The critics of the economic system of modern industrial and commercial life are legion. Since the famous attack of Marx, this so-called ‘Capitalistic System’ has been continually assailed and defended with an ever-increasing power of learning and ‘judgment born of experience.’ From every angle and vantage-point Capitalism has been viewed from without: while from within its many secrets of good and evil have been dragged forth into the light of day either for admiration or for shame. Of the many far-reaching truths concerning its nature which we have thus slowly discovered, perhaps the chief is the most alarming—its incalculable strength. So deep and strong are its roots—avarice and coveteousness, so enormous is its growth—its jungled strength covers the earth, so dominant is its influence—no civilised people can escape it, that it can and does defy the legion of critics to check its growth or lessen its influence. As some monstrous, hydra-headed giant of the fairy story, Capitalism smiles horrifically upon its millions of victims, who see nothing more in the smile than the hope of their present safety. And up till now, there is no sign of a ‘Jack-the-Giant-Killer’ in the legion of critics.

To add to the volume of criticism of this economic system seems gratuitous. Yet there does appear to the writer some good reason for hoping that its gigantic monstrosity is not so strong as it looks, and indeed even to-day a weakness, latent but radical, in its system, is being slowly exposed.

The inscription can still be made out. It is carved in stone over the porch of what was once the old grammar school, but is now the hall and institute of the local Labour Party. Orate pro anima Clementis Abbās. So all are bidden who pass this way in Evesham town, whether they belong to the Labour Party or have quite other political convictions, to remember the soul of the last Abbot of Evesham—Clement Lichfield.

He it was who built the Bell Tower, a campanile apart and independent, that the bells of the great abbey might have a house worthy of their message. And of all that vast monastery, that holy house of St. Egwin, its first abbot and bishop of Worcester, nothing remains save the Bell Tower and some crumbling stone foundations. Hardly was the Bell Tower finished when the crash came. To Henry VIII in the year 1539 the riches of Evesham were a temptation not to be missed. Usurped authority must needs buy support, and these abbey lands at Evesham, as elsewhere, judiciously bestowed could win many to approve the royal supremacy. Not only the good land, but the wealth and splendour of the abbey shrines and the very stones must be taken and distributed. The monks, too, must be dispersed, for Archbishop Cranmer discerned that while monasticism survived great would be the difficulty of introducing the new religion, of pouring the new wine of Luther and Zwingli into the old bottles of the Catholic Church in England.

We imagine that few besides those specially interested in the fate of Christianity in the East paid much attention to a tiny paragraph which appeared among the obiter dicta of the newspapers some weeks ago. The news was not considered worthy of prominence; even an important Catholic paper placed it at the foot of the column. Those who discovered the paragraph learned that two Christians had been murdered at Smyrna and a Catholic priest stoned; that was all.

But in the days when European Christendom was still a reality such items of news have stirred up whole countries, and have gone far towards the promotion of a new crusade. Times and sentiments have changed. Perhaps some excuse may be found for our apathy in the fact that the events of the past ten years have so accustomed us to the thought of death, murder and the massacre of thousands, that the slaughter of two individuals even on account of their Christian faith can hardly be expected to stir up interest, not to speak of indignation. Besides, did not this happen in Asia Minor? And how can we be expected to be moved with righteous indignation over two wretched Asiatics, when we have watched the slow massacre of a Christian people, the Armenians, in the same country?

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.

A town and Gown affray in these days is not usually regarded as serious. In fact such conflicts have almost ceased to be, the gown confining its attention to the annoying of college authorities rather than attacking town. In the Middle Ages, however, there occurred bitter and bloody fights between students and citizens. Anthony Wood tells of many killed and wounded in these affairs. After the battles, peace was secured, for the time being, by the paying of compensation by the town, because the gown, being well up in logic and law, could always prove that it was right and the town hopelessly wrong.

A great affray in Paris, early in the year 1229, led to disastrous results. The fight began in wine and ended in blood, which was the ordinary procedure; what was extraordinary about this particular riot was that when the citizens were tired of being knocked on the head, the civic authorities sent out the Civic Guard, and Queen Blanche ordered her archers to quell the tumult. These two bodies of disciplined soldiery shot down the students without mercy. They, badly beaten and resentful, clamoured for redress. The Masters— Paris University was a guild of Masters—took up the quarrel. The Queen refused them satisfaction, and in a short time a deadlock was reached; then the University had recourse to a very modern weapon of retaliation—they declared a strike. If they expected by this means to achieve their ends they were disappointed, since town and court stood firm.

Historically, by far the most interesting thing in the process of the Catholic Church is the embryonic character of every Catholic institution at its origin. In this the Catholic process is exactly consonant with creation.

Most moderns would say that this was true of all human institutions: it is the fashionable tag of the day based on a vague materialism, or Pantheism, and it is entirely wrong. In almost all human institutions except Catholic institutions, the work of man is deliberate, planned, and fails. It does not develop consonantly to its origins: you do not see in its growth the unfolding of a germ. Institutions very often grow up unconsciously from origins which have no sort of resemblance to or communion with their final form: but then their origins are exactly not embryonic. Such developments are but examples of the truth that the human will cannot impose itself upon the world. What is remarkable about Catholic institutions from the smallest to the greatest (until it is at last found to be true of the Church itself) is that the origins are (1) of one essence with the final thing, and yet are (2) simple, i.e. undifferentiated, and (3) apparently insignificant : and in those three lies the true meaning of the word embryonic.

