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!

You have set me a very difficult problem, which my fifty years study of theology makes me chary of solving. In using the word difficult I do not mean the difficulty of gathering from your long letter with its many anxious repetitions the few points of uncertainty which you wish me to solve. My main difficulty after having gathered the heads of your difficulties is to solve the few difficulties which I have gathered.

Of course I know that you are not a Communist. I know this in spite of the wide-spread opinion that you are a Communist in mind and heart, though not in name. I know that what men and some of your fellow Priests take to be your Communism is your quite rational conviction that many of the alleged refutations of Communism do not refute. Of course you are too good a logician to think that you have proved a man’s opinion to be false merely by showing that the arguments for that opinion are false. A man may bring up wrong arguments to prove that the earth is round. But to show that his arguments are not true does not prove that the world is not round. Hence your refutation of the refutations of Communism does not prove that Communism is right. But still less does your refutation of the common refutations of Communism prove that you are, what many hold you to be—a Communist.

Of the various religious revivals of present-day Catholic Germany the biblical movement has, next to the liturgical, attracted most attention, even among Evangelical Christians. For centuries “Bible-reading” has been so marked a characteristic of Evangelical Christianity that those groups of Evangelical students which correspond to the various Catholic student youth-associations were spoken of as “B.K.’s” (Bibelkreise), i.e., “Bible-circles.” Since the Reformation, Bible-reading has been part of the daily life of every devout Evangelical family, at a time when, even in the best Catholic families, one could search in vain for an unshortened edition of the book in which the word of God was shown forth. There are to-day signs that this particular tradition among Catholics is weakening. Hundreds of thousands of copies of the “book of books” are sold every year; everywhere vigorous “bible-circles” are springing into life.

The 22nd of September, 1932, marked the foundation of something entirely new. On that day there came into being in Stuttgart a central organisation to deal with all matters connected with the propagation of Bible-knowledge. Stuttgart then became the centre of the Catholic Bible Movement. Was it the result of a novel imitation of Evangelical forms of piety, or did it mark the return on the part of Catholics to an ancient Christian custom, which was only discontinued for a short time when the Bible was in danger of being seriously misinterpreted?

In considering first the Second Part of the Report on Doctrine in the Church of England, we have deliberately postponed consideration of those sections which have aroused most discussion and which would seem to indicate trends and tendencies very different from those in the section on The Church and Sacraments. Before trying to form an estimate of the significance of the whole from the standpoint of those concerned with the fidelity of the Christian witness and with the prospects of Christian unity, we may, without attempting a full analysis, draw attention to some salient points raised in these other sections.

The first of the three main divisions of the Report covers The Doctrines of God and of Redemption. Herein the doctrine of the Triune God is confined within a page and a half, not of dogmatic or theological exposition, but of pure history of dogma. The question What do we mean by the word “God”? is answered exclusively in terms of purely natural theology without reference to Revelation; but it is found subsequently that the “Biblical conception [of the ‘Living God’] is greatly to be preferred,” for purely pragmatic reasons, to “the leading conceptions entertained by Greek philosophers and Indian sages.”

For a Thomist the validity of any method in patristic study can be gauged by the effort to attain to an objective knowledge of patristic thought. It is only for its own sake that truth is to be sought for if we are to chance to find it. The theologian who brings his own preconceptions to the study of the Fathers will only rediscover what he has himself preconceived. The controversialist who uses patristic texts as missiles will find them both as malleable and as harmless as snowballs. It is a futile thing to read the Fathers in relation to problems and to controversies that were beyond their imagining, for their writings can only be intelligible in terms of their own setting, not of ours. Hesitatingly and clumsily we must try to place them in the time context and the cultural pattern of their lives.

It is only gradually that such a method is becoming possible. It would be naive to ignore the value of the labour of the past. French and German Catholicism have maintained a record of continuous achievement in patristics which is only paralleled by the high tradition of Anglican scholarship. But of their nature such traditions cannot be static. Our knowledge of Hellenistic cultural factors is as new as the science of Byzantine palaeography and both are critically significant for the reading of Greek texts. The study of Hadrianic culture has been transformed since 1906, scientific Byzantinism is not yet forty years old, but Hadrianic and proto-Byzantine culture formed the setting of two out of the three decisive epochs in patristic thought.

