John Henry Newman’s Apologia pro vita sua has been epigrammatically described as “the work of a French sceptic controlled by an English don—or a joint product of Voltaire and Bishop Butler.” Bishop Gore’s Belief in God, which might well be called his Apologia pro fide sua, is of the same dual and complementary parenthood as the earlier Apologia. Cardinal and Bishop alike belong to that resolute band of thinkers for whom the highest truths are to be discovered in a balance of probabilities and even of contradictories.

The younger apologist is hardly a less challenging personality than the elder. Few of the Tertullians or Origens of our day have had a life so crowded with happenings and doings. An Oxford Doctor of Divinity who identified his economic thought with Socialism, who interwove his theological thought with Rationalism, and who accepted the ecclesiastical mode of Anglo-Catholicism, had colour enough in his life to attract not only the undergraduate imagination of Oxford, but even the adult commercialism of Birmingham. There was no limit to the influence wielded by a man who seemed prepared to give up everything, even a belief or a Bishopric, in his thirst for the truth. Thus sceptics were dogmatic about the power wielded over men by a man who

. . . had been very far After where the shadows are.

By Economics we mean the conclusions arrived at by man in his study of the production and distribution of material wealth.

These conclusions are often called, with much solemnity, “laws” ; and if by “law” is meant something that has been observed to happen every time a certain set of conditions are present the word may pass.

For instance, the economic “law of diminishing returns” is the simple conclusion that there is a limit to the amount of labour that may be applied profitably to any given area. Half an hour spent daily on the plants in flower-pots or window-boxes should produce a profitable return, and another quarter of an hour may produce an increased return. But two hours would bring a diminishing return, that is, something certainly less than four times the good result of the half-hour’s attention. So with an allotment. Double crops may be obtained by the additional labour of a second person, but six people working on the same allotment will not produce six times as much harvest. A point is always reached by the “law of diminishing returns” when no more labour can be expended profitably on any given piece of work.

In order to understand the present deadlock in Ireland it is necessary to study its history and the series of political blunders which has led up to the deplorable situation now prevailing in that unhappy country. For this purpose I would recommend everybody, who has not already done so, to read an article entitled “A Tragedy of Errors” that appeared in The Nation on January 8th, written by Mr. H. L. Hammond. This most admirable article has now been reprinted in pamphlet form and can be obtained in the offices of the “Peace with Ireland Council,” 30 Queen Anne’s Chambers. Also the excellent study of recent Irish history, The Evolution of Sinn Fein, by R. M. Henry, should be read by all.

It is difficult for those who have not been over to Ireland to realize the lamentable effect that the policy of the Government is having upon the Irish people. As soon as you cross the Channel you are in a totally different atmosphere. Everybody is living on the edge of a volcano and the talk is of reprisals, raids, murders, robberies, and the sad and dreadful events that are happening daily in town and countryside.

“Industrial unrest” is apt to be regarded in many quarters as something new and strange, an alarming phenomenon of the present age due to the sudden irruption of mysterious and hitherto unheard-of qualities in man. Frequent allusions are made to the “present unrest.” All manner of solutions, plans, and proposals are offered in the hope that labour troubles will disappear in the same mysterious fashion that they came. There is, too, a persistent belief in certain minds that “industrial unrest” will “blow over” as though it were merely a passing fashion, akin to the rebellion of the day scholars at Ipswich when Mr. Nupkins was magistrate and Mr. Pickwick a visitor. After they had conspired to break the windows of an obnoxious apple-seller, had hooted the beadle, and pelted the constabulary—“an elderly gentleman in top-boots, who had been called out to repress the tumult,” the latter was able to announce the retirement of the rioters in the memorable words, “Popular feeling has in a measure subsided, in consekens o’ the boys having dispersed to cricket.”

Friday, April 15, 1921, is a day to mark in the Kalendar. We are still so near to it that there is no need to detail the Conferences, Proclamations, Appeals, and Letters which marked the stages of the fever of that hectic week ; enough that on Friday morning the Army, the Special Reserve and the new Defence Force were ready for war, that the Triple Alliance had called on the workers of the country for a General Strike, and that 10 p.m. was to have seen Great Britain as near to the modern equivalent of civil war as at any time since 1642. Yet that night one placard at least proclaimed the general relief. It blazoned one word—Peace.

On the Saturday, the Press offered a bewildered country its explanations. One section had it, in the words of the Morning Post, that “The Great Bluff” of Labour had “failed.” Other papers told that Mr. Thomas had stared revolution in the face and had been too timid—or too brave, which you please— to face it. Others attributed the dramatic end to a realization on the part of the leaders of the Triple Alliance that their men were not staunch behind them. At least one crowned the Premier with fresh laurels. A new Cromwell had saved his country with the threat of something that approximated to 500,000 bayonets. At any rate it was “ peace.”

