New York, Mott Street, Chinatown ... It is the district of the Law Courts, the prisons and Police Headquarters. Only poor Italians and Chinese live here. At night sightseeing buses come down from Times Square filled with tourists from Europe and the “West” who want another thrill out of this amazing cosmopolis. There is only one bright spot in this ugly place which has grown like a cancer from avid speculation and deforms the gigantic body of New York. It is a square cemented site surrounded with chicken-wire fences, a playground for the poor children of the immediate neighbourhood—another humane deed of Mayor La Guardia and his energetic and efficient assistant Mr. Moses, who has dotted the huge metropolis with playgrounds and parks. Yet even this playground would be sad and dull, were it not filled with the laughter, the singing and screaming of poor Italo-American children and their gossiping mothers. It little resembles our European playgrounds, with their shrubs and lawns, their flowers and shady paths. It looks more like an open wound amidst the ghosts and skeletons and sub-human mansions called tenements. Yet if not here, the poor little boys and girls would have to seek their exercise and amusement on the littered streets, in dark and damp backyards, and between parked cars.

“Hence the particular problem now before us, which can be formulated as follows: should a new Christendom, in the conditions of the historical age on which we are entering, while incarnating the same (analogical) principles, be conceived as belonging to an essentially (specifically) distinct type from that of the mediaeval world? “

The question is posed on page 133 of the recently published English edition of Maritain's Humanisme intégrale. In its context the “now before us” refers only to one stage— albeit a crucial stage—in the argument of that great book. But I would suggest that it has a far wider significance. For I think that this is the vital question which now confronts Christian social thought and action, a question which calls imperiously for a clear answer. For so long as we fail to answer it, or so long as we answer it contradictorily, our social efforts must lack unity of aim and direction. So long shall we be disastrously divided into muckers-in and muckers-out and muckers-along. So long will there be hostile and irreconcilable “schools of integration” and “schools of separation.” So long will the latter charge the former with compromise with the world and the flesh and with ignoring the devil, and the former regard the latter as escapist saboteurs. So long will there be “Right” Catholics who quite honestly doubt the sincerity of the Catholicity of their brethren on the “Left,” and so long will there be “Left” Catholics who only with difficulty can regard their brethren on the “Right” as deserving the name of Christian.

Père Lagrange was inspired by a theological principle the rational consequences of which are from now on clearly in evidence. Inasmuch as the Bible is an inspired book it is wholly and essentially divine, therefore absolutely true and infallible as representing, with the necessary guarantee of authenticity, the very word of God Himself. At the same time, however, and precisely in virtue of the divine inspiration communicated to the human writers, it is no less integrally human by reason of its production by a human instrument who is both intelligent and free under the movement of God, the primary cause. Profound consideration of this co-ordination of the two causes had led Père Lagrange to a principle finely balanced, it is true, but as inevitable as it was freedom-giving: the distinction between what is characteristically divine—where there is no room for any defective element—and what is characteristically human—where there is room for limitations and imperfections. Whilst reserving always and most explicitly to the Church, the only living authority qualified by God for this purpose, the determination of the characteristically divine teaching or statement contained in a biblical passage, it then became possible to envisage the Bible in the human perspective of its inspired authors, to study it, that is to say, according to the rules of the most positive historic method.

The fidelity and purity of the Anglican witness to the Gospel of Christ is a matter of utmost concern to all Christians. Least of all can an English Catholic, anxious for the temporal and eternal welfare of the people of his own race and nation, be indifferent to it. It is estimated that, at the present time, some 20,000,000 souls in Great Britain and some 11,000,000 in other parts of the world, are directly dependent upon the Anglican churches for whatever they know, or humanly speaking are likely to know, of the message of salvation. When it is further remembered that, in nearly all parts of the English-speaking world, the Anglican community enjoys a prestige as an authorised representative of organised Christianity far in excess of its numbers, and is to millions of non-Christians the most familiar spokesman of Christianity, the character of its doctrine is seen to be a matter of almost cosmic importance. Distortions of the purity of the Gospel message and of the integrity of the Catholic faith by Anglican divines are as unseemly material for the headlines of sensationalist journalism as they are for the jibes and gloatings of the nagging type of proseltyser. On the other hand, it should be to the apostolic-minded Catholic a subject for praise and thanksgiving when, notwithstanding four centuries of independence from the unity of the Catholica, the Anglican churches still bear witness in an apostate world to the elements of the faith once delivered to the saints.

