And he brought them to Adam to see what he would call them.

When Adam was invited by God to name all the animals, he was the first poet. Thus poetry is as old as mankind, and fundamental to man. Adam had a head, a heart and five senses: he was a perfect man and could sing. Adam the poet, when he named the animals, did not give them their scientific names, studied by genus and difference: no, he beheld the marvels of creation, he loved them, and he cried out the music of their names. And the sons of Adam also have intelligence, desire and sensation as their father had, they also have the experience and love of Creation, and— amantis est cantare—they will also always sing of it. For man, endowed with the power of speech and song, will not rest with experience. His experience will overflow, he will always be ready to speak of what he loves, he will make something drawn out of himself, that self which has somehow been transformed by the love-experience, and spontaneously will say the Thing that he has got to know and to love. From the day when the first man called out the names of the living things of the earth, the heart of man has continued to utter a good word—eructavit cor meum verbum bonum, as the poet hath it—echoing the refrain of that first divine poem: “And God saw that it was good.”

There are few countries the world knows better than France; yet few countries are less understood. Nearly all the opinions which foreigners are accustomed to express about France appear, to the eyes of a Frenchman, to be tainted with error or, at very least, to be unfair generalisations.

Will this be thought a mere reaction of patriotic pride? A refusal to recognise ourselves in portraits which do not flatter us? Perhaps; but it is not only that. For a Frenchman will, as often as not, refuse to recognise himself in foreign portraits which flatter him as well as in some he finds less gratifying. Even before criticising what is said of him, he is suspicious, mistrustful.

For he is aware even though he be incapable of analysing it, of the immense complexity of France and things French. France is a nation with a long history, wherein a great variety of traditions intermix and intertwine. Her apparent cohesion, however striking it may seem to the foreign observer, covers an astonishing diversity of very variegated provincial families, and, in the phrase of Maurice Barrès, of “spiritual families.” Monsieur Durand and Monsieur Lévy may be as alike as twin brothers, but they are nevertheless profoundly different. And if Monsieur Durand is a native of Paris, and Monsieur Lévy saw the light at Mulhouse, the difference will be very great indeed. The swarmings of parliamentary parties and groups, the rise and fall of a bewildering variety of political formations and of literary cliques—with all of which the foreigner observer finds it very hard to keep peace—bear ceaseless and ever changing witness to the truth of this.

The general contempt for law and the breakdown in the machinery for enforcing it suggest the need for a reconsideration of the principles which give to law its binding force. The very conditions which must prevail in organised society necessitate a social control which is exercised through law and upon which must rest an orderly arrangement as a groundwork of social peace. Peace in society is dependent on social unity. All things naturally crave peace based on order, and although man is by nature meek lawlessness and inflamed passion are capable of making him the worst of brutes. Hence reason dictates the necessity for rules of conduct to be followed by all. Individual inclination must sometimes be restricted and accommodated to the larger interests of society as a whole. St. Thomas therefore defines law as “a dictate of reason, given and promulgated for the common good by one who has charge of the community.” There are, besides statutory law, properly recognised customs which in defect or written law retain their binding force. The obligatory character of law is derived from the power to legislate vested in the representatives of the people, whose charge it is to make provision for the common interests of the society over which they rule. It is by legislation that just relationship is established between members of the state; and as all legislation should be dictated by justice and gives rise to reciprocal rights and duties, every just law has an ethical value. But a law which is unjust is no law, and does not merit obedience.

With the admirable intention of giving the English public reliable and authentic information about present-day Germany and in the hope of thereby promoting friendlier relations between the two countries twenty-one prominent Germans have collaborated to produce a book called Germany Speaks. In many respects the work is well done. It is an attractive-looking book, lengthy without being too discursive, and generous in the amount of information about many aspects of German life and policy. Unfortunately it fails to give anything like an adequate account precisely of those questions which have caused the average Englishman to take up an attitude which is at best distrustful, at worst positively hostile, towards Germany.

The fundamental principles behind the Nazi system, labour, social and economic conditions and Germany's external relations are of interest chiefly to politicians and intellectuals and the average man is prepared to admit the truth and justice of much that appears under these headings. The problems which do need an explanation if the ordinary Englishman is to be won over to sympathetic understanding of Germany and which are omitted or scarcely touched on in this book may be reduced to four.

