A deep sense of responsibility urged us to write in our July issue some of the thoughts that filled our soul on the eve of the Lambeth Conference. We were of those who could see, and even profess to see a unique event in the assembly of two hundred and fifty Bishops in communion with the Sees of Canterbury and York. These Bishops, belonging to the two great English-speaking nations, could not discuss after-war problems in the spiritual sphere without wielding a power for good, which, like every other power, might be turned to evil even when used with good intent. It was part of their disarming truthfulness frankly to confess that they had no mandate even from their own Church to say the last word on any subject of spiritual reconstruction. This profession of self-diffidence did not discredit them in our eyes. Rather did it put them apart from that all too numerous group of spiritual reconstructionists whose self-confidence is their chief power for evil. We were therefore ready to listen to whatever issued from the counsels of a group of men whose self-diffidence recalled the prophetic words, “I am not the Christ.”

We purpose (1) to set down a few passages from the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas dealing with Biblical Criticism ; and (2) to give a short commentary on them.

It is not unemployment alone, but the unemployment carrying with it a stoppage of pay that chiefly concerns us here. When a living is guaranteed by dividends, pension, or a sufficiently large dole, we can, for the most part, bear without discomfort the inconvenience of “no work.”

To-day there are in Great Britain at least a million capable people, men and women of various trades and occupations, of varying degrees in skill, training, and muscular strength, who are out of work, and out of wages. They are unemployed, existing precariously on meagre trade union allowance, on unemployment “benefits,” or on casual relief. They stand by in idleness in the market-place of every town because no one will hire them.

At the present time there are also many millions of people in Europe, men, women, and children, needing food, clothing, and dwelling places. (In especial the pitiful needs of the children of middle Europe are constantly brought to our notice.) In England alone many thousands are in need of these necessary things, while many thousands more, hard put to secure the bare necessities of physical life, worn out with anxiety in the struggle for a living, fade and perish in their prime.

These two facts, then, may be noted.

(1) A large population in need of food, clothing, and dwelling-places, and unable to obtain these things.

(2) A large population capable of producing food, clothing, and dwelling places unable to engage in such production because no one will employ them.

The true speaking absolutely is prior to the good, as appears from two reasons. First because the true is more closely related to being, which is prior to good. . . . Secondly, . . . knowledge naturally precedes appetite.” (Summa, la Qu. 16, Art 4, Eng. trans.)

The object of the intellect (i.e. Truth) “is more simple and more absolute than the object of the will” (i.e. goodness). Therefore the intellect in itself and absolutely is higher and nobler than the will—yet “the love of God is better than the knowledge of God ; but on the contrary, the knowledge of corporeal things is better than the love thereof. Absolutely, however, the intellect is better than the will.” (Ibid., Qu. 82, Part 3.)

These two texts from the Summa of the Blackfriar St. Thomas Aquinas must outline the attitude of Blackfriars towards Truth.

The Manchester Guardian publishes things, “incredible,” in England, concerning marauders and murderers, called police, in Ireland.

Everyone in this land who opens his lips has “incredible” tales to tell about them—tales too true.

Here are things, done of late, that never have been published. But the present writer has seen, or he has heard.

(a) In Tipperary, boys, but a short time since, were playing ball against an old disused half-ruinous house. Up drove the “police,” rushed out of their lorry, seized the boys, saying : “You burnt our barracks”— the building where the boys were playing was not the barracks, which (in another part of the town) had been burnt— ”and now we’ll have revenge on you.” They beat the boys with butt ends of revolvers, knocked them to the ground, kicked them, carried off five into a lorry, to deal further with them. Some of the boys escaped to tell the priests of the place. When the men saw the priests, they shouted : “What do you want here, you bloody sky-pilots?” At last, one R.I.C. man among them quieted them so far, that they let go the boys, some of whom were cut about the faces, and had to have their heads bandaged for wounds.

Then the “police” broke into a public-house, stole much liquor, and twenty pounds from the till.

If we have reached the parting of the ways in Ireland, Archbishop Mannix is the signpost to those who will take the trouble to read before they rush into hysteric hostility. There is something melodramatic, but not without its providential aspect, in his return to Europe. It is curious to think that the Twentieth Century opened finding Mercier, Mannix, and Wilson obscurely buried in college life, so closely related to abstract and metaphysical subjects that their very injection into international politics would have caused instant amusement to their former pupils. They were after the manner of Plato’s schoolmasters, whom in his republic he wished to govern the world. The world has never come nearer to the Platonic ideal than when Wilson proclaimed the doctrine of Self-determination among nations. Though Wilson failed in the gigantic task of imposing it upon the Allies, Archbishop Mannix has taken upon himself the duty of bringing it with logical severity to the notice of the British Government. Though living at the Antipodes, he has crossed two oceans in his consuming desire to see applied the supreme theory of modern times to the kindly and admiring people who gave him birth.