Whether we date the beginning of the English Labour Movement from the years when the famous “Junta” of trade union secretaries consolidated the societies of skilled workmen in the mid-Victorian period, trace its origins to fiercely democratic Chartism, or earlier still to Robert Owen's “socialism” and the national trades-union of a “New Moral World,” the Labour Movement as we know it to-day in Great Britain is really but little more than fifty years old—its course steadily, at first almost imperceptibly, directed to a co-operative commonwealth.

Two notes in the character of this movement have always puzzled and often shocked the leaders of continental trade unionism. Our British trade unions never require profession of political faith from their members; neither do they encourage hostility to the Christian religion. They seek neither to overturn the state nor intrude the dogma of atheism. This indifference to the “materialist conception of history”, and all the rest of it as revealed to Karl Marx, perplexed and distressed the German labour leaders in the years before the War. The Marxian “class-conscious proletariate” should quite definitely affirm its aloofness from Christianity the Germans maintained. French leaders of labour, Catholic and secularist alike, shrugged their shoulders at les Anglais, with their Catholics and Protestants, agnostics and freethinkers, all mixed up in the same trade unions.

“The preaching of the truth,” said the Pope last year to the French bishops, “the preaching of the truth did not bring many victories to Christ: it brought Him to the cross. It is by charity that He won souls and drew them to follow Him. That is the only way in which we shall win them.” The importance of the question of means cannot be overstressed. Over and over again, great enterprises, Christian enterprises, have been brought to nought because evil, unchristian means have been adopted to achieve them. What is the business of the Christian, as a Christian, in regard to the temporal order? It is to work for the building of the temporal City of God: the remedying of injustice and hatred, the establishment of justice and charity. Temporal and spiritual meet and fuse in the structure of society inasmuch as this or that social structure preserves or destroys the eternal values; so that when a social structure destructive of Christian values obtains, it is part of the duty of the Christian to work to change it. What kind of means is he to adopt?

We shall certainly be misled if we allow ourselves to forget —as so often we do—that on the one hand catholic means universal; on the other, that to-day there is no existing Christian temporal order.

We shall certainly be misled if we think of the work of the Christian in the world in terms of making the world safe for the (existing) Christians.

Christianity has ever been faced with the challenge of that conception of life which we call humanism, originated and elaborated by the philosophy of the Greeks, It would be possible and interesting to trace the long history of the adventures of Christianity’s encounters with humanistic conceptions. It did not begin with the Renaissance, nor have the encounters been concerned solely with problems of aesthetic. Indeed, they call in question an attitude of life which concerns the very foundations of our intellectual life and our moral conduct.

What is to be the distinctively Christian attitude to humanism? Is there a Christian humanism, and if so what principles must govern it? These are questions which the science of theology alone can decide with competence and finality. With its aid, we shall here set out some of the more important principles which must be taken into account in any definition of authentic Christian humanism.

“Plato by a goodlye similitude declareth,” said Sir Thomas More, “why wise men refraine to medle in the common wealthe. For when they see the people swarme into the streets, and daily wet to the skinne with rayne, and yet cannot persuade them to goe out of the rayne and to take their houses; knowynge wel, that if they should goe out to them they shoulde nothinge prevail, nor wynne ought by it, but with them be wette also in the rayne, they do kepe them selfes within their houses, being content that they be saffe themselves, seinge they cannot remedye the follye of the people.” And so, Plato adds, the wise man “is well content if he can in any way live his life here untainted . . . , and, when the time for his release arrives, take his departure amid bright hopes with cheerfulness and serenity.” To-day, in the countries where it is still possible, more or less, to speak one’s mind, the trouble is this: that while there is surely no ground on which angels are less likely to be ready to tread than the floors of parliaments and chancellories, we for our part are all constrained to rush in, driven no doubt by some kind of epileptic irresponsibility, congenital in human nature; and the upshot is a sort of incessant crossing of the floor of the house of commons; for finding ourselves in violent disagreement with one side we rush incontinent over to the other, where a similar process has been taking place.