The analysis of the present Catholic position in France, with its hopes and fears for the future, as presented by the Marquis d’Aragon in the January issue of Blackfriars was both interesting and inspiring. On one point however he was rather reticent. Certain it is that in large measure the apostasy of the working class in that country was due to the fact that quite a number of employers were practising Catholics. In their own circles, in their families and in all that concerned the practice of religious duties, they were without reproach. But this did not prevent them, with a few notable exceptions of whom the most glorious example was Leon Harmel, from being “amoral liberalists” in their treatment of the workers. Harmel, writing to a priest friend, described them thus: “They are little Louis XIVs, in their factories and in their towns. Their ideas go no further than the patronage, and the publication of new ideas for the education of the people, for popular initiative, and for devotion to the working class, seems monstrous to them.” How can one blame the workers for associating Catholicism and wage-slavery? The struggle of the C.F.T.C. (Christian Trade Union) to play its proper part in the relations between Capital and Labour in France is sufficient proof that Rerum Novarum found many stony hearts among French employers. The result of this was that apostasy which Pius XI termed the greatest scandal of the twentieth century.

German economic and sociological theory has always tended to follow a line of its own, away from the general Western European tendency. In the days when the English “classical” theory, incarnated in John Stuart Mill, had provided a lucid and logical complexus of interlocking “laws” for the whole of the economic activities of society, the German “Historical School,” in the person of Roscher, denied there was such a thing as economic theory at all, merely the study of actual economic facts. Against this theory (or lack of it), and against new-arisen Marxism, the “Austrian School” erected a powerful theoretical structure in defence of Capitalism. The Germans, curiously enough (in view of the industrial development of Germany), as opposed to the Austrians, always tended to react against Industrial Capitalism. Schmoller, who succeeded Roscher as the Archimandrite of the “Historical School,” preached the preservation of the handicrafts as the sole bulwark against “domination by the monied interests”; and this tradition was carried on by Max Weber (the inventor of the famous theory of the origin of Capitalism from Calvinism), and by Werner Sombart.

The fundamental moral principle governing the relations between men as producers and consumers, employers and employees, is admittedly that of social justice. The purpose of this article is to show, in a brief synthesis of papal teaching, that this principle implies the social theory of Christian corporativism, and to study the application of both in the leading articles of the Portuguese Statute of National Labour.

The Statute of National Labour was published on the 23rd September, 1933, six months after the plebiscite on the part of the Portuguese nation of the new Constitution establishing a “unitary and corporative Republic.” It is not itself technically a law, it is rather a preamble to all future social and economic legislation, in which has been elaborated the norms of the new social and economic order which in accepting the Constitution the nation had solemnly pledged itself to bring about. (Constitution: Part I, chapters IV and VIII.) Now that the constitution of the late Austrian Federal Republic is a dead letter, it stands unique among political documents for its fidelity to Christian social and economic principles and for the care with which it applies the precepts of papal teaching in the construction of a professional and economic code specially adapted to the needs of a particular nation.

The nature of social justice is clearly expressed by Pius XI in Divini Redemptoris: “it is impossible to care for the social organism and the good of society as a whole unless each single part and each individual member—that is to say, each individual man in the dignity of his human personality—is supplied with all that is necessary for the exercise of his social functions.”

Between Stockholm and Upsala, in one of the occasional clearances amongst Sweden’s seemingly eternal forests towards the northern end of the great Lake Malar, lies the lovely village of Sigtuna, the cradle of the Dominican Order in all Scandinavia where, at the time of the Reformation, the Dominican Province (Provincia Daciae) counted forty-three houses of friars and four of nuns. It is, beyond question, one of the most interesting places historically in northern Europe. In this small settlement three massive ecclesiastical stone-built ruins attract attention, the broken tower of the Church of Saint Lawrence and the fortress-like churches of Saint Olaf and of Saint Peter with their chancels roofless but otherwise intact. The last-mentioned church was the cathedral of the bishopric of Sigtuna which early in the twelfth century was split into two dioceses, Weteraos and Upsala.

