If St. Thomas had not been born a Catholic, his philosophy would have brought him to Catholicism. If he had not been—or if he were not—by temperament a humanist, Thomism and the Faith were sufficient to make him one. These three, which meet and fuse in the human soul, are so intimately linked together that it ris impossible perfectly to possess any one of them without possessing the others. All three find common expression in the enfranchisement of the personality. Humanism in the full and real.sense is more than the incomplete humanism of the ancients; more than the atrophied humanism of the Renaissance. For in humanism there are two elements. There is the worship, the love, of beauty, wherever beauty is to be found. There is the realization of the personality in whatever sphere that realization is possible. And both Greece and the Renaissance failed in fullness in these things. If there be any realm of reality, any part of the university of being, whose beauty finds no echo in the heart of a man; if there be anything of life and its fullness to which his personality will not respond, that man is, in that degree, no humanist. In the same degree he will be, logically, no follower of the philosophy of St. Thomas or of the religion of Christ.

It need hardly be said that such a conception is in no conflict with the Christian idea of what is called detachment or of mortification.

Example is the best definition,’ says Sainte-Beuve. Far from it, say we. It is the easiest, as small boys find out before their preceptors. It is the test, the touchstone of definition, but it is not definition, so how can it be the best? French clarity, where art thou?

Now what is a Wowser? It would be easy to define by examples. Stiggins and Chadband were Wowsers with a difference : they embodied only a sect, a thing, virulent and intense; even if drowned in Dickens’s scorn of all the tribe. The thing was extant in his day (when has it not been?), but the inspired nomenclature was in the womb of time, if this be not an indecent expression by now (for the Wowser works like the coral insect, defiling words deep down by identifying them with defilement in his imagination, and he rages like the tempest against Beauty and her father, Freedom-of-Heart, and her mother, Simplicity).

In his study of the Dark Ages, Mr. Dawson has done a difficult thing with entire success. What is nearly as interesting is the apparently effortless way in which he has achieved his end. Instead of as a formless waste of barbarism and decay, such as is often presented by the merely secular historian, the Dark Ages are viewed as the essentially formative period of European history, when the foundations were being slowly and painfully laid. Though superficially the period lacks the attractions of what are usually considered the great epochs of history, yet the age that saw the laying of great foundations of European culture has an interest that is all its own. Foundation-stones, if less showy, are more necessary than flying buttresses.

The political existence of Europe depends on the Roman Empire; it has little, if any, geographical warrant. A society of city states, the inheritors of the Hellenistic culture, was welded together by the military dictatorship of the Roman tradition. It is no mere figure of speech to call Caesar and Augustus the founders of the European polity, for the barbarians, though possessed of valuable cultural traditions, were of themselves incapable of producing a higher civilisation. It was Rome with her genius for constructive and sustained toil which was to bring this to pass. Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem.

The present weakness of Western civilization may be more apparent than real, and in part the exaggeration of a press-hysteria which, concentrating on the plight of the modern and mushroom centres of industry and finance, makes little account of the deep-rooted strength which Europe draws from its countryside, traditions, and religion—convictions inarticulate perhaps, but largely operative. Still, a menace to our culture looms so heavily on the Eastern frontier, and its economic achievement is so impressive, its application of the dialectic of materialism so ruthless and complete, and its direction so intelligent, that it is easy to be overawed by the mere size of Bolshevism, to admit over-readily its claim to a universalism, and, granting it a weight in the order of ideas which it certainly possesses in the order of fact, to miss seeing it for what it is, a sect.

Then, considering its anti-God campaign and its emphasis on economical and mechanical facts to the exclusion of any other, thinking of it as a resolute common-sensism that scoffs at everything it cannot see, picturing it in a bright hard light and religion as a thing for the twilight, it is easy to pass over the fact that the whole movement derives its impetus from the worship of an ideal every bit as slavish as that of the religion it displaced, and without the justification. Prostration to the lord of eternal life and death is at any rate a pretty natural sort of attitude; abasement before a man-made projection, an ens rationis, the human herd considered as an economic group, however vast the herd, however insistent the economic pressure, is a definite degradation.

In an age triumphant in mechanism, thought tends to run on mechanical lines—on railway lines, in fact. Sometimes we refer, with a pitying smile, to the Victorian idea of progress, which had as its favourite text ‘Go from strength to strength,’ and which was admirably epitomised by Tennyson, the characteristic Victorian poet, in such phrases as :

‘Forward, forward let us range,
Let the great world spin for ever
‘Adown the ringing groves of change’;

or:

‘Men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things’;

or a world

‘Where freedom slowly broadens down
From precedent to precedent.’

All very tidy, orderly, and regular. And all very ridiculous ....

We tend to smile at all this now. We now describe ‘progress’ as rhythmic; and a rhythm has its ups and downs, its systole and diastole, its oscillations. Nevertheless, the theory of evolution still binds us with its spell, though some of the Germans are beginning to question it. ‘We are all evolutionists nowadays,’ in ‘progressive’ circles, that is; and we do not usually import German thought until it has become a bit stale in the country of its origin ....