It is seventeen years since Blackfriars, then in its infancy, welcomed the return of the Dominicans to Oxford, and it now has the added joy of welcoming the return of the Friar- Preachers to the sister University. It is an interesting coincidence that the original foundation at Cambridge, in 1238, also took place seventeen years after the first foundation at Oxford. Both were suppressed by Henry VIII in 1538, so that Cambridge has been just four centuries without resident Dominicans, though many well-known friars have worked there individually as preachers and lecturers in the last few years. Not a few Cambridge men, moreover, have entered the Order since the suppression in 1538, the most famous being Thomas Heskins who ruled the English Friars as Vicar-Provincial during Elizabeth’s reign. He was one of the foremost champions of the Catholic cause and his well- known book, The Parliament of Christ, written in defence of the Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament, brought on him the unwelcome attention of the government. About 1566 the authorities were seeking him in Cambridge. One of the succeeding Vicars-General, Cardinal Philip Howard, who did so much for the Province in penal times, was as a youth entered by his parents at St. John’s College, Cambridge, but the outbreak of the Civil War between Charles I and the Parliament brought his stay to an abrupt end, his parents sending him for safety into Flanders.

On a ship in mid-ocean, buffeted by the fury of the waves, only the presence of an experienced captain, certain of his course and sufficiently master of himself to brave the storm untroubled, can stimulate the crew to action and inspire confidence in the passengers. But should the bridge be struck by lightning and the captain killed, then the danger is suddenly brought home to everyone in all its stark reality.

For nearly half a century, amongst the unceasing and furious storms loosed against Catholic exegesis by the excesses of unbridled rationalism, Père Lagrange stood facing the danger, his eyes fixed unwaveringly on the safe beacon-light of the Church’s divine authority, never taken unawares by the most violent or most insidious assault. He was an unfailing source of confidence, because of the intensity and energy of his scientific labours, and an attractive and fruitful example, because of the steadfastness of his faith founded on a most fervent practice of his Dominican religious life and nourished by unfailing prayer. And now, in a supreme act of abandonment to the Divine Will, this voice has been forever silenced here below. Père Lagrange entered into eternal life on March 10th, and his going from this earth has plunged in sore dismay those whose course he has guided among the rocks and the perils of the storm which now more than ever before rages against Truth, that is to say against Christ and His Church.

With the elevation of the present Archbishop to the Sacred College the see of Westminster has seen all its rulers raised to the purple, Nicholas Wiseman, Henry Edward Manning, Herbert Vaughan, Francis Bourne, and Arthur Hinsley. The ancient see of Canterbury saw only four of its archbishops made Cardinals: Robert Kilwardy, Simon Lang- ham, Thomas Bourchier and John Morton, and of these the first two had to surrender their see on their promotion. Three others, Stephen Langton, John Kemp and Reginald Pole were already Cardinals when appointed Primates. There is no truth in the statement that Archbishops Chichele (1414-1443) and John Stafford (1443-1452) were Cardinals, though this statement, based on careless seventeenth century writers, has crept into so good a reference book as the Catholic Encyclopedia under the article, Canterbury, and has been several times repeated. Henry Chichele, far from being a Cardinal, was the cause of Pope Eugenius IV publishing a decree, dated 1439, declaring the precedence of Cardinals over all other prelates, particularly mentioning primates and archbishops. In this Bull, known as Non mediocri, the Pope tells Chichele of the displeasure with which he has heard that the archbishop, for close on fourteen years, has given precedence to the Cardinal of St. Eusebius, Henry Beaufort, presumably because of his royal birth, yet now refuses a like precedence to the Cardinal of St. Balbina (John Kemp, Archbishop of York). The Pope orders him to desist from this conduct, reminds him of the precedence of Cardinals over all other prelates in the Church, and instances the custom observed in the General Councils.

It is very gratifying to me to have the opportunity to express the good things I think of Father Gerald Vann’s recent book, Morals Makyth Man. A work such as this delights the mind with a “rejoicing in the truth” which is indeed characteristically thomist: a joy in fresh Air and Light. In this book we find, combined with constant care for doctrinal accuracy and for fidelity to the established principles received from tradition, that reverence for experience and for the humble truths of ordinary human existence, that quality of compassionate concern for the needs and the sorrows of the time, which we recognise as part of the heritage of the great Dominicans of history. For it has been written that we “must redeem the time”; and if it be that the distinctive mission of St. Thomas and his disciples is the evangelisation of the intelligence, who would feel more acutely than they the pressing urgency of this work of redemption?

