Everything Christian begins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, and ends in glory to the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. And the essential point in all religious recovery is a realisation that God is all in all, and that our heart, our strength and our faith in the future come from that controlling absorbing, essential fact of the reality of God.

When Eric Gill, the sculptor, was asked to make a sculpture for the League of Nations at Geneva, he went to the beginning of Genesis for his text, and he made a design like that of Michaelangelo in the Sistine Chapel in Rome—God touching man to life; ‘In the image of God He made man’—and above it he put a line from a religious poet of the last century, Gerard Hopkins : ‘Thou mastering me, God.’ Eric Gill, the artist, thought he could choose no better text for the League ot Nations; the League should be made to realise that without the inspiration of that essential text and that line from the poet, their councils would be in vain, as, alas, so far in vain they have proved.

The old and true Christian attitude is that God is the measure of all things; God is the measure of man. This so-called humanitarian age which is now reaching its close has said that man is the measure of all things; and, alas, unless Christian ideals can prevent it, we are moving into an age when the State will shape the measure of all things, and, if I may say so, that measure will be a mess.

Since, at the beginning of this century, Pius X. called the faithful to the restoring of all things in Christ, and indicated as the chief means of such a restoration the active participation of all in the public worship of the Church, much has been done to bring about what he desired. Popular editions of the Missal have been multiplied, courses and conferences, for priests and lay people, have been organized, and in some ways the effects have not been scanty. Yet, in spite of all this, the priest at the altar and the people in the pew seem often entirely separated, notwithstanding all the efforts of zealous pastors to instruct their people to ‘pray the Mass.’

We are only just beginning to realize that much that has been done in the name of the Liturgical Movement has been liturgical only per accidens. People have been persuaded to use a Missal, sing plain chant even, but without understanding. They have followed where they were led, blindly. At last some of this is being realised, and more emphasis is being placed now on the fundamentals, the Mystical Body, the dogmatic truths of the Faith, our re-incorporation with Christ, and the living of the life of the Church through the Liturgy.

But this fuller realization of the true implications of the Liturgical Movement has brought its own problems with it. Now that it has at last been understood that the possession of a Missal is not an entirely necessary passport to the gales of Heaven, that the life of the Church is for all and not an élite, that it must be possible to live this life, not only if one does not understand Latin, but even if one cannot read, the question of the language of the liturgy becomes obviously of the greatest importance. Some people have even gone so far as to suggest that a course in liturgical Latin should be added to the curriculum of the elementary school.

The Beveridge Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services is in its way a portent in English politics.

Though it is in form a report made by Sir William Beveridge to the Minister of Reconstruction, Sir William Jowitt, K.C., M.P., who held the rank and office of Paymaster General (and is now Minister without Portfolio), and though the Report admittedly raises matters of policy which are ‘so important as to call for decision by the Government as a whole,’ the issue of the Report was heralded by a regular campaign of advance publicity and propaganda which appeared to be designed and calculated to impose the document on Parliament and the people; and its actual publication was accompanied by such a fanfare of trumpets, in the Press and on the Radio, as made one to understand, almost for the first time, the technique and power of publicity in the hands of a totalitarian régime and its habit of treating Parliament no longer as a deliberative assembly, but rather as a body accustomed obediently to register the decisions of the Party, or the Fuhrer. Thus, within twenty-four hours of its publication, summaries of the Report (as yet unconsidered by the Government or by Parliament) were broadcast in twenty-two languages as a forecast of the line of social legislation to be followed by Great Britain in the post-war reconstruction.

‘For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness.’ We see the meaning of the Sacrament of Penance most fully if we see it against the background of the world-struggle between good and evil. The essence of sin is pride, the isolation of the self; the harmony of creation is split into warring fragments; there is no redress until created spirit, responsible for the material world, can emerge from its isolation and return to its Source. ‘The whole of creation is in travail even until now.’ So the Redemption is given us; that man-in-nature may be made whole again by restored oneness with God—a restoration wrought by the Cross and Resurrection and made accessible day by day in the world through the power of the Church. It is for that restoration of the divine order in the world that we pray when we pray for the coming of the Kingdom; but the coming is postponed, the power of the Church to heal and make holy is curtailed, by the persisting presence and power of evil. Nor can we think simply of a struggle between the members (visible or invisible) of the Church, and the world; it is waged by the Church, but it is also waged within the Church. And as there is a communion of saints, so there is a solidarity of sin; and the Church’s power as a whole is curtailed and its victory impeded by the sins of its sinful members.

