The Catholic engaged in the study of natural science is in some ways less well placed than any other student for growing into a full-blooded Christian. His subject is not one which provides obvious stimulation for his Catholic conscience. Its content and presentations are unaltered whether its exponents are Christians or not, and the student lacks the stimulus of that constant need of criticism and re-interpretation, which is provided, for instance, by the study of history. And it is undeniable that natural science when studied intensively easily produces a person hypertrophied in some respects and gravely lacking in Catholic fundamentals. Laboratory work occupies long hours which others would spend on general Catholic reading, and it is too easy to become caught up into a routine which contains little but science. Prayer and spiritual reading do not thrive when they have to be fitted precariously into short intervals saved from the rush. Work is not readily sacrificed to them, for there is severe overcrowding and economic pressure in the lower ranks of scientific workers. (This competition, incidentally, does not favour humility nor a true love of learning.) The manual work of the laboratory gives a certain balance to the scientist’s life, and this again tends to obscure the deficiencies of the latter on the spiritual level. Further, there are certain intellectual obstacles. If a Catholic scientist is intelligent enough to begin thinking about the nature of his scientific knowledge and comparing it with Thomist philosophy, he is liable to be oppressed by certain superficial divergences between the principles of Thomism and of physical science.

All through his sixteen years as Provincial, Father Bede strongly held that discipline has no value after childhood unless it is self-discipline. He abhorred coercive and nagging methods of enforcing it. Under his rule the best had every incentive to do their best, and the worst all the freedom that God allows them to do their worst. He was eminently loyal to our Lord’s counsel not to resist evil but to overwhelm it with good. Like his Master he acknowledged openly that religion is the happiest hunting-ground of Pharisees and profiteers, and he never concealed his indignation when he saw one man’s evil hindering another man’s good; but his remedy was to exhort the good to suffer the evil, and so convert it—if haply it would be converted—to like goodness. He had a firm faith in the moral of the Beatitudes—that to the meek and persecuted alone is given all power in heaven and on earth to conquer the froward tyrant. He well knew that when any ruler makes this foolishness of the Cross his only instrument of government, scandals needs must come. He had to brave the saddening experience of more than one. But he was worried neither by them nor by the mistakes and failures to which his leniency might expose himself and others. Only the grace of God, he believed, could save the Province from disaster under his rule; but he confidently counted on that grace, neglecting none of the appointed ways and means of meriting it.

Even in the abridged form of the English translation the Journals of Kierkegaard are not to be read at a sitting, or even in a series of consecutive sittings. Their thought is at once too concentrated and their range too vast. Covering his jottings and reflections de omni re scibili et quibusdam aliis over twenty of his most creative years, the Journals could perhaps be assimilated in scarcely less a span. Not, therefore, a book to borrow. But emphatically a book to possess, to browse in and to browse upon, to open and to close at well-spaced intervals which allow ample time for digestion, for assimilation and rejection. A book to feed upon, for it contains in epigrams and tabloid essays the marrow of his thought. But for that very reason a book which, consumed gluttonously, must infallibly produce biliousness and dyspepsia accompanied by dizziness and nausea.

There will be some who find Kierkegaard indigestible and nauseating anyway. And that not only for the reasons which he himself anticipated; the reasons which would reflect upon his readers rather than upon himself. Not only, that is to say, because ‘every man is afraid of the truth,’ and ‘between man and truth lies mortification,’ or because he sought ‘to tear the veil from human twaddle and from the conceited self-complacency with which men try to convince themselves and others that man really wants to know the truth’ (1153). Not only because of the ‘scandal of the Cross’ which he proclaimed, fully understanding that if you ‘act just once so that your action expresses the fact that you fear God alone and do not fear men: you at once “scandalise” people,’ and that ‘whatever avoids “scandalising” is only what, out of fear of men and human respect, conforms entirely with worldliness’ (1116).

Now that events have settled the issue between peace and war a new situation arises which demands the attention of the theologian in respect of the readjustment of life in accord with Christian principles. Many new elements have been brought into our lives, and we not unnaturally pause to reflect how, if at all, they can find place in the Christian life as such.

We are not without reasons, and compelling reasons, in support of our cause. Much as we may abhor jingoism, we must learn to distinguish it from authentic patriotism, a Christian virtue authorised by God and the Church. Yet even patriotism, taken in its fullest sense as a Christian virtue and duty, does not make the whole issue crystal clear; it does not diminish the realities of the horror and attendant evils of war, but on the contrary makes those realities more actual and those evils more apparent, urging thought as to the reorganisation of individual life to meet them. Patriotism emphasises the need of accepting readily the restraint and sacrifices inevitably imposed on all. Can this acceptance be a truly Christian thing, and can the new conditions of civil life be integrated into the Christian life?

There is much that will chiefly affect only one’s private life; and this at least can be accepted in a Christlike way, sanctified and made sacramental. Much has been spoken and written of the life of the Christian in the Body of Christ and of his share in the Sacrifice of the Mass, and it has rightly been pointed out how this participation dignifies human nature and how the quality of ‘alter Christus’ places a man, in some sense, higher than the angels, invited to embark, as an Apostle and Coadjutor of Christ, upon the conversion of the world.

It is true, replied the Dutchman, we are a small people without a great future. But when early in the morning we hear a loud knocking at the door, we know it is only the milk.

The Times every morning and the New Statesman every week, those cover serious periodical reading for many of us. From them we should assume that the political weight of Catholicism has been thrown heavily to the right for the last hundred years. The association of Catholics with the forces of tradition is, of course, evident; this, at its worst, has meant subservience of vested interests, and, at its best, rallying with the stable and chivalrous elements of society. It is true that altar and throne, farm and nationality were the causes Catholics fought for most conspicuously in the nineteenth century, and that Liberalismus was, to put it mildly, not favourably regarded in the second period of Pio Nono’s pontificate. What is not so generally appreciated is the strength and official standing of the Labourite movement in the Church.

Père Lacordaire died, he said, an impenitent liberal, the Bishop Baron von Ketteler dug deeper to the roots of reform than did our own Victorian Radicals, and cardinals like Manning, Mermillod and Gibbons were scarcely daffodils that came before the sturzos dared. They were the leaders of a Catholic democratic movement that had reached such proportions by the time of the Europe of Locarno that the action of Catholic groups on the whole—I speak quantitatively—lay with Trade Unionism and Parliamentary Democracy.