Should we enter some old-established library of size and respectability, we shall be pretty sure to notice on its topmost shelves the sixty volumes, seldom dusted and never opened, of the Universal History, a vast compilation which appeared between the years 1760 and 1790, and which, though perhaps of no critical value, contains an infinity of matter never brought together before or since. Bishop Warburton, the one-time dictator and tyrant of the world of literature, used to speak with contempt of this work as ‘miserable trash’ and ‘infamous rhapsody’ ; but Gibbon, a very much better judge, says that the excellence of a great part of it is ‘universally admired’, and that some portions of it in particular are ‘executed with erudition, taste, and judgment.’ Now by far the greater number of the volumes in this series that deal with Ancient History were written by the subject of the present sketch, one of the most extraordinary characters the eighteenth or indeed any century ever produced—George Psalmanazar.

What Psalmanazar’s real name was has never been discovered, any more than his parentage and the country and place of his birth. The name he fashioned for himself was taken from that of the Assyrian king mentioned in IV Kings xvii, 3, while the intimate friends of his later years believed him to be a Frenchman born in some part of Languedoc. He appeared in London in 1703, being then about twenty-four years old. His amazing story at once rivetted public attention.

Never in the world’s history have economic problems played such a large part in human life or had such a direct influence on human thought as at present. Economics have come to overshadow politics, to absorb into their sphere the entire social question. Even the man in the street has learnt that his personal welfare is intimately bound up with an economic system. He may be indifferent towards politics, sceptical of the value of philosophy and science, hostile towards religion, but in economic matters his interest and prejudices are keen. Hence the rise of Socialism—the success of an economic gospel and an economic interpretation of life. Hence too a new spirit of criticism towards religion, which is felt to be indifferent towards the things which are so vitally important—it is ‘the opium of the poor’ which drugs them into contentment with their lot, and indifference towards their true interests.

This excessive preoccupation with economic problems is, however, abnormal and temporary. A healthy society is no more troubled about its economic organisation than a healthy man is troubled about his digestion. The present unrest is a symptom of disease, as well as a symptom of necessary change. Modern society is traversing that critical period of its existence, which the Ancient World also went through during the century that preceded the Augustan Peace. In both cases the material resources of society have outstripped its moral control. It is the crucial moment in the life of a civilisation—a time when societies and individuals are beset by temptations to violent remedies and excessive hopes, alternating with apathy and despair.

Several hands have attempted versions of Adoro te; it would be impertinent to add another attempt without a word of prefatory justification. My object has been to supply what doubtless others also have desiderated, such an English rendering of these twenty-eight lines as will sing naturally to the plain chant melody in the Vatican edition.

St. Thomas’s hymns to some appear doggerels. And certainly they are severely stript of all adventitious ornament or poeticism. But there is one merit that cannot be denied to them by the most envious critic : an immense significance. They are so crowded with meaning that each may be called a little Summa of Eucharistic theology, with a variation from the festal didactics of Lauda Sion—appropriate to an Office—to the devout personal effusion of Adoro te. Eucharistic theology reduced within the strict dimensions of verse, and, more particularly, of ‘singing-verse.’ The verse form serves both for economy of bulk in expression and for a mnemonic device. The virtue of good doggerels is that they are not easily forgotten, and I cannot believe that St. Thomas was not deliberately making a mnemonic compendium of the simplest statement of Catholic doctrine about Transubstantiation. Perhaps he was at the same time executing a lyrical impulse to give to this truth the most chastened and disciplined form of verbal beauty. Lyrics or doggerels, it beats me to decide which they are.

Anyhow, the peculiar quality of this hymn makes a peculiar problem for the translator—and all translators of Latin hymns travel a road that is milestoned with the skeletons of predecessors who have failed horribly—for two reasons.

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?

Poliziano alone of the Medicean Academy has lived into modern times for reasons with which he would not be wholly content; for though the first of the Classicists to use his genius on behalf of his own tongue, he regarded his editions of the Classics as more important, as, indeed, in themselves they were. Fortunately, like his patron and intimate Lorenzo, Poliziano was very modern, also he was a born poet, and his easy Greek and Latin made these languages live. His work was no mere imitation of Horace in verse or Livy in prose; he was so saturated in the classical learning and yet so wholly modern that he really embodied the spirit of antiquity in a living person, singularly unlike the higher and dryer scholars of his own and succeeding times. It is possible to have a vast erudition and yet to lack the spirit of the old world, and it is possible to miss the highest scholarship and yet to have a mind informed with antiquity. Poliziano was certainly not the greatest scholar of the Renaissance, but he was the most original and the most brilliant interpreter of the ancient to the modern world.