But if these three ancient relics of Sweden’s early and vigorous Catholicity call for notice, another in Sigtuna commands it. The church of St. Mary, as it is called, is a building of clamorous pink brick, looking scarce more than a decade of years old when viewed from a short distance. When, however, we get close up to it, it shows by the lines of its door and window arches signs of considerable age, and the interior clearly demonstrates its birth in the thirteenth century. It is no other, in fact, than the ancient Dominican Church of Sigtuna, now used as the state or Lutheran place of worship. This explains its intense state of preservation.

Like most of the problems of modern life that of property is neither purely theoretical nor purely practical. We live in a transitional period in which profound social changes together with changes in the spiritual outlook of mankind have at once divorced legal institutions from their basis in the socio-physical life of men and have set in profound and dynamic movement desires and forces wholly disruptive to the compact life of a traditional social order. The challenge to the Christian thinker is taken up glibly enough at the level of pure theory, but an impatience is growing within the Christian body itself at the failure of theory effectively to modify and to change the system of dynamic disorder under which we live. In particular the defence of traditional property rights can and does lead to attitudes of pugnacious defence not of the traditional but in effect of the existing “order,” while a spirit of understandable but shrill and dangerous exasperation throws its hopes into one, and the most potent, of the forces of disruption. This does at least represent a real force for change rather than a system of hardened arteries through which the life of society cannot flow again; but in espousing the cause of Communism the loss for the Christian is the loss of a Christian mind. What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world for the workers and suffer the loss of his own soul? How terrifying a pedestal!

In a recent essay on education in a Catholic review, the writer was concerned to show how “vocational education” (i.e., school training in manual work for particular occupations) might be accompanied by “cultural and religious” training so that pupils should have the advantages of all three. He was anxious that clerical attainments should not make for contempt of manual work, but thought that all would be well if teachers would “blend but not confuse” in those whom they taught the “three streams of education, the religious, the cultural and the economic.” So taught (he concluded hopefully) “the individual will be content to earn his living at the job, whatever it may be, that he is best fitted to perform.”

The writer was a man of great experience in education, but it is to be regretted that words like “culture” and “vocation” should have been used without apology as they are used by secular sentimental thought; that almost no reference should have been made to Christian principles and tradition; and that any idea of integration should, seemingly, have been dismissed from the writer’s mind. Doubtless he thought some truths too plain to need repeating; I differ, and shall repeat them here.

Divine grace may be regarded: firstly, as the primordial vocation of man to the supernatural order; secondly, as a gift habitually dwelling in the justified soul; thirdly, as an actual and indispensable help from above.

The practical importance of the doctrine of the primordial vocation of mankind to the supernatural order is unlimited. In it we shall find unending motives for admiration and adoration. It is said of St. Augustine that, after his conversion, he could never fully satisfy his desire to contemplate the divine plan for the salvation of the human race—that is to say, the idea of the Incarnation; and yet, in truth, the Incarnation is, as far as we can judge of such a mystery, only the remedy to the check which the fall of man gave to an antecedent plan. Let us go back further than the Gospel and put ourselves face to face with that incomprehensible love of God for his creature, which destined us from all eternity to the participation of His essential and infinite Beatitude: for that is exactly what we mean by our vocation to the supernatural order. “We shall be like unto Him, and see Him as He is, face to face.” This is indeed a great mystery, since, as St. Thomas teaches, God loves nothing in us that He has not first caused in us. In the natural order, His providence inclines Him towards the needs of that degree of being that He, as Creator, has imparted to us.

In an age in which no special premium was placed on experimental science St. Thomas did not feel the urge to submit the Christian life to a process of psycho-analysis. He was as convinced of the validity of reason, and the principles derived therefrom, as that the sense are to place us in touch with reality which would otherwise remain a blank to the human mind. In this sense he was an experimentalist, though his aim was not merely to classify phenomena and to place them under generalizations, but rather to deduce from them principles which in the light of reason would be valid at all times and under all circumstances. He believes in basing his conclusions on tested facts, and when it is a question of pure reason he is unwilling to draw conclusions in advance of the evidence. He is more than usually aware that an attitude of mind may be easily coloured by desires, but he is equally assured that under the influence of grace the desire of charity may give a deeper insight into divine truth by immediate intuition.