The substance of most books of modem verse is the succession of scattered emotions remaining to those who have no philosophy of life, who cannot see the wood for the trees, who suffer the ache of an inner vacuity, who clutch at the passing straw of any transient emotion because that wandering wisp is the only tangible thing in the disorder of their attention. But an ache for something which is not there, a confession of something wanting, a search for some centre on which to repose : none of these is a substitute for a positive quality. It is the absence of a personality which these reveal; they are symptoms, not revelations. The lack which earnestness, striving, purpose (ugly words for ugly vices) betray in life and in prose, this scatter-brained emotionalism betrays in poetry. The first cannot speak, nor the second sing. This explains why we read most contemporary books of verse with impatience, and why, if we read many of them, all sense of standard seems to depart from us.

Here I have tried to make the effort which most readers will hardly be at pains to make for themselves, the effort to diagnose the disorder of which most modern verse is the reflection. Since this dis-ease, with the disillusion which accompanies it, is now endemic, we should recognize its nature and then fortify ourselves by a study of those writers, classical and modern, who in different degrees belong to the true order of poetry.

I was swallowing some coffee in the Paddington refreshment-room when my neighbour said to me suddenly :

“‘Ave you seen Tarzan of the Apes?”

“I’m afraid not, Sergeant,” said I (for he was an R.A.M.C. Sergeant, and happier than many a man need be). “But I’ve noticed the posters.”

“Ar,” said he. “Now if you sets store by Lord Darwin’s the’ry, I won’t say as that ain’t how it mightn’t ‘ave happened.”

“There you are !” said I discreetly.

“There’s some,” said he, “as may ; and there’s some as mayn’t. But you take it from me, may or mayn’t, there’s some wot’ll think different from wot they do. Nor yet from wot they did.”

Failing to disentangle this, and seeing that ten o’clock was imminent, I was unable to probe further his philosophy, and said “Good night.”

It has long been recognized that there is a psychology not only of individuals, but also of groups. As with the hypothetical units of physics— electrons and atoms—so with the real units of the animal kingdom and of the human race, the group has a definite constitution and definite laws expressing its behaviour which are not the same as those which express the behaviour of the individuals of which the group is composed. Man is not merely an intelligent animal : he is also essentially a social animal, and, if the human race is to make progress, it is of supreme importance that the factors in social life which make for progress or for deterioration should be analysed out and critically discussed in their concrete historical setting.

This is the main aim of Professor McDougall’s latest work, The Group Mind., a book no less interesting than the other psychological works which Prof. McDougall has given us, and no less provocative of thought. It purports, in fact, to be the continuation of his Social Psychology, and assumes that the factors and principles of social life, as there laid down, are already familiar to the reader. These it now discusses from the point of view of the group. In the First Part the characteristics of different kinds of groups are set forth, notably those of the crude group or crowd and those of the most highly organized group—the army. Then there is a discussion of the group spirit, of the interrelation and interaction of groups, and of the peculiarities of certain types of group.

What is to be said of Westminster Cathedral? Is it a great building? Is it more than a big building? The almost universal verdict is in the affirmative. It is not petty. It is a work of genius.

Now, genius has been defined as the will and ability to “put the first thing first,” and certainly Bentley did so at Westminster. Whatever others may have said, Bentley did not say : the first thing is to make a big Byzantine Church. The first thing he did was to envisage a great building suitable for Christian worship, and, again putting the first thing first, he did not say it shall rival Beauvais in height or Rheims in sculpture ; he said : this great Christian Church shall be built of massive piers of brick spanned by vaults of concrete—these are the available materials, and I am not crying for the moon of medieval delight. He did not use such words, nor could he have used them. He was an old-fashioned English architect and was not aware of the social problem. He even dreamed of a building covered with a veneer of marble and mosaic ! But though that was his dream, and even partly his achievement, he saw his church as a great building first and only second as a much adorned one.

This is obvious from the accomplished thing and is admitted even by those people who still, in this pagan age, hanker after pointed arches and pinnacles.