We hold as Catholics that the truths of our faith should be the basis and life-giving principle of our ideas and judgements and actions in every department of our lives, and that nothing should be excluded from the all-inclusive influence of that principle. I had not been teaching very long before I began to be conscious that, as in the life of ordinary Catholics in the world, so in school life, there were often two distinct areas. One area was an explicitly Catholic area, in which Christian standards were fully realized and fully applied; but there was another area, and in school this was chiefly covered by what are termed the secular studies, where Christian standards were not indeed denied, but either not applied at all or only applied occasionally at certain isolated points where their non-application would have been glaringly apparent. At other less prominent points our standards of judgment were not really Christian at all, but those of the world around us. In other words, we were not living the Christian life integrally; the principles of the faith were not penetrating into and informing every idea and judgement in every department of our lives; and in consequence we were producing characters, forming personalities, that were all-unconsciously divided in allegiance, in the service of two masters, ruled in part by Christian principles, but in part either without definite standards of any kind or ruled by standards that were not Christ’s and that in the last analysis were quite irreconciliable with Christ’s law.

When the old pagan civilization in the West went down with Imperial Rome there was one institution which, surviving the general decline, gathered together the fragments from the wreckage and incorporating the new elements rebuilt again more solidly, more splendidly than before the edifice of Western civilisation. So intimate was the union between that institution and the new civilization in the West that we may call Christianity the soul of Christendom, for Europe is the Faith and the Faith is Europe.

Till about the beginning of the 16th century the Christian revelation and ideology were accepted universally even when their precepts were not always adhered to. Though disagreement and conflict might arise between Prince and Pope, the basic principles on which society reposed remained unchallenged. But after the decline of the later Middle Ages revolution came, a reaction set in.

That “to raise up hatred against hatred is to prepare the ruin of political life”; that violence is a boomerang, the attempt at violent repression of an evil merely causing it to spring up elsewhere with renewed virulence; that “Christendom will re- create itself by Christian means, or it will collapse completely”; in a word, that the “problem of means ... it of absolutely central importance’ ‘; and that only the Christian means of patience, unity, love, can do anything to save the world; these are the leading ideas in M. Maritain’s preface to Professor Mendizabel’s Aux Origines d’une Tragedie. They also form, with certain obvious reservations, the leading lines of thought in Mr. Aldous Huxley’s latest, and greatest, book; and one notes them here because of this sometimes startling similarity, extending almost to verbal parallelism.

About the goal of human endeavour, that we ought to be advancing towards an age of liberty, peace, justice and brotherly love, “there is and for long has been a very general agreement. Not so with regard to the roads which lead to that goal.” And if we search for a definition of the ideal we ought all to be becoming, we shall find here too that; if “the enslaved have held up for admiration now this model of a man, now that,” on the other hand, “at all times and in all places, the free have spoken with only one voice.”

Once it was a sign of taste to knock down the little grecian temple at the end of the glade and build a gothic ruin in its place. Does it not seem that the contemporary revival of St. Thomas is sometimes conducted in the same spirit? And does not this to some extent justify the mutters about philosophical feudalism? At any rate such reflections have produced a most candid and enquiring essay, an examination of conscience as to why our philosophy should be either accepted or rejected more or less as a vogue.

In his own university the author discovers a feeling against St. Thomas out of all proportion to the effort of revival. He does not permit himself to suppose that the reaction comes from a fresh reading of the text. The fault is largely ours. We have presented our philosophy almost as a religious creed, not indeed by appealing outright to ecclesiastical authority, but by sundry becks and nods hinting, and not too gently, that we have bread where all else is synthetic confectionery; playing on the verbal emotions; using the psychological magic of security, a conservative code, the few simple tests. Rationalism, like racialism, can have its superstitions, and both can offer violence to the free individual, sensing only the forces of disintegration outside their own particular pattern. In both cases, too, it is the Jew who suffers, the wandering Jew; the mind unhappy, ironic, searching, but still unattached. We have avoided the issue with modern thought, or begged the question, bringing forward half a dozen or so of our own principles tricked out with technicalities.