Through conscious or unconscious prejudices and preconceived attitudes of mind in matters pertaining to the spiritual life, the intellectualism of Thomism does not appeal to all, while many become wary of impending danger. Even those who might well be expected to know better, are afraid of the intimate connection which Dominicans hold to exist between speculative theology and contemplation. This doubtless is in some measure due to the marked contrast which is observed between the writings of St. Thomas and of those who are classified as mystical writers.

No one should attempt to read what I shall write unless they understand a principle which alone could justify what may seem like a justification of Communism. I think I first realised the principle when discussing Henry VIII with Protestants whom Froude’s glorification of Henry had infected. The Froude-infected mind proclaims the great good that came of Henry’s policy; as if the increased fertility of the infant burial place at Bethlehem justified Herod in slaughtering the Innocents. On hearing this mode of arguing I did not refuse to grant, for the sake of argument, that some or even that much good had come of Henry’s thefts and murders; but I refused to grant that Henry’s policy was a good policy because good came of it; or even that Henry was either a great or good man because great good had come of his way of acting.

The abstract principle which Henry VIII’s legal thefts and murders made me see and accept was this: A man, a programme, a policy is not good merely because good comes of it; especially if the good that comes of it has come by the operation of a good-will. Just as there is nothing so good that a bad will cannot turn it to bad, so there is nothing so bad that a good will cannot turn to good.

“World Conference, World Domination or World Government?” is the title I have chosen for the consideration of a problem which I venture to think is the most burning question of our age: but which, as a student of history, I shall approach historically.

What do we mean by “World” in this context? Evidently Humanity, the totality of human beings who at any one time inhabit our planet. This humanity is one, both biologically and historically. It has radiated from one centre in primitive times and gradually, in wave upon wave, spread over the whole earth. Primitive man was a food-collector, i.e., one who had not yet learnt the art of food-production; incidentally, and this is of special interest to us here, he did not know nor practise homicide; whether singly or en masse. Survivals of such primitives we still find on the fringes of the inhabited world, as for instance, the Eskimos of Greenland, the Firelanders of Patagonia, the Semangs of the Malay Peninsula, the Pygmies of the Central African Ituri forest: all people, who still have not even formed the conception of war.

With the threefold invention, in widely separated areas, of food-production by Hunters, Herdsmen and Farmers, there arose the three basic civilizations of mankind, which later on and in diverse manner mingled and produced secondary civilizations. Many of these again fused, and thus for instance there issued that great Archaeic Civilization, which we can trace back to the VII millennium B.C. and to which belonged the earliest—and essentially peaceable!—civilizations of the Mesopotamian, the Indus and the Nile valleys.

Language is an instrument designed for the clarification of thought, and not, as Socialists too often assume, as a substitute for thought. This is no new development, for the discussion groups of Mr. Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club carry on the tradition of the revolutionary clubs in eighteenth century France.

’ ‘Dans la vie,” writes Pierre Gaxotte, “ce qui compte, ce sont les actes; ici, ce sont les paroles. Dans la vie, ce que l'on recherche, ce sont des résultants matériels, tangibles; ici, ce sont des votes. Dans la vie, gouverner, c’est lutter contre des choses, prévoir, préparer, organiser, agir; ici, le grand art consiste à composer l’ordre du jour et à faire la majorité. Dans la vie, une pensée se juge à l’experience, à l’èpreuve des faits. Ici, c’est l’opinion qui règne. Est réel, ce qui emporte l’assentiment des auditeurs; est vrai, ce qui entraine leur adhésion . . . Dans la société de pensée, l’initié fait table rase de tout ce qui n’est pas abstraction et raison raisonnante. Il retranche de lui-même tout ce qui lui est vraiment personnel; il se réduit à cette petite faculté déductive qui est la chose du monde la plus répandue.”

Word fetishism plays an important part in the propaganda of the Left. The Oxford Dictionary defines “fetish” as “an inanimate object worshipped by savages for its magical powers.” To the Socialists inanimate words seem invested with magical powers. “Democracy” is such a word. No genuine Socialist worships the fact of democracy, for the intellectual Socialist has a contempt for the people and is ambitious not to be governed by but to dictate to the demos.