This title is hardly Catholic—“Reunion with the Church” would be more correct. But we have chosen it as nearer to the idea contained in Dr. Headlam’s book : The Doctrine of the Church and Christian Reunion. When we remember that this book is the result of long study carried on with no less sincerity than acuteness, and that it appeared, programme-like, a few weeks before the Lambeth Conference, we shall attribute to it an importance not belied by the reading of it. Especially in England is the Reunion of Churches discussed. Certainly, in the presence of division, Catholics do not feel the sorrow they ought. There was a time when Christendom was uncertain as to the true Pope. There was no dispute as to principles ; it was not doubted that the Church could have but one head. Yet the mere uncertainty as to the person of that head weighed on Christendom like a nightmare. Universities, kings, bishops knew no rest till the day when perfect unity was regained. To-day, after so many centuries of divisions, this deplorable state of things seems to have become accepted. We vaguely trust to time to bring back to the fold the sheep that have strayed, and all the time others are straying and losing all Christian faith, partly owing to these same divisions. The paralysing of the Catholic Apostolate is the only too evident result.

In his recently published lecture, Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, Mr. de la Mare tells an amusing story by way of showing how in 1916 his reputation as a poet stood “in the great eye of America.” He went one day to pay his respects to a friend of Rupert Brooke’s in New York. “A graceful coloured lift-girl inquired who the caller was. I told her. Whereupon she exclaimed, with a smile all radiant gold and ivory, ‘Gee whiz ! What a name !’”

It is to be hoped that the poet’s diffidence made him underestimate his fame in the United States ; even Mr. Kipling could not expect to be as well known by name to a lift-attendant as the latest cinema hero : “One star differeth from another in glory,” or at least in conspicuousness. Yet it is scarcely to be disputed that something remains to be done before the readers of Mr. de la Mare’s poetry, on both sides of the Atlantic, are as numerous as they should be. The poet of Motley and The Listeners will certainly never be as popular as Miss Mary Pickford ; he would disclaim any such ambition. He will probably never be as well known even as Mr. Kipling, or the friend whom he praises so generously in the essay from which we have quoted. Nevertheless, his work ought to be, and, we hope, when his Collected Poems have made their due impression, will be much more widely read and discussed than it is at present.

The problem of the just pagan has haunted the imagination of Christendom. It troubled Dante. It raises for us the question—What is the relation of all that is noble in the pagan world to the Christian faith? How far was the mind of that world prepared by its past to receive that faith ; how far was that preparative element the outcome of chance or of Divine purpose? And as we regard history in the light of a mere record of human activity or of the unfolding of that purpose, so will our answer be.

In the De Civitate Dei, Saint Augustine gathers together the history and the faculties of man and relates them to the Will of God. Eusebius entitled one of his books the Prœparatio Evangelica. Clement of Alexandria wrote in the second century, “To the Jews was given the Law, to the heathens Philosophy, to guide them to Christ.” And later in the same book, “Greek philosophy prepares the soul for receiving faith on which the truth builds knowledge” ( ). And Augustine himself asserts in his Retractations that “what we now call the Christian religion existed among the ancients and was from the beginning of the human race until Christ Himself came in the flesh ; from which time the already existing true religion began to be styled Christian.”

The present hue and cry against the profiteer, whose elusive personality escapes arrest, and the discussion vehemently waged on die merits or demerits of “nationalization” divert attention from the root of the matter—the purpose or end of all productive labour.

Ignoring the fundamental, the campaign against profiteering is naturally unsuccessful, and the arguments for and against “nationalization” are frequently irrelevant.

The assumption that the present relations of capital and labour are, subject to slight modification, permanent, or, to put it m another way, that the directing control of labour must remain in the hands of the possessor of capital, commonly sways our minds. And this assumption, made somewhat rashly, largely prevents our clearing up present difficulties, or getting at the question of the purpose of production. Is the purpose private gain and profit? or the convenience and comfort of the community?

It has taken two editors and six volumes to complete the biography of Disraeli. The last two volumes enjoy the advantage of the freedom which the war has brought to those who search the faded purples and tinsels of the Victorian ash heap. The love letters of a Premier are not generally disclosed forty years after his death. However, as Lady Beaconsfield was dead, Catholics need only smile at his septuagenarian infatuation for Lady Bradford, illustrated in letters which outcloy even his coy adulation of the Queen. Lady Bradford he could not marry because Lord Bradford lived, and Lady Chesterfield her sister refused to marry him, though they were single, while the Queen, who was both single and devoted to Disraeli, could not have married him without putting Gladstone into office and perhaps their hate of Gladstone was their strongest bond.

Bishop-making is always a fascinating pursuit, even more for the makers than for the made. That Anglican Bishops are elected by the Grace of God and the favour of Downing Street has always added to the piquancy of the pursuit.