When Oliver Goldsmith wrote The Deserted Village he made it perfectly clear, both by his title and the content of his poem, what he was intending to say. A great poet of to-day, Mr. T. S. Eliot, in writing East Coker and Burnt Norton, has not been so explicit either in his title or in his contents; few of his readers know Mr. Eliot well enough to realise the significance of these place-names in his own personal history; nor will they find it easy to elucidate all the references within the poems. The title of the third of the trilogy, The Dry Salvages, has been explained by a footnote, though there too the text is not easy to follow.

Recently an attempt has been made to justify the obscurity of modern poetry, and especially Mr. Eliot’s poetry, by maintaining that great poetry in all ages has been obscure, that it is only written for ‘competent’ readers and it not ‘a mere pastime for the idle.’ This is simply not true. Much of the great poetry of the past has been exquisite in its lucidity; many, perhaps, of the references are more obscure to us than they were to contemporaries; but the main themes of the great poems are as plain as their titles, an Ode on a Grecian Urn; Paradise Lost. These poems have formed in all civilized ages one of the very highest recreations to be enjoyed in human leisure; to deny that they are ‘a mere pastime for the idle’ is to misstate the problem. You do not earn your bread by reading poetry, and it can call for more intellectual effort than a detective story without rivalling a Torquemada cross-word puzzle.

The family depends on two people, a man and a woman. It is probable, in our present pattern of culture, that they marry because they fall in love with one another, wish to spend their lives together, and consciously or unconsciously desire children. Before marriage, each is likely to be a self-supporting adult individual, earning and laying out money at his or her own discretion ; rooted in his or her own nationality ; a citizen able to subscribe to the funds of whatever political party he or she thinks likely to bring about the public good; a worker contributing in the vast majority of cases to the national health insurance scheme, with a call on the services of a doctor if he is ill; a person able to give to personal relationships the un-self-conscious love, co-operation, sympathy, respect and self-respect of a responsible and independent human being.

After marriage, however, everything changes; and most vividly of all, the economic position. If there are to be children, the personal relationship between two equal, different and delighted selves has to be run very awkwardly in double harness with an economic relationship of absolute power on the one side and utter dependence on the other. It should be said at once that this relationship has not always been a result of marriage. It has grown up since the Industrial Revblution, which had two evil consequences for married women. The first was the development of a habit of regarding work not as a means of getting things done—houses built, children clothed, food grown—but as a method of getting money ; so that its worth came to be assessed not in terms of achievement, but in terms of-ex-’ change.

The history of the Swastika-Movement goes back to the early nineteenth century. At that time, when the first archaeological excavations were made in Germany the Swastika was found on many objects from Germanic tombs of the first Christian centuries, and so it came to be regarded as a Germanic symbol. The first to popularise the sign was a man named Jahn, who in 1806 founded the German gymnastic clubs, which politically had a strongly nationalistic tendency. Jahn subsequently came to be known as ‘The father of the gymnastic movement.’ His motto was : ‘Frisch, Fromm, Froehlich, Frei’—‘Brisk, Pious, Joyous, Free’; and he arranged the four ‘F’s’ of this device to form a badge in the shape of a Swastika.

Then, the seventies of the last century saw the rise of Anti-Semitism in Germany and the foundation of various Anti-Semitic parties, which in the years before the World War 1914-18 took an increasingly radical direction under the influence of the race theorists. The Swastika, which the Viennese author Guido List (1848-1919), in his bombastically written books, called ‘The holy symbol of the Aryans,’ became, some years before the World War 1914-18, thanks to his writings, the generally adopted badge of the Anti-Semites.

In order to understand later developments, it is necessary to study List’s writings, which prior to 1914 were widely current in ‘nationalist’ circles in Germany and Austria—although indeed they are completely forgotten to-day. Fundamentally, Guido List’s ideas are based on the vague and disputed writings of the Germanised Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and his predecessors, such as the French count Joseph de Gobineau and the latter’s compatriot, De Lapouge. To these must be added the publications of the East Prussian archaeologist, Gustav Kossinna, and certain misinterpreted teachings of the famous German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche.

The liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox Church is known and appreciated by the Catholic West. Less known are its non-liturgical devotions. One such devotion, ‘the prayer of Jesus,’ has for centuries been encouraged in the Eastern Church, though, leaving the freedom of choice in spiritual ways to her faithful, she never imposed it or ascribed to it any particular merits (a practice unknown to the East). With this proviso the Prayer can be compared with the Rosary in the West; and as its roots go back to the early, undivided Church, it could be claimed by the West no less than by the East.