We read in the Acts of the Apostles (xv, 23-29) :

The Christian political consciousness has been deeply stirred by the revolutionary events of our time and many to-day feel the need for its revival. Christians widely recognise in this country that they have to fulfil a necessary function in the political order, and this no matter whether the duty is based on the dogma of the sinfulness of man and his necessary imperfection or on the doctrine of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, according to which man as ‘Zoon politikon’ is essentially interwoven by his nature with Politics. Christians are more or less inclined to accept to-day the fundamental thesis that Politics has its own natural right to exist and its own basis and independent sphere within the framework of the natural aims of a community.

This insight has in itself weighty implications, from the political-sociological point of view. For if Politics exists in its own right it cannot be considered a sham or an ideological cloak for the nonpolitical forces of society. This does not mean that economics, or religion, or legal or racial motives, which play so great a part in society, cannot enter the sphere of Politics. On the contrary, they do so to a large extent. But the point is that by entering the political sphere an economic, religious, legal or racial question, from the very fact of its being regarded politically, changes its essential peculiarity. Its former nature remains no longer the same. Aristotle would call this change a ‘metabasis eis genos.’ The question acquires a distinctively political character.

Pascal, to use a customary word of his own, is admirable. It is true that the satire of the Provinciales, however clever and amusing in its time, is out-of-date and unjust; that his scientific experiments and writings belong to the domain of the history of science. But his apology for Christianity, even in the fragmentary form of the famous Pensees, is an imperishable work. Into it he put all his knowledge and experience of the world, of human achievement, and of the divine things that were the absorbing pursuit of his mature file.

It is a happiness to re-read them, or a selection of them, in this new edition : to marvel once again at Pascal’s penetration and his ardent zeal, to feel once again the beauty and power of so many compelling pages and lapidary sentences ; especially as we are reminded in an early paragraph (No. 11) of what is in fact the goal of this long array of close reasoning and urgent pleading: ‘Jesus-Christ the object of everything, the cenfre to which everything tends.’—‘The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of Christians is a God of love and consolation, He is a God who fills the soul and heart of those whom He possesses, a God who makes them feel within themselves their wretchedness and His infinite mercy; who unites Himself with them in the depths of their soul; who fills it with humility, joy, trust, love; who makes them incapable of any other end than Himself.’

It is now some time since Mr. Massingham began to educate and delight us with his studies of the English rural tradition, but the present book may be considered his most mature achievement. In it he takes the types which he regards as most representative of the English countryman and examines in turn the origins, status, character and history of each. The history indeed is of rather a melancholy kind, since in each case rise and development is followed by a decline and fall, the fortunes of the countryside being bound up with those of England and its culture at large, and the movement towards modern times being a retreat rather than an advance. The replacement of sacred by secular, of spiritual by material, of the functional and the reasonable by the functionless and irrational, of many-sided wisdom by the smartness of business men and the research of undisciplined scientists—these are the characteristic note's of modernity, and it is natural that they should appear with particular vividness in the history of so central and primary a thing as agriculture. Nevertheless, the diagnosis is not a hopeless one, and its partial acceptance now, with the chance of wider acceptance soon, offers some possibility of a return to the norm we have forsaken.

During the latter half of the nineteenth century the Catholics of England entered upon their long struggle to maintain their schools in a condition of material and professional efficiency equal to that of the wholly state-supported schools in the national system. Both in primary and in secondary education the price of monetary aid from the Government has been increased control by the local or central education authority, and in consequence the chief pre-occupation of our struggle has been to safeguard the principle of Catholic teachers in Catholic schools, and to ensure the integrity of the teaching in doctrine and morals given during the hours devoted by law to religious instruction.

In the matter of the curriculum of secular teaching we have been content in past years to follow the lead set by the non-Catholic schools, and have adopted their general educational policy and conformed ourselves as best we could to its varying demands. Even those schools which have always been independent of government control have been forced, during the last forty years, by their acceptance of the external examination system to abandon their autonomy and the traditional system of education which they had inherited from the continental schools of pre-penal days, and to conform their syllabuses and teaching system to the dictates of the external examining boards. Thus it has come about gradually that the curriculum of secular teaching, with its attendant syllabus of books to be read and periods or matter to be studied, has ceased to be chosen by the authorities of the school and has been imposed by an impersonal external authority which has little or no understanding of the purpose and needs of Catholic education.

French Personalists, in condemning the totalitarian ideologies and decadent individualism, elaborate at length the distinction between person and individual. Their solution of the whole social problem is based on this doctrine.

In his Revolution personnaliste et communitaire, Emmanuel Mounier has set out the considerations which necessitate the distinction. The individual is definitely inferior : he is a prey to selfish complacency, to the inordinate love of his own singularity. Enclosed in the fortress of his own egoism, he is deaf to the importunities of social claims. The person, ‘by way of contrast, represents man’s triumph over this ignoble self. According to the exposition given in his Personalist Manifesto, the person embodies the nobler elements of human nature: generosity, self-possession, individual vocation, renunciation and self-sacrifice even to the point, of heroism. Such a being enjoys autonomy and spiritual liberty in its true sense (pp. 76-80).