A Resurrection of Relics is the title of a “Modern Churchman’s defence in a recent charge of heresy” urged against the Rev. H. D. A. Major, principal of a Church of England Theological College at Oxford, and Editor of The Modern Churchman. Presented by a brother clergyman to his bishop on a charge of heresy on account of a statement publicly made “that the form which the doctrine of the resurrection assumes in his mind is the survival of death by a personality which has shed its physical integument for ever,” Mr. Major has brought out a pamphlet in which he reiterates this statement and endeavours to defend his position.

He has been brought to hold what he does, he tells us, not merely “because of the intrinsic improbability” of the doctrine from which he dissents, “nor because of the scientific difficulties to which it was open.” He has been led to reject the doctrine “because it has become clear that Jesus Christ did not teach it.” With the Apostles it is otherwise, and “it may well be that the teaching of St. Paul is different.” But, if so, so much the worse for St. Paul. Like the Salvation Army lass when confronted with St. Paul’s teaching on women’s speaking in church, he has his answer ready. “Ah ! but that, you see, is just where I don’t agree with Paul.” There is only a single passage of Our Lord’s teaching to appeal to, so he tells us, for “the resurrection teaching of the Fourth Gospel is not easy to interpret” and may therefore, apparently, be left unexamined. The one passage which is decisive, in Mr. Major’s view, is the answer of Our Lord to the Sadducees, “I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.

Prejudices die hard, and I suppose the idea still prevails abroad that France is an irreligious, if not actually an anti-Catholic, country. Living in France after the war, it is a continual source of astonishment that such an impression should ever have arisen at all. I know, for instance, a very shrewd old French lady, the wife of a deputé for a Southern constituency, who regards Paris as a religious centre second in importance only to Rome itself. She has spent a great part of each year in Paris for fifty years, more or less, and she ought to be in a position to know its character. She and her husband the deputé have for twenty years never once missed making their annual pilgrimage to Lourdes. I know of another deputé, from the other end of France, who once a month stays up all night on duty at the perpetual adoration in the Sacre Cœur Basilica. These are not even isolated cases : they have both come within my own acquaintance in one typically unpretentious middle-class hotel. Neither of them are men of any particular note outside of the districts that elected them to the Chambre.

Bulgaria has shown more readiness than any of our late enemies to carry out the crushing obligations imposed upon her, and the Allies have taken advantage of this attitude to treat her with greater severity than other States which have given more trouble. It may be possible to justify this policy, but it is surely impossible to deny that the Allied Powers, on their part, ought to carry out their Treaty undertakings towards Bulgaria. This they have failed to do.

They undertook, for instance, to provide Bulgaria with a commercial outlet on the Ægean. Not only have they done nothing to fulfil this promise, but the British Government still insists on retaining Greek sovereignty over Western Thrace (where less than a third of the population is Greek), which is equivalent to debarring Bulgaria altogether from direct access to the Mediterranean.

But the question which affects the Bulgarians even more vitally is that of the protection of minorities, for at least a quarter of the Bulgarian race is under the rule of its worst enemies. The Allied Powers have undertaken, in the St. Germain and other Treaties, to safeguard the racial and religious rights of minorities in Serbia, Roumania, and Greece. Since these Treaties were signed, tens of thousands of Bulgarians have been driven from their homes in Macedonia and Thrace ; all Bulgarian schools have been closed, and all Bulgarian churches handed over to the Patriarchists.

By the modern non-catholic mind the problem of Our Lord Jesus Christ’s knowledge of His Divinity is stated in terms of Consciousness. In other words, the mass of non-catholic writers on the nature and work of Jesus Christ ask, and in various ways answer, such a question as this : “Was Jesus Christ conscious of His Divinity?” For example, this statement of the great problem of the Jesus Christ of the Gospels was dominant in the recent conference of Modern Churchmen at Cambridge.

The Dean of Carlisle, whose historical scholarship is not necessarily akin to theology, said “that Jesus did not claim divinity for Himself. He may have called Himself, or more probably allowed Himself to be called, the Messiah or Son of God ; but never in any critically, well-attested sayings was there anything suggesting that His conscious relation to God was other than that of a man towards God” (Daily Telegraph, 13 Aug.). Here the phrase “conscious relation to God” seems to mean that Jesus Christ did not know and did not believe Himself to be God. He knew and believed Himself to be merely a man. In Dean Rashdall’s recent explanations he seems to assert that Jesus was God. We await his explanation of how Jesus could be God and not claim Divinity.