Like other sciences which have gradually emerged from a pre-scientific state, psychology arose when man began to ruminate on the mystery of life and the ways of human beings. The general facts of knowing, striving, feeling, desiring, willing, and so forth, were recognized and expressed in the common sense of people and expressed in perhaps a crude form in the customs language—folk-lore and myths of early times. In the attempt on the part of thinkers to find a rational explanation and a systematic grouping of such facts lay the beginnings of scientific psychology, the science of the psyche.

Professor Spearman traces the rise of psychology and the course it has taken throughout the ages to the present day, carrying the reader pleasantly and not too arduously through the intricacies of opposing ideas and theories as these have in successive epochs come to the fore.

Notwithstanding that Catholic Action has been already so thoroughly investigated and discussed, it is possible that sufficient attention has not yet been paid to the important question of its sacramental basis and sacerdotal implications. It should hardly need to be said that Catholic Action, as a thing if not as a name, is not something new in the Church; it is, on the contrary, implied in the very notion of membership of the Mystical Body of Christ and is an integral part of Catholic truth.

It is important to insist that the Church of God is a hierarchic society in which membership implies also status, a status which derives immediately from oneness with Christ and a sharing in His perfections and powers, and therefore in His sacerdotal character. The nature and the degree of this sharing in the Priesthood of Christ varies considerably in the different grades within the Church; but it is a reality even in the lowest grade and gives an almost unbelievable quality and value to even the most commonplace participation in the liturgical life of the Church; and the source of this sacerdotal power throughout all the hierarchical grades is to be found in the Sacraments. Moreover, as far as Catholic Action in the modern sense is concerned, there is a particularly important source to be recognised in the Sacrament of Confirmation.

The part played by the Dominican Order in the General Councils of the Church would make a very interesting study in Ecclesiastical history. The idea of the Order came to fruition in the mind of Saint Dominic when he was attending the Fourth General Council of the Lateran as companion and vicar-general to the bishop of Toulouse. It was then that he opened his mind to the great pontiff Innocent III who eagerly seized on a plan so comformable to the one he himself had already advocated, namely, the creation of groups of preachers to help the bishops in their task of preaching. In the first General Council of Lyons held by Innocent IV in 1245, a leading figure was the renowned theologian and scripture scholar, Hugh of St. Cher, the Order's first cardinal. In the second of Lyons held in 1274 the greatest figure was the venerable ex-Bishop of Ratisbon, Saint Albert the Great. Other prominent Dominicans were Peter of Tarentaise, dean of the sacred college and soon to become the Order's first pope as Blessed Innocent V; Robert Kilwardby, Archbishop of Canterbury and England's foremost scholar; and William of Moerbecke, Archbishop of Corinth, the translator of Aristotle, whose knowledge of Greek was so useful in arranging the re-union with the West and Eastern Churches. It is well known that Saint Thomas Aquinas died on his way to this same Council to which he had been summoned by Pope Gregory X. In the next General Council, that of Vienne in 1311, although no lists are extant of the prelates who attended, we are told by choniclers that the great number of Dominican bishops present caused some embarrassment and no little jealousy.

From 1558 to 1598 Cecil ruled in England, under Elizabeth the Queen, and all that time Philip II reigned over Spain and America. Philip kept both his country and his continent Catholic, and nearly all his European possession. That he lost Holland can be laid to the wiles of that extraordinary character William Cecil, whose continued opposition to Catholicism was a dominant factor in making England Protestant. Here is the man as seen by a modern writer: Never in the history of England has there appeared a man Cecil’s superior in astuteness. There was something satanic about the man; an hypocrisy almost unparalleled, frightening in its profundity. His duplicity can never have been surpassed by any ruler. With equal facility he deceived friend and foe. Even Philip and the wise Cardinal Pole were his victims, and his success with Elizabeth and his defeat of the Catholics is described in lengthy and masterly fashion by Walsh, famous as the author of “Isabella of Spain,” in his new and vast life of Philip II. There was one however whom he could not deceive, Mary the Catholic, so he let his cold heart feed on his hatred till that unfortunate woman passed to the grave. Vain it was for him to clack his rosary in the church at Wimbledon and in the streets of Stamford.