It is a sequel to the Catholicism of the Church that the unity of her members has not necessitated their uniformity; racial cultures have been strengthened by the acceptance of a common faith, and English like French or Irish or Italian types are still most distinctively national when most deeply Catholic. The history of the great religious orders affords a parallel, for the common end to which they are directed, the common faith that has created them and the bond of priesthood, have yet enabled them to maintain a full individuality. The greatest of their saints are those who most incarnate the particular spirit of each order. For they have found their perfection in the fulfilment of God’s will, and God's will has been fulfilled in their obedience, an obedience to tradition as well as to command, an acceptance of custom as well as of written law. Each of the greater religious orders has therefore possessed its own school of spirituality. For “spirituality” is but a clumsy term for the conscious following of a way to God.

Yet it would seem puerile to discuss which order and which tradition in spirituality is the more perfect in the concrete. Each retains the possibility of corruption and each will mirror in its finite contrasted achievement the infinite unity of God, since each will be perfect in so far as it participates in the divine and yet remain inevitably separate in so far as it is participant; “quod in Deo est simpliciter et uniformiter in creaturis est multipliciter et divisim.”

The most important thing in life is to know God. It is no less necessary than food, clothing and shelter. It is no less necessary, and even more important. “Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven . . Absolutely necessary.

Necessary for us here and necessary for us hereafter. Hereafter, because “This is eternal life to know Thee the only true God and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent.” Here, if only because unless we know Him we cannot know ourselves, and if we do not know ourselves we cannot be what we were intended to be, even as men. It may be true that the proper study of man is man, but it is also true that he knows little of man who knows only man. The very nature of man, the purpose of his strange life, his conflicting desires and interests and yearnings, the meaning of his joys and his pain, the whole bewildering complexity of mystery which we call life, is unintelligible unless we know something of whence he came, whence we came, and whither we are destined. And we know that God made us, and that for some purpose of His own. We cannot know ourselves with anything resembling completeness, we cannot know what we are, let alone what we should be, unless we know Him and His ways. Without that knowledge our whole life becomes meaningless. On the other hand, the more we know of Him, the more our life, the meaning of our existence, grows in completeness, in direction, in unity.

For many centuries past Religious Life, in the official or technical sense, has implied the cloister and the religious habit; and the obvious advantages of these external helps need no showing. Yet it has always been the way of Holy Mother Church, is indeed one of her essential qualities, to accommodate herself in her modes of life to the needs of her children in every age. In recent years many of the faithful have discovered in themselves a desire and a need to seek the perfection of religious life and yet, for one valid reason or another, cannot enter a religious Order or Congregation. For these, too, there is a special corner in the understanding heart of the Church; so that now there exists a number of organizations whereby these souls may pursue the special vocation which has been given to them. Amongst them is one that is under the aegis of the Dominican Order, and it is about this we propose to write a brief account.

The Bishops of Belgium have recently made public the convocation of the Sixth Malines Congress. It will comprise three days of lectures and discussion, will be held in the archiepiscopal city, and will be brought to a close by a great demonstration in which tens of thousands of the faithful will participate; but, in view of the fact that Malines is not extensive enough to hold this concourse, the demonstration itself will take place in Brussels, upon the high plateau of Koekelberg which is dominated by the national Basilica of the Sacred Heart. As far as one can judge beforehand, this demonstration will surpass anything that has hitherto been seen even in Belgium, where the popular temperament loves to show itself in enormous public gatherings with processions, local choirs, and hundreds of banners.

It can be maintained without any exaggeration that the religious history of Belgium has been moulded by these Congresses of Malines, an account of which is given in an interesting book by Professor M. Defourny. In the Congresses of 1863, 1864 and 1867 the Catholics of Belgium assembled their forces together and laid the foundations of their corporate public action. It was about 1840 that the Liberal Party in Belgium began to evolve into an anticlerical party, and the Catholics saw themselves under the necessity of defending their rights in the political field and in public life. Thanks to M. Edouard Ducpétiaux, who was the moving spirit in these earlier Congresses and remains one of the greatest glories of Catholic social action and the courageous precursor of social reforms, these Congresses effected the concentration of the Catholic forces and inaugurated their fruitful operation in public life.

