The Joint Pastoral on the Social Question from the Catholic Hierarchy was particularly noteworthy for what may be called its specialisation. We have long heard the complaint that the official pronouncements of the Church are ineffective because they are too general to move the wills of individuals. This is largely an excuse for shirking responsibility in regard to momentous Encyclicals like Rerum Novarum or Quadragesimo Anno. The Joint Pastoral leaves no room for such an excuse because of the detail in which it describes the minimum which a Christian should accept and for which therefore every Christian in this country is bound to strive. It remains to be seen whether we shall be jolted out of our apathy. If such detailed direction from authority fails to awaken a corporate attempt to right the injustices of the day it will be left to the blind force of world upheaval to alter the present system—and who can say whether the result of that will be more or less just?

The most important of the Pastoral’s special applications of Catholic Social teaching is the tenth point, which declares that the present distribution of wealth in this country is unjust. This is more than a general declaration that the industrial system tends to an unjust distribution of wealth; it is a special judgment on the results of that system in our own country. Reasons for such a judgment are also given. For it is not so much that the distribution is unequal as that it places the lives of most Englishmen under the control of a few irresponsible individuals, or worse still of an impersonal group or company.

Descartes was personally a believer, a sincere Catholic. His education by the Jesuits of La Flèche, and the philosophy they had taught him there, had marked him profoundly. This man, whose mind is so free and enquiring, who was always so conscious of a vitally important intellectual vocation, who grounded all his philosophy on a daring effort to doubt everything, that he might vanquish doubt by doubt and is discover the unimpeachable certainties implied in the very existence of the thinking self, this founder of modern rationalism never doubted the Catholic creed; he could even be blamed for being insufficiently aware of that anxious questing restlessness of the soul that is worked upon and deepened by Faith. To the Protestant theologians who tried to force the religious issue on him, he answered smiling that he preferred to remain in the religion of his king and his nurse.

He was not giving them his reasons for believing; he meant merely that he preferred to be left in peace on this matter. His death was nobly and genuinely Christian. That fine sense he always had of the dignity of reason and intellectual integrity, of the grandeur of created nature, was itself religious. I am sure that at the opening of his philosophical career, with the illuminative experience of November 10th, 1619, still vivid within him, he was equally desirous of establishing the principles of physical geometry—his work par excellence— and of grounding Christian doctrine on such firm foundations that atheists and sceptics would be silenced for ever. And with all this his hostility to Theology was stubborn and bitter and calculating. How explain this paradox?

One arrives best, perhaps, at the concept of political obligation by considering what is society and what is that particular form of society which is the political society. All men belong to societies, have some community with others—i.e. are compacted with them into a solidarity of one kind or another. Though this may arise in various ways, two main divisions are distinguishable, namely that coming from the division of labour and that coming from similitude. The former expresses our dependence on the planter of Brazil, the rancher of the Argentine, the fellah of Egypt. We all acknowledge our dependence on them, but would scarcely say that we formed a society with them. To admit this would be a manifest absurdity, but to deny it would be to deny the existence, or the possibility of the existence, of an international society of men. All that can be allowed is that there exists a certain inter-dependence which yet does not constitute a society.

But men are linked together by resemblances of which they may be ignorant, which are innate and which affect them physically and morally; resemblances coming from race, culture, language, customs, or an historical accident. The formation of ethnical and national groups provides a good example of this solidarity by similitude. Because these people are united by blood, because they are begotten by the same cultural and historical milieu, they are in harmony and have a common patriotic feeling. Yet even here it must be conceded that neither the ethnical group nor the nation is a society. The only way in which they can become this is by taking on themselves the political form of a State, a man-made construction.

When in Rerum Novarum Pope Leo XIII taught that it was the ‘great and principal duty’ of every employer to give every one of his work-people a fair wage, he was, as he himself reminded the faithful, only enunciating a principle that had its foundation in natural justice. When he again, and Pope Pius XI after him, declared that a workman’s wages must be sufficient to enable him to maintain himself, his wife, and his children in reasonable comfort, and to put by for a rainy day, they were making a declaration not only of Christian, but also of natural, rights.

Nearly thirty years after Rerum Novarum the Anglican Lambeth Conference recognised that a living wage should be the first charge upon industry. That was in 1920, when many industries were finding it difficult to keep alive, and others were already expiring, when many workers, far from being paid a living wage, were soon to become wageless, while the prospect of permanent employment for many others was rapidly diminishing.

During the war of 1914-1918 there had been phenomenal prosperity. The living wage seemed to have become a recognised right, and rates of pay were constantly raised to meet rising prices. But the high wages were in great part the result of a large and easy flow of money. Whereas the deposits of twenty-two British banks in 1914 amounted to £875,000,000, in 1919 they had reached the sum of £2,117,000,000. This huge increase was caused very largely by the wholesale purchase of War Loan by the banks themselves, and by their lending money, which soon came back to them as deposits, for the purchase of War Bonds.

The Brains Trust once set the following question : Would the nation be better governed by men of science and great thinkers rather than by professional politicians? The problem is of paramount importance in these days when civilisation, as we know it, totters on the brink of destruction and when thinking men of every party and creed are endeavouring to find a sure basis for post-war reconstruction. According to Professor C. E. M. Joad, the man of science is certainly not fitted to guide the destinies of his country. In his specialised capacity he is as methodical and as efficient as the worker bee, but out of his laboratory he appears as stupid as the insect on the window pane. This view was severely criticised. Surely, it was said, the training of the man of science, his careful weighing of facts, his patient analysing, his impartiality, should fit him more pearly to approach the ideal legislator than his unscientific fellows. Are not the scientists the ‘disinterested men’ of J. B. Priestley— men dealing in hard facts without prejudice? Professor Joad’s reply pointed to the heart of the problem. He showed that the politician, too, was dealing in hard facts—the facts of human welfare—but, whereas the scientist was faced with the problem of yes or no, the politician’s job was a question of right or wrong. In other words, moral value was the primary consideration of the politician and morality was beyond the field of science. It is true, of course, that the scientists have contributed greatly to the potential welfare of man as they have also (for example by the invention of the internal combustion engine) contributed to his doom.

John Tauler, a contemporary of Suso, is perhaps the best known of the three great German Dominican mystics. For he is the most characteristic representative of his Order, being first and foremost a preacher and shepherd of souls. Like St. John the Baptist, he was a voice crying in the wilderness of the world : ‘Repent ye, abandon the creatures and turn to the Creator.’ This was his battle cry, and his life work was to show man how to fulfil its demand. Whereas Suso made his own life a mirror, as it were, of the mystic way, reflecting in it both its glories and its agonies, Tauler took man by the hand and led him step by step to the Sanctuary of Mystic Union.

He was eminently fitted for his work, for he had that deep insight into human nature which is indispensable in the preacher and teacher. ‘Man, he said, hangs between heaven and earth. With his highest faculties he is exalted above himself and above all things, and dwells in God, but with his lowest faculties he is subjected under all things into the very ground of humility.’ He calls the higher faculties the ‘inner man,’ whilst the lower faculties form the ‘outer man.’ The inner man is subject to God alone, but the outer man to all creatures in true humility. The task of the inner man is of a double nature: he directs the outer man by the light of his superior knowledge, whilst in himself he remains unruffled by the changes of earthly existence, ‘sunk and united’ in his communion with God.