Erasmus, a far more profound scholar and thinker and human withal, regarded Poliziano’s scholarship as inaccurate; but his conscientiousness is apparent in his collating and editing of Justinian's Pandects from the Pisan MS., a gigantic undertaking, in which he never resorted to emendations unless the text seemed hopeless.

Humanitarianism, in its modern form began with Auguste Comte ninety years ago, and has, since then, been ably expounded by such positivists as Stuart Mill, Spencer, Huxley and Tyndall, as well as by James Cotter Morison and H. G. Wells. But man’s worship of Man—for Humanitarianism is nothing else—is as old almost as history. Only its name has changed. To-day, however, possibly more than in any other age, the revivifying of this error is a terrible menace, rapidly taking root and spreading like some noxious weed in our very midst.

Amongst those who have become acutely conscious of this danger and who have set themselves to expose and resist it, Father Dudley has wielded his pen to good effect in the cause of Christianity and human happiness. In a recent work (from the excellence of which even the dreadful colour chosen for the cover must not be allowed to detract) he has exposed the worthlessness and folly of this pretended road to happiness. As Mr. Chesterton says so justly, in his Introduction, this ‘book is concerned with a highly practical and even topical point in the controversies of the day.’

‘Positivistic Humanitarianism’ is a big title for a petty system. It clings to sense knowledge to the detriment and exclusion of intelligence. Nothing must be believed which does not come under the direct dominion of the senses. The logical conclusion of such a doctrine—it is the one glimmer of logic—is the exclusion of God. And, since man must have something to adore, it offers him himself as a deity.

The establishment of such an economic order is demanded not only by external circumstances but also by a human need.

In almost all the industrial countries the wage labourer is thoroughly disaffected. For almost a century he has been fed on the doctrines of political liberalism. He has been taught to believe in democracy, in the equal citizenship of all, and it is not surprising that he should have come at last to demand the application of these theories to his daily life— that is to economic matters. Hence the determination of organised labour to acquire a fixed standard of life, secure from the fluctuations of the international market. Hence too its tendency to look for the satisfaction of these ideals to Socialism, which had its birth at the time when the prospects of the working classes seemed most desperate, and which has shown itself ready to step into the place of the old governments in the political disintegration of Europe that has followed the world war.

The Socialist doctrines, especially in their ‘Scientific’ Marxian form, in spite of being a conscious revolt against the prevailing economic theories, nevertheless took over from the older economists their materialistic outlook, and their faith in the operation of unmodifiable economic laws. They simply added to these fundamental conceptions a theory of historical evolution, by which they taught that the capitalist system was a necessary stage in the development of the individual handicrafts of the past into the scientific socialised industrialism of the future.

The epoch known as the Renaissance is the most complex in all history. Various forces were at work moulding the national, economic, intellectual and moral life of the people. Religion was not the least important of these factors. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Church was the sole means of civilization for the nations. From the time of Charles the Great, Church and State had worked hand in hand, with but little friction. Under the sway of Gregory VII and Innocent III, the temporal power of the papacy was secured. Philip the Fair and the exile in Avignon weakened papal rule. Pope after pope tried to protect and increase the so-called Donation of Constantine and the estates of Matilda of Tuscany which formed the bulk of the Patrimony of St. Peter.

During the fifteenth century there was a change among the people in their attitude toward the Church. The economic growth of cities, the increase of commerce resulting from inventions and discoveries, the strengthening of central governments and the rise of national kingships, lessened subserviency to papal authority. But above all, the intellectual Renaissance developed an independence of thought which in many cases led to a change of dogma.

Some of the finest literature in the world has been written in the shades of the prison-house. Ovid composed his Tristia as a convict in the Crimea, the reason for his marooning being that he had loved the Emperor Augustus’ daughter too deeply. Boethius penned his Consolations of Philosophy when under sentence of death. James the First of Scotland solaced his days of captivity at Windsor with the creation of that noble volume, The Queen's Quhair. A distinguished French prisoner in England, Charles D’Orleans, the contemporary of Villon, beguiled his dull leisure with the invention of beautiful poems.

Villon, jail-bird and man of genius, was not as well housed by his captors and jailers as Charles, but his miserable condition was a sharp spur to his quick brain. In the Castle of Meung he was cast into a cell without light or air, dripping with water and swarming with rats, toads and snails. In such miserable conditions he wrote his Ballad of Debate of the Heart and Body of Villon and his Ballad of Villon in Prison, a most poignant appeal to help Francois living instead of saving up prayers for Francois dead. Here is a taste of its quality:

The infant Church was born at a time when the greatest state that the world has ever seen was attaining to its full development. The whole civilised world west of the Euphrates was united under a single head. The age of civil war, of social unrest, of the exploitation of the conquered peoples was at last over. Everywhere new cities were springing up, trade was flourishing and population increasing. It was ‘the hour of the prince of this world,’ the apotheosis of triumphant material power and wealth.

And yet the whole splendid building rested on non-moral foundations—often on mere violence and cruelty. The divine Caesar might be a Caligula or a Nero, wealth was an excuse for debauchery and the prosperity of the wealthy classes was based on the institution of slavery—not the natural household slavery of primitive civilisation, but an organised plantation-slavery which left no room for any human relation between slave and master.

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.