It is certain that such work cannot be achieved without toil and hardship. Not without sufferings and opposition was St. Thomas able to assimilate to Christian thought a pagan Aristotle who appeared suddenly in his time surrounded by a cortège of Moslems and Jews. Towards the end of his life he was called to maintain, against the Bishop of Paris and the great majority of contemporary divines, the doctrine of the oneness of the substantial form of the human being, that doctrine which after his death was to be censured by Etienne Tempier and the Doctors of Oxford, but which now has become classical and established.

Two recent facts without precedent in the history of the world are worthy of being considered by the readers of Blackfriars.

If you were told of a large parish where Catholics never heard Mass, never assisted at Benediction, never knelt before the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, never held a rosary in their hands, never saw a crucifix on their walls, never crossed themselves with holy water—and this through no fault of their own but only because they had been overlooked and forgotten—you would not believe it. And yet such a parish exists: scattered among all the mental hospitals in England whose tragic sufferers—the most tragic sufferers of all—have forfeited with health, sanity and freedom almost the whole practice of their religion.

In the nature of things—if nature were to be allowed the last word—no one thinks more than can be helped about insanity. Your daughter at Cambridge has a breakdown from overwork: you minimize the episode to her, to yourself, to your acquaintances. Everyone is encouraged to forget all about it as soon as possible. Your old father becomes senile: you make him as comfortable as you can in appropriate surroundings, but you do not broadcast the calamity. Someone goes under altogether: husband, wife, parent or child becomes incurably insane. It is not, for the most part, the lazy, the half-hearted, the unintelligent. It is often, in these intimidating days, the young, the ardent, the generous. It is they who, thanks to our crazy educational system over-tax their minds while they are still growing. They whose careers depend on the reiterated strain of examinations—those statutory mile-stones of imaginary progress which have so little bearing on present interests or future needs.

It was not, perhaps, without a certain over-simplification that, in the course of the Middle Ages, men were pleased to qualify the great Masters of thought and Doctors of the Church by some epithet which expressed the most typical feature of their intellectual and spiritual make-up. St. Thomas was the Angelic Doctor, St. Bonaventure the Seraphic Doctor, Tauler the Ecstatic Doctor, and so on. At any rate, we must not stop short at the obvious implication of these epithets, nor limit the rich genius of these Masters under pretext of determining its characteristic. Bonaventure the Seraphic was an extremely vigorous speculative thinker, Thomas the Angelic admirably described the powers of Love, and Tauler the Mystic analysed in a most detailed manner the demands of simple asceticism. We must penetrate to the profounder significance of these epithets, and see in them, with the superabundance and variety of gifts, the type of an intellectual and spiritual life, the unifying point in which all these gifts are rooted and co-ordinated.

“May not Wisdom and the English people,” runs the closing sentence of Mr. Huntly Carter’s book, The New Spirit in the Cinema, “build a splendid Theatre-Cinema, temple to initiate all into a new philosophy and a new religion?”

This sentence, which is curiously symptomatic of the age in which we live, provides a useful starting point for a discussion of the cinema. For the cinema must not be regarded as an isolated phenomenon. It must be seen against the social background of our time and as the latest phase in the development of modem art.

There has been a pronounced tendency in recent critical theory to make art serve some purpose beyond itself, often to turn it into a substitute for religion. Instead of looking to religion to provide them with their philosophy, it is to art that educated people are more and more inclined to turn. It is poetry or the novel or, according to Mr. Carter, the cinema that will initiate us into that new philosophy and that new religion which remain significantly so vague and ill-defined.

For the origins of this attitude we must go back to the upheavals of the sixteenth century which destroyed European unity and divided culture into a vast number of tiny independent cells—some religious, others not—each basing its life on a different and usually contradictory philosophy.

Now there remains goodness, beauty, truth, these three: but the greatest of these is truth . . .

If the implied parallel between these three “transcendent- als” and St. Paul’s disposition of the theological virtues with charity at their heads be not an exact one, the right understanding of the place of truth in human life is nevertheless of no less moment than—is, indeed, an indispensable condition of—an enlightened appreciation of the claims of charity ; a fact which may perhaps go far to justify so seemingly bold an adaptation of the scriptural text.

