however painful and humbling may be the process. And then we must ask ourselves Whether the monster against which he so insistently warns us is not London or Birmingham, or even Nazi Berlin or Fascist Milan, as well as Moscow or Barcelona, U.S.A. as well as U.S.S.R., whether the thing called Atheistic Communism is not to be found among avowed Catholics as well as professed Communists. We must ask ourselves not only whether our industrial-capitalist world is not guilty of having brought about the thing which the Pope calls Atheistic Communism, but further whether it is not guilty precisely of the very evils of Atheistic Communism itself in so far as these fall under the anathemas of the Church as they are expressed in the text of the Encyclical Divini Redemptoris.

Harry the King intervenes between Falstaff and Hamlet. He is Shakespeare’s last successful version of the natural man. And by this I mean that he is the last of those heroes who is himself a success. He has all the natural graces and he has them in abundance. He meets no problem which he does not solve. He is victorious in arms, just though stem in government. He is a Hotspur sobered by responsibility and a Falconbridge of the blood royal. What he successfully answers are, of course, those questions on the nature of kingship which history had posed for Shakespeare in Richard II. The royalty in Harry is no mere lineal prerogative. It is a quality of the soul. It is an earthly echo of what we mean when we talk of the kingship of Christ. It draws its power from its capacity for fellowship with men, and it makes the humblest of men a king in his own kind. It operates with the discriminating generosity of grace and is at the disposal of all who seek it worthily.

After Henry V comes the great bend in the road of Shakespeare’s search. He begins to see into the depth of the human soul and into the extremities of human circumstance; and what he sees is his subject for the next few years. He sees the failure of the human nature he had glorified. He sees tragedy. His hero becomes Brutus and Antony who divide a play between them. There is no doubt that Shakespeare sympathized with Brutus, but he cannot help making him illustrate the thesis which is now hammering at his mind. I mean the futility of action, or rather the incompatibility of action and thought. Brutus is a philosopher-politician; the Arthur Balfour of republican Rome, intellectual, honourable, and detached. His material is thought, not men. But he becomes the General Franco of this particular conspiracy. He is drawn in reluctantly, but once in he assumes a full share of responsibility.

It is Narcissus who sees in the unrippled water the transfiguration flash back of its liquid clearness. He is like a god, so perfectly is his vision proportioned to his seeing, so uniquely has the element reserved for him a significance which is for him alone. Completely and wholly it is for him, but for the pool he gazes on is this interchange of light and of looks anything less than the end possessed, the entelechy and the consummation of its being? For this it was made, that it should receive this imprint of light from above and so render it. A clarity-in-general become indelibly this clarity, uniquely its and his. The word which utters it is a new thing in the scale of creation.

It seems to me that poetry ceased to form itself upon the Liturgy in order to form itself upon the poet's own likeness seen in the mirror of the world. (Or is the’ statement “simplicist,” a priori, slick?) Tuncks, then, in his naked individuality, creeps out from Choir to choose between the apple-orchards and the wilderness. It has commonly been one or the other, according, perhaps, as the sense of sight in his non-spatial anatomy lies nearer the heart or the intelligence, or to the liver, source of black bile and sombre landscapes. So with his note-book Gerard Manley Tuncks searching the inscapes of clouds and flowers, the ash-tree and “weeds in wheels” for the reflection of his own countenance which is in the eyes of Jesus Christ, but vicariously in “the bluebell I have been looking at. I can tell the beauty of our Lord by it.”

Wishing no doubt to console a group who are more noisy at the moment than they are numerous, a firm of Catholic publishers has now perpetrated an English version of the Comte de Saint-Aulaire's venomous lampoon Genève contre la Paix, a work well calculated to offset their former productions, The Church and War and Peace and the Clergy, which were—well, not quite nice.

It is the “stuff to give ‘em.” M. de Saint-Aulaire is the French equivalent of Colonel Blimp. But whereas our English hero is merely reduced by the thought of that dreadful League of Nations to an inarticulate spluttering of “Gad, sir! Stuff and nonsense, what, what,” his Gallic colleague has a more vivid imagination and the gift of tongues. True, he has his lucid moments, only too rare in this book, in which his shrewdness delights us; but for most of the time he sees red, or, should I say, Red. So eloquent indeed is this excited old gentleman that it is a little difficult sometimes for one, whose humdrum job it has been for sixteen years to acquaint himself with the actual history of the League, to follow his flights of fancy. His essay is not very coherent. It begins by explaining that the League has never existed or, alternatively, (as the lawyers would say), has long since compassed its own decomposition. Having proclaimed the dogma of equality (Has it?), it has built, though decomposed, upon inequality and privilege. The real forces behind it (if it exists) are those occult Internationals, Bolshevism, Freemasonry, Judaism and Pangermanism—oddly united, these last two—which, as Colonel Blimp would heartily agree, are well calculated to make the flesh of all good Christians creep. The League is “a prostitute,” “an abortion clinic,” “a corpse,” “a fantastic hoax,” “a gravedigger,” “aparalytic,” “anassassin,” “asuicide,"etc. It has committed nothing but errors: it has told nothing but lies.

Hymns have been written by the thousand, and of the thousands written very few have stood the test of time, the vicissitudes of religious revolution, or the vagaries of human taste. Few of us can regret the disappearance of many hymns that would evoke upon discovery no response in our minds beyond a polite curiosity and mild amusement that we reserve for the more grotesque museum pieces. Modem hymns, however, may meet with a different reception, and the man who would open a public discussion about them must step out along a thorny path, where even his guardian angel may fear to tread. Some hymns which the stream of time has borne down to us may still be sung with pleasure, “rari nantes in gurgite vasto.” And their appeal need not rest solely upon their antiquity, but may possible be based upon their adequate expression of Truth, Goodness and Beauty.

We may like hymns or we may dislike them, whether on principle or from prejudice: we may sing them one and all with a joyous abandon, indifferent alike to their quality or their quantity: we may accept them with a Christian resignation as part of that bracing discipline, which makes a man upon other occasions take medicine with a nauseous taste hoping that thereby he may possibly reap some benefit. Whatever we may think or feel about them, hymns are here and we cannot avoid them: a careless turn of the knob on the Radio will bring us the most unexpected examples: on Sunday the very streets are not free of them, when every town has its contingent of the Salvation Army: even attendance at a Cup Final may involve us willy-nilly in a mass of rough men sobbing in chorus, “Abide with me, Fast falls the eventide! “

In a recent publication a German Jesuit Father has set down some useful suggestions for the ascetic which are culled from the authoritative findings of modem experimental psychology. He shows, among other things, how psycho-analytical research can, and does, contribute much of importance in educating a stable, virtuous life; and one of the basic spiritual problems dealt with is a faulty disposition of will—a disposition with such urgent consequences as to compel immediate attention of both spiritual teacher and psychologist.

As many of the modern exponents of psychological knowledge and motive-analysis in general have called down upon themselves the condemnation of not a few moralists, Catholics have been inclined to ignore the subject as something not safely assimilable. This appears to be in response to certain authorities who opposed the Christian pursuit of virtue—maintaining it to be an oppression of man’s primitive urges, which of course is not quite the case; for it is a position of one instinct being subordinate to another, and ultimately to the Divine law. But probing as it does the inflammable part of man, experimental psychology should receive constant observation by Catholic teachers in view of the help and enlightenment it affords in self-formation.