We may imitate the method of our master St. Thomas by setting down the opinion from which we differ. Dean Rashdall of Carlisle has given us a full and perhaps final expression of that opinion in his paper read at the Cambridge Conference of Modern Churchmen under the title “Christ as Logos and Son of God.” He writes :

“Jesus did not claim divinity for Himself. He may have called Himself, or more probably allowed Himself to be called, the Messiah or Son of God. But never in any critically well-attested sayings is there anything which suggests that His conscious relation to God was other than that of a man towards God. . . . The speeches of the Fourth Gospel where they go beyond the Synoptic conception cannot be regarded as history, valuable as they may be for theology. The doctrine of our Lord’s divinity must be taken to express the Church’s conception of what Jesus is or should be to His followers and to the world, not His own theory about Himself.

“Note 2. . . .If we accept the Synoptic discourses as substantially correct (though not, of course, in every detail, for there are considerable discrepancies between them), it is impossible to regard the Johannine discourses as equally accurate reports ; and even in this Gospel few sentences (when taken apart from the Preface, which does not pretend to represent the words of Jesus, and other comments of the Evangelist) imply actual Godhead in the sense of post-Nicene theology. . . . The claim to be the Son of God does not necessarily imply Godhead” (The Modern Churchman, Sept., pp. 278, 279)

A wholly new influence over books written on school-life began with Compton Mackenzie and Sinister Street. Previously to that there had indeed been school stories, an endless procession of them, including such masterpieces as Tom Brown's Schooldays and others that like Eric sought to appeal frankly to that innate sentimentalism that lies uncomfortably across the conscience of every English boy. These, however, had culminated in The Hill, The Harrovians, and The Bending of the Twig, which are the three finest probably of that older school of Romanticism, throwing its touching veil of fights, friendship, and laughter over the hardened formalities and dreary littlenesses of normal school-life. These represent, then, the final effort of a style of writing which had become obsolete when dealing with “Olympians,” but was still employed in the happy efforts of grown men to recapture the spirit of boyhood, its inner sanctities and outer brutalities, its sorrows, its heartiness, its monotony, its intrigues as baffling, and to master and pupil as entrancing as the political games that interest and exhaust the diplomats of a larger world.

Then came the first volume of Sinister Street. This must be too well known to all readers of Blackfriars to require much treatment here : but its importance is hardly to be calculated. It opened the eyes of boys to the fascinating study of self-analysis : for it differed in two respects from previous ventures, in that first, it was written by one who had hardly left school, and secondly, it was a very detailed description of the changing attitude of a boy’s mind, its unfolding to good and evil, and thus it interested the reader, as often as not a boy-reader, in watching the changing attitude of his own mind.

The recent Conference of Church of England Modernists has drawn attention to the Fourth Gospel. In calling it the Fourth Gospel we are not minded to deny that it is the Gospel of St. John, the beloved disciple. Indeed, we should be doing violence to our reason, or our reasons, if we did otherwise than believe it to be the eye-witness and ear-witness of him who leaned on the bosom of the Master. But our chief aim is to denote the historic value of this Gospel which, if it is not the eye-witness of the last years of Jesus was assuredly the eye-witness of the first years of His Church. In both cases it is of supreme value as a witness to that consciousness which has been the unique claim of the Catholic Church.

Two preliminaries will clear a way to the centre of our thesis.

The Fourth Gospel is a product of Eastern, not Western Christianity. It is a delicate point of history to decide whether it came from Jerusalem or from Ephesus. In either case its witness to the historic development of the Church can hardly be overrated. If it sprang from Ephesus, it arose out of a Christian consciousness which was definitely the work of St. Paul. If it sprang from Jerusalem, it arose from a Christian consciousness which, at the time of writing, owed little or nothing to St. Peter.

The oral instruction which Jesus had given His apostles had its limitations ; although it may well be doubted whether it had the limitations of written instruction. It is clear that human intelligences could not retain in a state of active consciousness all the sayings and doings of some three years, so filled with activity as to leave little time even for foodtaking.

After wellnigh eight centuries of cruelty and hate, peace seems now at last to be dawning upon Ireland. In a poem of servile flattery addressed in 1545 to Henry VIII by the antiquary Leland, are three Latin verses to celebrate an imagined final settlement of the Irish question. “Repentance has subdued the savage Irish everywhere routed, and has taught them to bear the sweet yoke of British law.” After the experience of some four further centuries of persistent attempt to force on the Irish the “yoke” —to their taste not sweet but bitter—of an alien people, we have at long last learnt that the only true and final peace between England and Ireland must be based on liberty and justice. Whether the present treaty be wholly in accordance with these is a political question I do not wish to raise. Only this is surely evident that it does offer such measure of both as will enable Ireland to enter with full self-respect a new and a better union with England, a union not of force and terror, but of free co-operation. That the dawn is overcast with the storm clouds of bitter opposition from irreconcilables should not make us despondent. For the storm clouds will pass over, and the dawn will brighten into daylight.

While we are thus watching the dawn with a hope not to be killed by passing anxieties, it seems opportune to remember one who at the very hour of sunset, when the shadows of the coming night were beginning to darken over his country, worked for that dawn whose rise we now witness.