It would not be difficult to show that whatever is permanent in human activity is in some way an expression of man’s instinctive worship of “the good, the true, the beautiful.” The saints and moral reformers, the philosophers and savants, the artists and poets proclaim their homage by their respective functions; they walk within the sanctuary of this trinity and offer their praises as its chosen votaries. As surely, if less evidently, the more familiar ways of life, the commonplace actions of every day, bring their own witness. To read a newspaper is to admit a need for knowledge, which is another name for truth—however precarious may be this particular means of obtaining it; to smoke a cigarette is to satisfy a craving, assuage desire, that is, to acquire goodness within a limited sphere of reference; to gaze upon an object or to pause and listen for no other reason than that it is delightful is to pay tribute to beauty.

Even in His manhood Christ Our Lord, being endowed with the fulness of grace and truth, enjoys a divine intimacy of love and vision which is incomparable. Since He is at the very apex of perfection made a “little less than the angels” but to Whom all things have been subjected, He “is able to save for ever them that come to God by Him.” Anointed with the glory of the Godhead the grace that is His is not only an endowment of His own sacred humanity but a fount of supernatural life which is meant to pervade all who are redeemed. The first among creatures to receive within herself the author of divine life was Mary the Mother of God, by whom God gives Himself to the world. “The Blessed Virgin,” says St. Thomas, “received such a fulness of grace that she was nearest of all to the Author of grace; so that she received within her Him Who is full of all grace; and by bringing Him forth, she, in a manner, dispensed grace to all.” And again he writes: “Indeed it is a great thing in any saint that he should have such an abundance of grace that it is enough for the salvation of many: but when it is so abundant as to be available for all it is in the highest degree, as is the case with Christ and the Blessed Virgin.” By the man-becoming of God, the God-man is consecrated priest and anointed as king.

The pertinent remarks of Penguin on “Modern Education” in the September number of Blackfriars invite the expression of the principles of perfect education set forth in the following pages.

There is a marked similarity between the ideal put by St. Angela Merici before her children in the sixteenth century and that set by St. Dominic before his, more than three centuries before. “Angela’s was a war for truth,” writes one of her most recent and authorised biographers. Truth was also the ruling principle, one might almost say passion, of St. Dominic. Both were no doubt inspired by their common father, St. Augustine, whose rule of life was chosen by them both. “What desire,” he asks, “is more deeply rooted in our soul than the desire for truth?” It was so deeply rooted in the soul of St. Angela that on her tomb in Brescia it is written that she was not only an Apostle in word, but a Martyr in desire. Her desire was to give her life, as Christ gave His, in testimony to Truth, in a spirit of self-sacrificing service of the Truth, under the patronage of St. Ursula and the great multitude of virgins with her who were themselves martyrs to the cause of Truth.

The Apostolate of Truth may be resumed, it would not be exaggerated to suggest, in the word “Education.” “Education,” as Newman puts it, “is a high word. It is the preparation for knowledge and it is the imparting of knowledge in proportion to that preparation.”

If there be a typical trait of faith—an attitude of spirit or an act characteristic of it—this is certainly its simplicity. It is already observable in that indeterminate thing which we term the “religious sense’ ‘; whatever may be its context, its forms, the act of the cleaving of man to the Divine is eminently simple. In the most complex souls, in those most burdened by analysis, who seem to us irremediably torn by passions, problems and agonies of inward conflict and distress, when once this shock has come out of nowhere to compel the proclamation of God . . . , a sort of polarisation comes into action. Under all the excesses, many-sidedness, and beyond superficial deployments, a directness, a spiritual purity, is cutting its way through in the search for freedom: a certain primitive and simple thing at the very root of our being has been touched.

How much more so in faith! The religious factors which create this attitude of basic adhesion are transposed and “planted” in God Himself Who is the source and consummation of the entire change. No longer adoration grounded in the shivering dread of an annihilated creature, but communion in the life of a personal God by active “outpouring” of divine light interiorly.

What paradox, then, to wish to analyse it, analyse this faith which, like life beneath the surgeon's scalpel, escapes us in proportion as analysis goes deeper!

Must we leave it alone?—Let ourselves be involved in a sort of spiritual wave where, assent once given, we have to renounce every control, every recall to terra firma, under pain of falling into any kind of “rationalism”? Attractive, enduring temptation for the believer!