‘Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner.’ This invocation has behind it volumes of spiritual writings and centuries of ascetico-mystical tradition. It is known as ‘the art or mental prayer.’

Many seem to have built their whole spiritual life on the prayer of Jesus, though it cannot be regarded as detached from the rest of the Christian life: Bible reading, sacramental grace, practice of the Commandments and theological virtues. In monasteries it was combined with special ascetical practices. Beginners in the use of the prayer abstained from devotional reading in order to concentrate, and the prayer replaced private psalmody in the cell, outside the services. Some kept it as a unique rule. It was repeated with beads several thousand times and was accompanied by prostrations. This acted as the first ascetical exercise of the will in obedience to the rule imposed by one’s spiritual father, teaching also control over the body.

Péguy’s life practically covers the stretch of years between the Franco-Prussian war and the war of 1914. He was killed at the Marne in September, 1914. They are years when the attitude of Frenchmen to the problems of nationalism underwent fundamental changes, which are reflected in Péguy’s Cahiers de la Quinzaine.

For two generations after the Franco-Prussian war, defeat and determinism worked their separate corrosions and Frenchmen knew such depression of spirit that perhaps in all history no country has fallen so low in faith in its power to carry on. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century German ideas had become increasingly popular, and it seemed to some people that all that was vital in recent thought came from Germany. Tracing the reactions of two generations of young Frenchmen to the music of Wagner is a very good way of tracing a change of attitude for which Barrès was largely responsible. He felt the fatal attraction of the Tristan music : ‘It is in vain that I am bound to the mast, like the wise Odysseus. I tear my bonds asunder, and ardent even to despair I plunge beneath the waves to seek the sirens.’ Elsewhere, he speaks of Wagner’s creations as exerting harmful influences, demoralising and brutalising’ men’s minds.

The stout little man, lurching-along the narrow pavement of a street in Lima, had been celebrating Peru’s rupture of relations with the Axis, and he was looking for Germans to insult. His technique for identifying German citizens was to thrust two fingers, extended in the symbolic shape of a ‘V’ into the face of passers-by and to study their reactions. Mine failed to satisfy him, but when he finally realised that was English he melted into a flood/of tender remorse. ‘Mi amigo. All English my friends.’ ‘Muchas gratias,’ I replied, ‘A Dios.’ But he would not let me go. ‘You are my friend. Anywhere, anywhen.’ His heart was in the right place, but his feet were not; and by the time I had rescued him from a passing car, his affection was dynamic in its energy. Seizing me by the arm, he propelled me through the front door of his own shop. I disengaged myself as the champion of the democracies collapsed on to the sofa. ‘You are my friend. Anywhere, anywhen.’ I looked up and my eyes came to rest on an advertisement for the Leica, an enlargement of a Leica snapshot of the Wetterhorn from Grindelwald. And, for one vivid moment, I had a sense of bilocation as if part of me was in Grindelwald and part in Peru. ‘My friend. Anywhere. Anywhen.’ Fifty years have passed since I first saw Grindelwald, and few indeed are the human friends whose company I would prefer to the Wetterhorn.

John Tauler, a contemporary of Suso, is perhaps the best known of the three great German Dominican mystics. For he is the most characteristic representative of his Order, being first and foremost a preacher and shepherd of souls. Like St. John the Baptist, he was a voice crying in the wilderness of the world : ‘Repent ye, abandon the creatures and turn to the Creator.’ This was his battle cry, and his life work was to show man how to fulfil its demand. Whereas Suso made his own life a mirror, as it were, of the mystic way, reflecting in it both its glories and its agonies, Tauler took man by the hand and led him step by step to the Sanctuary of Mystic Union.

He was eminently fitted for his work, for he had that deep insight into human nature which is indispensable in the preacher and teacher. ‘Man, he said, hangs between heaven and earth. With his highest faculties he is exalted above himself and above all things, and dwells in God, but with his lowest faculties he is subjected under all things into the very ground of humility.’ He calls the higher faculties the ‘inner man,’ whilst the lower faculties form the ‘outer man.’ The inner man is subject to God alone, but the outer man to all creatures in true humility. The task of the inner man is of a double nature: he directs the outer man by the light of his superior knowledge, whilst in himself he remains unruffled by the changes of earthly existence, ‘sunk and united’ in his communion with God.

