Writing some months ago in this review on the probable attitude of the new French Government towards the Catholic Church, I ventured to anticipate that the first action of the new government would be to declare its hostility to the Church at the outset by undertaking to abolish the recently re-established Embassy at the Vatican. The Embassy has not yet been withdrawn, but the new Government in fact lost no time in announcing its intention of abolishing it. Only the unexpected strength of the resistance by the Catholic forces in the Chambre des Députés, and the critical situation created by the London Conference, have prevented the Government from pressing its attack to a successful issue. The Government has found itself confronted with a problem which it had not sufficiently appreciated in advance, through the resolute determination of the Catholic populations of Alsace and Lorraine to maintain the immunity from anti-clerical innovations which has been accorded to them since the lost provinces were restored after the defeat of Germany in the war.

It is not only the Catholics of Alsace and Lorraine who are in revolt against the threat to bring them under the anti-clerical regime from which they have been spared under German rule. The Jews and the Protestants have joined forces with them in a vigorous and organised protest against interference. Not many weeks ago the Protestant organisations of Alsace simultaneously published in all their religious periodicals the following protest:

As Père de la Taille has honoured me by giving in the American Ecclesiastical Review (July) an answer to my criticism of his theory of the Last Supper and the Mass, readers of Blackfriars may be interested in knowing what may be said in reply.

In Blackfriars of September, 1923, I ventured to cull the following passages from Père de la Taille’s now famous book, Mysterium Fidei. These passages shall be given in English :

(1) The Last Supper and the Cross are complementary. At the Last Supper was begun that sacrifice which was to be consummated on the Cross.

(2) The reality of the Immolation is found in the suffering of the Death. But in the symbolical immolation of the Last Supper is especially shown the quality of the liturgical oblation.

(3) Hence the sacrifice of redemption on the Cross and at the Supper was one.

Nor must it be reckoned a preliminary sacrifice at the Supper; and another subsequent on the Cross.

But in the Supper room there was made the unbloody Oblation of the Bloody Immolation to be made on Calvary.

The amateur, however much he may parade his amateurishness, has secretly always an envy of the professor. I am an amateur in art-criticism, and I have always wanted to be an Aristotle in judgment. Such awkward situations arise! The schoolboy bubbling over with enthusiasm consults me on Pre-Raphaelitism; the undergraduate asks me to admire Picasso or Wyndham Lewis; the pundit expects me to follow his monologue on the latest tendencies in painting and music, and always I struggle in the dark and conscience shakes its head at me for hypocrisy. How I long to be able to tick off on my fingers, after the manner of Aquinas in the picture, the good and bad points of this picture or that, and round off a classic treatment of the subject with some Olympian dictum!

In the days of credulous youth, I thought Ruskin was a Bible of Art. I learnt his definitions and went to art galleries a happy child certain of what I ought to like and dislike. But with the years disillusion came. Whistler found Ruskin wanting, and my friends, when I sang the song of Ruskin, laughed in my face and looked on me as a Victorian who had never grown old and wise. So I sought anew in great discontentment for a theory that would defy time and change. Books with alluring titles, What is Art? A New Theory of the Beautiful, The Relation of Art to Life, were tried, but instead of light I met fog, fog and ever thicker fog.

It is never wise, I think, to read two or three thought-provoking books simultaneously. Generally speaking, I never do; and that I did so in this instance was entirely due to unusual circumstances. For nearly ten days I was occupied in invigilating a Senior Local Examination. Invigilating is a tedious business. In oppressive silence a crowd of examinees vie with one another in covering sheet after sheet of paper with facts which the examiner may or may not have asked for, and if the silence is broken, it is only to make a request for further supplies of paper or for logarithmic tables. The invigilator cannot entertain himself for long with the daily newspaper. Its news’ columns and articles are soon exhausted and, for myself, I take very little interest in advertisements. Bearing these things in mind, I took with me into the examination room, besides my favourite daily, Benjamin Kidd’s The Science of Power and a text-book of Esperanto. The latter I found vastly entertaining, for, with a knowledge of three or more modern languages, Esperanto can be mastered with very little expenditure of time and effort.

Before the session was at an end, however, I found the two books inextricably interwoven in my own mind. That constantly recurring phrase of Benjamin Kidd’s, ‘the emotion of the ideal,’ I found myself applying to Esperanto. If, in a single generation, ‘the emotion of the ideal’ had created a unified Germany, strong enough to stand against the world, why should not this same ‘emotion,’ I asked myself, expressed through Esperanto, in one generation, create international goodwill and complete understanding, through the adoption of an auxiliary language?

I.

According to the teaching of the Catholic Church, and this teaching is necessarily true, for the Catholic Church teaches with the authority of God Himself, the reason of man’s existence is that he may know, serve and love God. Every activity of man must be directed to those ends, otherwise man is false to himself, for he is acting against his nature, and false to God, for he is acting against his Maker.

For such a creature as man, then, the work he does is not primarily that he may earn the food he eats, the shelter he needs and the food and shelter for the children he begets. Food and shelter are not the ends for which man works. On the contrary, man’s work is the end to which food and shelter are the means. We say that man’s work is the end. That is to say, it is the immediate or proximate end. The ultimate end, the final end is God. All food and shelter are things to help man in his work; all work is to help man to his God.

Now under the stress of an irreligious and therefore an ill-organised society, these things are forgotten or denied; God Himself is forgotten or denied, and men think of themselves as working merely in order to live. Food and shelter are proclaimed to be the ends for which men work and, being reduced to the level of a means to merely earthly existence, work is degraded and derided. This is indeed the curse of Adam; for Adam sinned when he ceased to contemplate his God.

The attack made on the Church to-day is, not merely different from, but, the exact opposite of, that made in the sixteenth century. What was then an offence is now a recommendation; what was then a mitigating circumstance is now a stumbling block. At the time of the ‘Reformation’ the accusation was one of superstition and materialism, though the latter word was not used. Our opponents posed as more spiritual in their conception of worship. Speech took the place of corporeal action. The pulpit replaced the altar and the preacher ousted the priest. The sacramental idea was almost completely lost.

It is startling to turn from these criticisms to the censure of Catholicism, and, indeed, of all forms of religion, current at the present time. Other-worldliness is the favourite charge. We are said to divert the attention of the democracy from those material interests in the understanding of which lies its hope of salvation, and to fix it on an unreal heaven and hell. Dogmas are derided because they lead to what are regarded as unprofitable discussions concerning abstruse matters remote from everyday needs. It is we now who are too ‘spiritual.’

This wave of materialistic thought finds the old-fashioned types of Protestantism entirely unprepared. The preacher addresses himself to empty pews. The exhortation to face the possibilities of the Future Life falls on deaf ears. Even the moral idealism that is adopted as a substitute for doctrinal truth fares no better; it is stigmatised as bourgeois ideology.