A Play whether moral or otherwise is a plot, an action in which one human force is pitted against another to culminate in victory or defeat. It is not a reality of human ambition, joy of suffering, but a figure, a picture, a statement of it, a thing made for presentation by actors to an audience. It is, therefore, conditioned by the language, knowledge and experience of those for whose delight or instruction it is performed. Not only each word and action but all costume, properties, lighting and scenery should be designed to develop or explain the plot. The author, the producer and the actor must know why a character is “garbed in black tights, dull red jersey and black cheese-cloth veil,” or in khaki and a steel helmet; why the Lighting plot is for “Red and blue Foots and Borders” at the rise of the curtain; and why a Castle of the World is made of silver blocks in the form of a triangle.

In 1286 the Dominican Mission in the Mongol Ilkhanate of Persia was reinforced by the Friar who was the destined instrument of its greatest triumph: Fra Ricold of Monte Croce. The mission was then more than forty years old, for it had been established in 1240, less than two years after the armies of Charmaghan and Baachu, lieutenants of Okkadai, successor to the terrible Ghengis Khan, had swept like a devastating flame over the land.

Pope Gregory IX had in that year sent eight friars to Tiflis, and in 1254 William de Rubruck, the Franciscan envoy of St. Louis to the Grand Khan, met one of them Bernard of Catalonia, in the half desolated city of Naxua, near Ararat. He had mastered the Tartar tongue and was still preaching zealously to the savage conquerors, with no companion in his isolation but a German lay brother whose language he did not understand.

At the time of Fra Ricold's arrival in the Ilkhanate the Mongols had lost some of their brutal savagery, but their character had suffered no change. If the Ilkhan and his court no longer went dressed in ox hides nor ate dog flesh and drank blood with the gusto of their parents, they remained deceitful, treacherous and insolent towards all not of their race, and still accounted the slaughter of others as naught.

Fra Ricold, born in the Tuscan village of Monte Croce in 1242, entered the Dominican noviciate at Santa Maria Novella, Florence, in his twenty-fifth year. In 1272 he graduated as Master of Arts, and was then sent to St. Catherine’s Convent, Pisa, where he soon gained renown as a Thomist and masterly expositor of the Angelic Doctor.

Teaching and worship have always been on friendly terms, arm in arm and in step with each other. Lex orandi, lex credendi, it is said. But it is not always easy to decide which takes the lead, since their action is reciprocal, teaching reacting upon worship and vice-versa. In general most will agree with the Abbé Vacandard, “that in Christianity the feast has always preceded the definition of the doctrine at the same time as the theological discussions contribute to precision in the meaning of the liturgical solemnity.” Yet in particular instances consistent teaching must have influenced devotion and directed it into new channels; though only after it has received practical expression in the liturgical worship of the Church is it crowned with precise definition.

The interplay of doctrine and devotion is of special importance in the honour paid to our Lady and the teaching concerning her, for in theology she is distinguished from all other saints by a liturgical distinction. The pre-eminence of our Lady is established by the type of cultus to be offered her, technically called “hyperdulia.” Doctrine and cultus are united here where she is distinguished from all other creatures by the type of homage which she should receive. But at the present time there are also many ideas concerning the blessed Virgin which are not so evidently connected with worship. By these she is given a very central position in the scheme of salvation as the “Mediatrix of all graces,” as “Co-redemptrix” or the “Mother of the Mystical Body” so that she is distinguished not only by the honour shown her but also by her unique type of co-operation in the redemption of mankind.