When Sir Arthur Eddington writes that “Religion first became possible for a reasonable scientific man about the year 1927” and when apologists expound their novel vindications of the classical cosmology in the light of quantum mechanics, it is clear to a metaphysician that both sides have missed the point. For the metaphysical approach to reality, with its immediate determinations in psychology and cosmology, either transcends the contingent data of individual research, or it does not exist. Yet apologists and even representative metaphysicians have not always appreciated this essential preliminary to philosophy and apologetics.

Hence it is all the more a remarkable fact when a non-Catholic writer appreciates it, independently, it would seem, of any manifest contact with a philosophical tradition. And in spite of the charges of buffoonery and leg-pulling sure to be brought against him from academic strongholds, the fact that he penetrates again and again to radical metaphysical realities, scattering pseudo-scientific question-begging postulates right and left in his convinced insistence, evidently commands our conscientious attention. We do not praise him precisely for his individual work, but rather because he is representative of an approach greatly, but often vainly, sought. The added fact that he is a professional mathematician, nurtured in the atmosphere of modern physics and thoroughly familiar with it, inevitably inclines many of us all the more to give him a hearing—not because he is a physicist, but because he is a physicist who has gate-crashed the conventional postulates of the physicist philosophers of the last three decades—intelligently, that is to say, and not by mere reaction.

In 1829 William Cobbett published the History of the Protestant Reformation. Cobbett was a remarkable controversialist, and his views were always highly coloured, but in this work he disclosed one of the most significant truths of English economic history. He pointed out to an incredulous nation that the social conditions of the English peasantry had seriously and progressively deteriorated since the beginning of the sixteenth century. He attributed this phenomenon to the dissolution of the religious houses at the time of the Reformation, and to the alienation of property which formerly was held for the relief of poverty, and which now passed into selfish and unscrupulous hands.

The pioneer of modern critical economic history was Thorold Rogers. Without acknowledgment and without intention his detailed and laborious researches substantiate Cobbett’s assertions. Thorold Rogers considered that the impoverishment and progressive deterioration of the peasantry between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries was due to a concerted effort on the part of landlords to lower wages in order that each estate’s rent roll might be increased as much as possible. In many instances in his works Thorold Rogers made assertions and generalizations which could not be justified. It appears that later historians have used these errors as a ground for denying the main truth that lies in Thorold Rogers’ theory of social development, and lately Catholic writers have been emphasizing that the accepted economic histories of to-day ignore the established thesis that the condition of the peasantry between 1500 and 1850 was consistently made worse by the individualistic attitude of the landowning class.

Art both religious and profane has remembered the curse of the serpent: ‘I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed; she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel” (Gen. iii, 15). In pagan art we see the agony of man in Laocoon, in Christian art we see the triumph of the Blessed Mother of God. Amongst many strange cults we see man appeasing the serpent in idolatrous worship, but Christianity has crushed its power for evil. It is in this light, however summarily we may dismiss the legends of hagiography, that we can read their origin, which is in casting out devils and the powers of darkness. Most critics, we presume, would consider the many stories of saints driving away snakes as allegories of their triumph over sin, but there are still no snakes in Ireland whereas Great Britain retains the unpleasant viper. This driving out of serpents occurs in the biographies of more than a score of saints, of whom fourteen are of France, Britain, or Ireland.

The distinctive position of the Anglican communion consists in its claim to be at once Catholic while non-Roman, Reformed while non-Protestant. For the maintenance of this claim nothing is more crucial than the vindication of the reality of its Orders and Sacraments. The more the importance of the idea of the Church is re-discovered and reappreciated, the more important is seen to be the reality of the Eucharist and the Liturgy. Hence Anglicans have come to realize that if their Orders and Eucharist are open to question, their very existence as a Church becomes equally problematical.

The intervention of Pope Leo XIII in this question of the validity of Anglican Orders and the decision of his Bull Apostolicae Curae are familiar to all. Equally familiar is the fact that there are some who hold that neither the intervention nor the decision were final, either because they maintain that, in view of what some Catholic theologians themselves have said regarding the relative and practical character of the Bull, the judgment was not irreversible, or because they dispute the accuracy of the matters of fact on which the unfavourable judgment was based. In this way the majority of Anglican ecclesiastics and scholars are accustomed to contest the historical argument on which Catholics rely.