The considerations by which Mounier seeks to reinforce this contrast are purely psychological in character. Thus, he argues that the person is ‘open,’ while the individual is ‘closed.’ Here the individual is credited with a psychological complex orienting all his activities towards his own selfish ends. The person, on the contrary, recognises his social duties; he is open to social intercourse, to the divine attractions of love, etc. But these psychological descriptions can in no sense replace the metaphysical doctrine of personality. If they have any intelligible sense, they must be interpreted in a broad Christian sense. Thus, man is destined to a transcendent end, in the light of which we must evaluate all his being and his activity.

This meeting is, I understand, not a religious service in the sense that there is no collection, but I should like to begin my talk with one thing that is usually associated with the beginning of sermons, a text, only I have not taken my text from the Gospels; I am happy to have been able to take it from Her Majesty the Queen’s wonderful broadcast on Passion Sunday :—

These are the finest words I have ever heard on the radio, and coming from our Queen, they must have and continue to have a great effect on the nation and the Empire.

I had just finished reading in his firm flowing handwriting, but with here and there a marked break, what must have been, alas ! one of his last personal letters, when the sad news came through of the heart attack from which he did not recover. He confessed that he had been having a rather bad time lately and was incapable of real work.

Then his thoughts reverted to the subject of unity, one of the clear notes of his episcopacy, rarely absent from his serious mind, and to our grievous disunities. ‘In the mission field, I found,’ he writes, that the awful confusion due to disunion was the obstacle to the spread-of the Kingdom of God. In Europe our enemies—the enemies of Christianity, he calls them—make capital out of our divisions. But the mere mixing together, so to speak, of varying creeds and of different ways of worship would be a mechanical union, not the one body of Christ.’ He develops the I heme again and says that our prayers for the indwelling of the Holy Spirit sent to lead us into all truth must be ceaseless. It was the theme of one of his letters from the Collegio Inglese after his elevation, whilst he waited to take up his great task—’ At my age what can I do? ‘But as a soldier he obeys. ‘

The troubled years and the awful movement of evil events have revealed that the Holy Father was divinely guided in his choice of a messenger. As the Public Orator of Oxford declaimed, ‘Cardinal Hinsley has become a true leader, not only in his own Church but in the nation at large.’ His broadcast after war broke upon us showed that he spoke with the voice of the nation—sad, stern, courageous, unfaltering.

That branch of the science of psychology, which perhaps is the most important branch, Medical Psychology, has without doubt become a permanent addition to Medicine.

One Catholic psychiatrist has called this contribution towards the Art and Practice of medicine ‘the other half of medicine,’ and the medical faculty would be inclined to endorse this opinion. Most of the teaching hospitals have now a special department in charge of a psychiatrist who acts as lecturer in psychological medicine as Well as being consultant to ‘out patients’ for functional nervous disorders.

Before the war the Institute of Medical Psychology, besides teaching and training an ever increasing number of doctors who wished to specialise in this subject, gave treatment to 14,986 new patients in the twenty-one years of its existence. The number of doctors who specialise in psychological medicine is now very large, and in this war all branches of the services have special psychiatric hospitals, where service patients are given treatment. This brief summary of the activities of psychological medicine should be sufficient guarantee that the medical profession has given an ‘imprimatur’ to what was perhaps considered at one time to be the happy hunting ground for cranks, faddists, and even charletans.

We have used the two words ‘motive ‘and ‘meaning’ ‘; although in the matter of the Resurrection the two words have but one meaning.

The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is a deliberate act of the will of Jesus Christ. Now when we ask, What does X (a human being with a will) mean by doing this or that? ‘we are asking, ‘What is the motive of X in doing this or that?’

We must first say that Jesus Christ did not rise again in order to prove that He is God. When we reflect a little we begin to see that his Resurrection by itself could not prove that he is God. Even Catholics allow themselves to be confused in this matter. Thus they sometimes say ; ‘But if Jesus had not risen he would not have been God.’—Granted; because he had prophesied that he would rise from the dead. Clearly if he had not kept his word of phophecy he would not have been God.

But the fallacy misleading even some Catholics is the quite common fallacy ‘that what is necessary is also sufficient.’ Thus we cannot argue : ‘If a being has not two eyes it is not a man. But this being (a dog) has two eyes, therefore it is a man.’ So, too, we cannot argue : If Jesus Christ had not risen from the dead he would not have been God. But he has risen from the dead. Therefore he is God.’

You are the light of the world. A city seated on a mountain cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel, but upon a candlestick, that it may shine to all that are in the house. So let your light shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your father who is in heaven (Matt, v, 14-16).

