Are you Zionists? ‘I asked.

‘Yes, but orthodox Zionists,’ came the quick answer.

In this short dialogue, spoken in one of the miniature shops of the bazaar inside the old Jaffa Gate at Jerusalem, you have the problem of modern Jewry. Imagine a room, nine feet by six, with three blank walls; the fourth side is open, and serves as window and door-way. There you have the shop. Its proprietors are two Jews of very typical appearance, clothed in flowing gabardines and soft felt hats (which are always worn), and bedecked with one cork-screw curl of hair on each side of the face. The elder would easily do for a scribe of the time of Our Lord, while the younger, with his olive-complexioned and gentle face, might pose for the Christus at Oberammergau.

By means of a jargon of English, French and German, with an occasional word of Hebrew, we managed to do business as well as to learn a little of each other’s history and opinions. Neither of them, I learnt, was born in Palestine. The elder came thither from Russia about thirty years ago; the younger from Hungary. They were evidently of the strict and old-fashion sect, ‘exceedingly zealous of the traditions of their fathers.’ The old man one day tapped his forehead and said in broken English :

‘The Bible and Talmud here.’

I never thought of doubting him; nor would you, had you been in the Jerusalem synagogues and seen the old men reciting the Scriptures in Hebrew at a tremendous rate, without apparently paying much attention to their bibles.

The acceptance of one of the two Catholic Rites now existing in Russia—Latin and Oriental—is invariably left to the individual choice : converts are not hindered from adopting any rite they choose, without, however, having the right to make a later change. The only restriction—if it can be called one —being that one is expected (expected, but not commanded) to make one’s Easter Devotions according to one’s adopted Rite, and, in the case of a convert wishing to dedicate his or her life to God, preference is given, in so far as circumstances permit, to a religious house of the Rite followed by the person concerned.

The question of the ‘Rite distinction,’ properly speaking, appears among the Russian converts only since 1917. Thus comparatively little can be said in connection with the progress of the Eastern Rite in the past; its history is too recent, though, embryonic as it is, it has already achieved results of no scanty importance.

Even in the ages of faith, servitude was never a congenial atmosphere for the growth of sanctity. Chattel slavery and serfdom bred an impoverished character, and rare is it to find in the calendar the name of a saint in the middle ages born or brought up in bondage to a master,—save in the case where freedom had been achieved or granted in early life.

Not that the miracle of the grace of God is withheld when social or economic conditions are unfavourable. The holy and humble of heart are discerned amongst rulers in high places, men and women of great estate, and are found in the most unlikely places. Many are the bishops, not a few are the kings and queens, and at least there is one emperor in the ranks of the saints. Even the Borgia family could produce a St. Francis. But the slave and the serf were, it seems plain, always hampered in the quest of holiness, badly handicapped in the struggle to bring the will into complete conformity with the Will of God. Compelled to subordinate the will to the devices of another or to the caprices of society the soul can hardly yield the fine fruits of sanctity.

When Dr. Johnson’s manuscript prayers and meditations were gathered together and published in 1785 by his intimate friend, the Rev. George Strahan, Vicar of Islington, the latter expressed the hope that the Doctor’s sermons, ‘none of which have yet been made public, nor is it known where they are extant,’ might be given to the world. He knew that Johnson had claimed for his writings as a whole that they were composed in such manner as might tend to the promotion of piety, that his Rambler in particular had been to him a kind of pulpit, and that he had turned his thoughts with peculiar earnestness to the study of religious subjects. In conversation and in writing, he had owned to having written many sermons, they were likely to be among his happiest productions, and so his friend appealed to those who might then possess them, not to withhold them but to bring them forth, as their seclusion would be ‘an injurious diminution of their author’s fame, and a retrenchment from the common stock of serious instruction.’

It has not been the least of the minor factors in the Anglo-Irish tragedy that the old Catholic families of England have almost all been strongly opposed by tradition to the claims of Irish nationalism. This constant divergence of views and sympathies between the Catholics of the two countries has in recent years produced incidents that will not easily be forgotten on either side. Irish Catholics can scarcely be expected ever to admit any excuse for the amazing action of the Duke of Norfolk when he played a conspicuous part in the mass meeting of the Unionist party at Blenheim on July nth, 1912, which gave its solemn benediction to Sir Edward Carson on the eve of his departure for Belfast to organise the Orange Volunteers. It may be thought probable indeed that, were he still alive, the Duke of Norfolk would even in his extreme old age have repudiated the deliberate campaign of political anarchy and religious hatred to which he then gave his approval, although he was the leading Catholic peer in England. His successors in the leadership of the English Catholic Unionists have generally accepted the subsequent verdict of the world’s opinion upon the Ulster campaign, and upon the savage outrages against the Catholic minority in East Ulster which it provoked. But his public support of the Ulster campaign was an incident that will live in history. Had the attitude of the Duke of Norfolk and of the large number of influential Catholic families in England who always thought much as he did, been less narrow in regard to Irish nationalist aspirations, it can scarcely be doubted that their influence could have at once checked the extreme violence of the Unionist campaign before the war, and simultaneously assisted towards a less bitter view of English Unionism on the part of Irish Catholics.

Among recent books, one of the most thoughtful and helpful, I venture to think, is Mr. Joseph Clayton’s Economics for Christians, wherein I find this striking passage : ‘First things must come first in a wise economy, and therefore the economist explains that the first thing to be done is to make use in the fullest way of the resources of land, that storehouse of wealth. Without access to the land, man is starved. Hence for example when there are thousands seeking employment on the land and vast areas are uncultivated, it is peculiarly wasteful to forbid labour from working on the land’ (p. 7). This, surely, is the A B C of economics and at the same time a brief and clear indication of England’s temporal problem. And yet if there is one point on which the political parties agree, it is in ignoring this fundamental truth. In very deed the land is desolate, and we look in vain among publicists for those who consider in their heart. It has happened before, and the warning was little regarded then as now. May we not say that it is a recurring phenomenon in the course of Empire? That of Rome is the best known example. ‘At the same period, the country places witnessed the gradual disappearance of the independent labourer, the very seed and stock of a sovereign people. Lands formerly divided into small holdings, fell finally into the hands of a few lords; the cultivated plains give place to the immense pasture-lands which still occupy the environs of Rome and exhaust its resources.’