It is becoming a convention to object to the Aposlolate of Christ the Worker because the name is misleading, or at any rate inadequate. The common answer, too, is becoming something of a recurrent theme. Yet if the answer is examined with an unbiassed mind it will be seen to be perfectly adequate. To quote from the Statutes : ‘The Apostolate of Christ the Worker ... is intended to be a means of bringing back to God the mass of the workers . . . It directs its energies towards the working masses throughout the world, irrespective of class and profession. It may be parochial, non-parochial or professional, according to the members who constitute the various branches. But though doubtless its work may take on a multitude of different aspects, it will remain, under this manifold activity, one indivisible body.’ An even more forcible answer lies in the actual work of the Apostolate, a work which rises from the principle embodied in the last sentence of the quotation, the spirit of unity and brotherhood. Among the works of the Apostolate the founder has put first the celebration of a monthly Mass. By this scheme, now become the Mass Calendar, all Catholics of any status, workers or otherwise, may share in the work and privileges of the Apostolate by offering Mass once a month for specified intentions. Significantly this monthly Mass intention is not included among the preludes to apostolic work, it is not insisted on only as a preparation, of soul, but it is the first and most important part of the actual apostolic work of the movement.

A number of books dealing with the function of imaginaton in humanu life have recently appeared. Is this because external experience is becoming harsher, as the war proceeds, shattering deli cate sensibility, so that we are forced into the internal world of images? Is it escapism? Or is it not, rather, a dawning realisation that in this interior faculty of sensation lies ‘the key to the great puzzle of our mental decay and to future remedies for civilisation? Excluding, therefore, the complications of psychology and aesthetics, of reflexes and poetic experience, we may profitably return to the simple truths about the human imagination which still throw much light on present problems.

Of the works here under review, the four-page News-Letter Supplement by Philip Mairet stands high above the rest in importance and value. He shows that the imagination, which is the property not merely of men of genius and ‘vision,’ but of all men, is a faculty of ‘etherialised’ sensations. With the memory it forms a kind of treasury of all one’s external experiences, so that a man can see, hear, touch or taste things which he has experienced in the past almost as strongly as if they were physically present and acting on his nervous system. Miss Ellis-Fermor, although she claims that this faculty ‘exists in most men,’ wrongly identifies it with a poetic faculty in the sense of an essentially active and constructive power, creating new reality from the data of experience. This is only one function of the imagination which, as Mr. Mairet seems to suggest, automatically provides a background to life, so that one can interiorly retain contact with the day-to-day physical experiences even when withdrawn from them, as in sleep.

The question is sometimes asked : Are there any married saints? Of course we all know there have been many married saints who died as martyrs; many who lived virginal lives in holy wedlock after the example of our Lady and St. Joseph; many who attained to heroic sanctity in widowhood; many who made a compact of continence after some years of marriage; and lastly there have been many married saints who mutually agreed to separate and serve God for the rest of their days in sanctuary or cloister. But all these categories are here excluded, and an attempt is made to show from hagiography that quite a numerous body of saints can be found who served God in the married state until their death, and lived lives of heroic sanctity, without surrendering the rights and responsibilities of parenthood.

Practically all the Old Testament saints fulfilled these conditions, and amongst those married to one wife we may instance Isaac, Joseph the Chaste and Moses, whilst of holy wives we cannot find a better example than the chaste Susanna. Verging on the New Law we have our Lady’s holy parents Joachim and Anna, and Zachafy and Elizabeth, parents of the Baptist.

Of the many married Christians who became disciples of the Apostles, St. Paul singles out St. Aquila and his wife, St. Priscilla, for special mention three times in his Epistles, whilst St. Luke speaks of them three times in the Acts of the Apostles. They were not martyrs, although they suffered much for the faith, having been exiled from Rome on that account. They died according to the Roman Martyrology in Asia Minor and their combined feast falls on July 8th.

Aladdin’s lamp revealed, to its fortunate possessor, the riches of this world and many would fain have h rub of it; the lamp of Faith which has infinitely greater powers is not so popular. This is odd. The riches of that other world, where one may ‘turn but a stone to start a wing, ‘lie idle; yet we are of that other world in saecula saeculorum.

Speaking under correction (for my similes may be as inaccurate as they are inadequate) I would assert that the rays of our lamp not only pick out abstractions, ideas, reasons, and so forth, the apprehension of which adjusts the soul to the Divine Will, but shines upon material things to be seen; and, having an ‘x’ quality, upon things to be heard, felt, and even tasted. The beams of its light not only dispel the immaterial darkness so that we may see the material way, but enlarge the mind so that we enjoy the journey on it; in short, the light enables us to see God in his creation, especially at its fulness within the narrow borders of his Church.

The Church, irrespective of specifically spiritual truths, is the most amazing storehouse of material truths, the truths also of sound and sense which, as the ray shines upon them, are seen to be of the very texture of Beauty. The adventurous soul under this illumination feels as though she were inspecting the wardrobes of heaven and at last apprehending the music of the spheres.