‘You are the light of the world,’ says our Lord to his disciples; and again, ‘I am the Light of the world ‘(John viii, 12). If the world then is to be truly enlightened, these two lights, Master and disciple, must be one; they must glow with a single light and burn with a single flame. The apostle who bears the gospel-message must strive by life and teaching to identify himself with the Lord who sends him.

‘Let your light shine before men that they may glorify your Father who is in heaven.’ These words provide a clue to the life-secret of him whose going leaves a heavy burden of sorrow on our hearts—a sorrow not for him, who has gone to his well-earned rest and rich reward, but for ourselves who have lost him for a time and will surely never in this world see his like again. You knew him and what he was; but there must be many who were puzzled and even astonished at this strange figure walking our streets and appearing to be a visitor from another century who had strayed into our modem world.

It was long a commonplace that the world knew nothing of its greatest men. Now that saying was already current a life-time ago. It is emphatically true to-day, and its value and meaning affect us at the present moment more than ever they did in the past, for this is a moment when men are only publicly known by their names, and when the real personality for which the name stands is hidden under a mass of popular print.

Father Vincent McNabb, the Dominican, who has just passed to his reward, intensely illustrates all this. The greatness of his character, of his learning, his experience, and, above all, his judgement, was something altogether separate from the world about him. Those who knew him marvelled increasingly at every aspect of that personality. But the most remarkable aspect of all was the character of holiness. Everyone who met him, even superficially, discovered this. Those of us who had the honour and the rare advantage of knowing him intimately and well over many years find, upon looking back upon that vast experience, something unique, over and above the learning, over and above the application of that learning to Thomism, which is surely the very heart of the Dominican affair. To that testimony, which so many have the honour and privilege to present, I can add less than nothilng. We know holiness just as we know courage or the unimportant particular of physical beauty and proportion. When we come across that quality of holiness permeating and proceeding from the whole Dominican world, we can only be silent as before some very rare and majestic presentation, wholly foreign to our common experience.

The Christian religion teaches us that we have been made by God for Eternal Life; that is our supreme and final purpose. Here we have no abiding city; we are travellers on our way to our home, and our journey is designed by God to fit us for our home when we get there. That is why to the Christian this world is supremely important ; not as an end in itself; so considered it is worthless and to be despised; but as the means by which our personalities and characters are prepared by God for the eternal happiness of Heaven. This life then prepares us for Eternal Life and the purpose of education is to prepare us to live this life in such a way that we may be made fit for Eternal Life.

A Christian believes that each human person is specially made by God, specially endowed with certain qualities and capacities; set in particular circumstances, in a particular family, belonging to a particular nation with its own peculiar tradition and culture. That is the Christian doctrine of vocation; the belief that God calls each of us to a particular place and work in his scheme; and that our place and work is of supreme importance because it is the means by which we fit ourselves by the power of his grace for Eternal Life. What that place and work is to be should be decided largely by the circumstances in which God has placed us, and by the capacities with which he has endowed us; our family, the culture and tradition into which we are born, our education in home and in school; all these should play their part in the great decision : ‘What is God’s vocation for me?’

We had been to a neighbouring seaside resort to visit an old priest living in semi-retirement. The winter atternoon was pallid with weak sunshine that strove to conquer the Crome-grey sky. The top of the bus was thick with stale tobacco smoke. Behind us, as we sat over the driver’s cabin, were the quiet low sounds of East Anglian men making speech. My companion, a venerated canon, lived some miles outside the city to which we were returning. A parish priest who had never lost the wonderment of childhood : a student who had learned Hebrew long after leaving college by a correspondence course so as to deepen his love of the Breviary.

We too spoke quietly, but what follows are simply the remembrance of his words. Men are not always the poorer for their gregariousness. Indeed the wealth I have gained, not once but many, many times, from the deep waters of this priest’s mind, is a wealth immeasurable and beyond gratitude ....

Man is a creature rooted in earth and drawing his breath from heaven. Apart from the truism that nature itself and every created thing comes from God, there is a sense in which we may make a legitimate distinction between the origins of man’s bodily and spiritual parts, regarding the one as from nature, the other from God. This union and integration of the corporal and spiritual in one creature is man’s unique distinction; and in most cases the normal, uninhibited man is emotionally aware of his kinship with the earth and with God. Throughout history this feeling of kinship has expressed itself in the two activities most perfectly characteristic of humanity, namely agriculture and religion. All civilisations have tended to approximate to the rural-religious pattern in some form or other until the last few centuries in the West and very recently in the Far East. Since the rural-religious life is essentially normal to man and satisfies the supreme appetitions of his being, it follows that he can only achieve true happiness and integration when his relation to nature and God is harmoniously satisfied. It does not, of course, follow that rural-religious societies will be necessarily happy or integrated : original sin is not so easily overcome; but it does follow inexorably that if men apostatise from nature and God they will inevitably be unhappy and disintegrated.