Granted that Capitalism arose under Catholicism and not, as Weber and even Marx believed, only with the loss of unified temporal power by Rome and the rise of the Protestant Reformation, individualism and the spirit of free inquiry; yet, as Fanfani explains, Catholicism and capitalism are unalterably opposed, two utterly different views of life and ethics, and any study of their interrelations must take note of that. A distinction must be made between what actually happened and how it should have happened; the moral question with its implication of the whole of Catholic doctrine permeates any factual, dispassionate analysis as such. He distinguishes between religious ethics and the actual apparatus of the Church. “The relations between capitalism and the Catholic Church as an organization must not be confused with the relations between capitalism and the Catholic religion”; “it should be plain to all how mistaken it is, in considering the relations between capitalism and Catholicism, deliberately to pause at this or that fact, this or that measure, this or that action, for which, whatever its results, responsibility lies not with Catholicism as a doctrine, but with some individual Catholic, be he Pope or sacristan.” An arraignment of capitalism on such grounds is almost literally an ideal one; it moves with an exclusively moral sphere, and it never allows the actual recording of history to be confused with constructive suggestiveness.

Holidays with pay is an idea which performs the almost impossible—it pleases everybody. The only people who really ought to object to it, on their own principles, are a few Catholic Distributists who display an excessive veneration for work and thrift and a rather puritanical hatred of the very words “leisure” and “plenty.” But even these, I feel sure, will not have the heart to be too consistent in this case.

We who preach the new economics naturally welcome the holidays-for-all-with-pay movement as a sort of miracle that confirms the truth of what we say. It is not consumer-credit, to be sure; essentially it is no more than an increase of wages with a shortening of hours. But it does prepare the way for consumer credit, and it does mean more purchasing-power in the pockets of the consumer as such. It does distribute money through some channel that is not exactly production. Above all it does make a beginning of a psychological break between the idea of work and the idea of a living or income. Or (to put it another way) it educates people towards the idea that work is something to be desired for its own sake, not because a living has to be earned by some drudgery or other.

That European society is in a state of decline is generally accepted. That the Catholic influence on the institutions of that society has been seriously diminished if not altogether eliminated is deplored by those who appreciate the Church's civilising power. The latter naturally do everything possible to reassert the claims of the Church and serious men of all kinds endeavour according to their limited means to prevent the decline. It may however be more useful and it seems more in accordance with the facts to regard the new age as already begun and, if not completely to solve, at least to propose a number of questions about the newest tendencies.

The fundamental fact is that our civilisation is something utterly different from what is properly described as European civilisation. The latter was established through the contact of the Roman and Barbarian worlds under the guiding influence of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church fused them and gave to society its distinguishing mark.

It is not a question of whether there were more baptised or better Catholics in mediæval times than there are in our own day. It is rather that society was then Catholic in outlook, with religion influencing all aspects of private and public life, while to-day it can no longer be called even Christian.

The rulers of mediæval society, the Guelfs and the Ghibel lines, the Hohenstaufens and the Carolingians, Henry II and Philip the Fair, quarrelling with one another, disobedient to the head of Christendom, were all Catholics by Baptism and profession.

“As at other epochs in the history of the Church we face a world that has once again fallen into paganism.” These words of the Holy Father must have found an echo in the serious-minded of many countries, and in France we find them abundantly justified. In most of her institutions paganism is rife, in her literature, schools, theatres, cinemas and radio. One can discern it in her economic outlook and in the manners and customs of our contemporaries; and, most insidiously, it is penetrating the lives of an appreciable number of Christians, attached to the Church by sentiment and tradition but exposed to the worst forms of selfindulgence by their lukewarmness and lives of ease.

Rather than enumerate the various spheres where this neo-paganism is specially rampant, I will give you some recent statistics. Something like 10% of the French people are unbaptized, not a quarter fulfil their Easter duties, and not quite a fifth attend Mass regularly on Sunday. This sufficiently indicates the state of Catholicity in France to-day, the France of the Crusader, the France of Saint Louis.

This is a work of sane and considerable scholarship covering a field in which, in spite of the work of Père Lagrange, Catholic scholars have shown some measure of diffidence: a field also in which thomist theology has a peculiarly acute responsibility. The problem is stated on p. 25, “The difficulty is that while Christian theology asserts that God is unknowable, it simultaneously asserts that God can be known. And not Christian only, but any form of belief which can be called theistic is bound to assert that in some sense God can be known.” The approach to it, “Not to get rid of anthropomorphism, which is impossible if man is going to have any idea of God at all, but to make the division between right and wrong anthropomorphism where it ought to be made— that is the main problem for all philosophy of religion.” Already the Catholic theologian has grounds to fear that the edges of the problem have been blurred. Not that, in such a fear, there is any room for sectarian pride or aloofness. Dr. Bevan himself underlines the nature of Catholic responsibility in the matter (p. 317), “It would be quite a mistake to suppose that these discussions (of the theory of analogy) are of interest only to Roman Catholic theologians. The problem with which they grapple is a problem which must confront any modern thinker who believes in any God at all.” Further back (p. 315) he says of the same doctrine of analogy, “I cannot profess myself able to make sense of this explanation.

“Le Silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie,” wrote Pascal.

Around us the miracle of nature towers heavenward under the huge pyramid of subordinated and interlocked beings. “Combien de royaumes nous ignorent!” But ourselves are introverted, egocentric. Even our earth readily becomes for us the core of the world about which the stars circle in a vast illusion.

It is the biggest contribution of Thomism to our lifethought that it tears us away from that little shrunken vision. We lift up our eyes to the eternal hills which surround us everywhere. Every rock, crystal, tree, flower, bird, is an “eternal hill” for those in whom the light of the vision has dawned. It towers upwards till it touches God and tells us of God.

Spinning electron hung over the void, electron supports atom and atom molecule; molecule supports tissue and tissue the rhythm of life. Through the wonders of science we learn to reconstruct in its richness the nature divided up by our analysis. Through division we reach a deeper unity; through the splitting up of the rainbow we know the inner richness of undivided light. As Goethe knew the beauty of holiness and adoration through the incense ascending from his childish pyramid of minerals, so we know the glory of God englobing us as we ascend the mountain of created being. “Un monde nouveau, comme si nous avions colloque avec les naturels d’une autre planète,” wrote Fabre of his insects. Every nook and corner of nature is such a new world.

The life of the spirit is the life of freedom, the life that responds to nature’s charms, to her colour, her cadences, her music: the poetry that sums these up and calls them evanescent and calls them also beauty. Spirit is not created art. Spirit is the poised brush; it is gazing; it is listening. Spirit is sensitivity that asks not why nor whether, that simply enjoys and through enjoyment may give rise to creativity.

What is the Imagination? That it is a very important thing, or an essential human faculty, we can all agree; but after that the trouble begins. And, as generally happens, those who have spoken of it with most seriousness and authority are the hardest to understand. “Imagination is the Human existence itself,” said Blake, who had plenty of of it. It is “the esemplastic power”—that is, the power of shaping diversity into unity—said Coleridge. “It may be compared to Adam’s dream.” A. C. Bradley, elucidating this, yet speaking with his own authority, said: “Wherever the imagination is satisfied, there, if we had a knowledge we had not, we should discover no idle fancy, but an image of a truth. “ That brings us back to Blake again, in his dictum: “Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.”

Relief of distress is one thing, endowment of destitution quite another. Naturally we give the cup of cold water—more probably of hot tea—to the vagrant men and women who ask for it at the door. Naturally the spare coat or shirt goes to the man in want of it. These benevolent acts we all perform, as we supply the match (always supposing we have one) to the casual smoker unprovided with the means of ignition. Which of us would berate the smoker for his carelessness, or require the filling up of a form to explain why he left his matches at home? The natural law enjoins relief of one’s neighbour.

Endowment of honourable and voluntary poverty— dowries and other provision for the sons and daughters of our Lady Poverty vowed to religion—this has been the practice of mankind in many lands long before the coming of Christianity. Plainly it is a matter unrelated to the endowment of destitution.

Nor again because we are bound to do our best for the poor who “are always with us,” the halt, lame and blind, the mentally and physically defective, the orphan, the aged and infirm, must we confound this entirely just and charitable provision with the endowment of persons unwillingly destitute and fully capable of earning their living.

The acceptance of destitution as the inevitable lot of thousands, a merely regrettable feature in our otherwise admirable civilisation, is the shameful thing to-day. Destitution accepted and tolerated by our elected rulers from every political party; accepted and tolerated by our Catholic legislators in Lords and Commons as unprotestingly as by non-Catholic. Only the question of “how much” the destitute shall be given to save them from starvation is hotly debated.