Whatever the significance of the Munich agreement, whether the pessimists are right in seeing it as a miserable political wangle, or the optimists are justified in their hope for a lasting peace for Europe and the World, one thing is clear, the Christian cannot afford to ignore it, when like the rest of the world he begins to take stock. Even if it was no more than a sign in the sky, not of the shape of things to come, but a taunting reminder of all that might have been, it was clearly a reminder, the meaning of which has not escaped general notice in spite of all the attempts to dilute it with talk of political honour and the flag.

Apart from its possible positive results, one of the main elements we cannot fail to appreciate is the sense of urgency it has imposed on the world, an urgency not to be totally side-tracked by the rush for renewed rearmament. By so substantially increasing the tempo of events it has imposed on the Christian issue in Europe a “now or never” condition in the struggle. It is this connection that M. Bernanos has a special significance.

The immediate instruments of that struggle are Catholics themselves, whose unity is one of dogma and worship, directed by one authority, but who in a larger sphere reflect every shade of opinion not ruled out by creed. It would be useless even if desirable to regret it. It is an expression of the elemental life of the Church.

“Personality” is one of the most rampant of the little devils responsible for the poorly state of modem literary criticism. He is the devil behind the heresy of looking not so much at the work as at the writer, and of expecting to find the person of the writer in the work. Than this heresy there are few things harder to scotch; you think you’ve stamped it out in some little corner; but wait a minute and it will perk up its head again like bindweed or the Shepherd’s Purse.

It is certainly a very old heresy, but it can hardly ever have been so common as it is nowadays. For it is apparently related to having to write for a very large public, and there can hardly ever have been so many people reading as now. Most of us are far more interested in persons than in ideas and things. In this we are surely entirely right, and in reading books, so long as they were good books, our attention would naturally be caught and held by the author's characters. Left to ourselves there would naturally be little danger of our being too interested in the author, for the author, especially if he be a good author, is generally a very vague and shadowy person compared with the persons he has created. To the reader of David, Copperfield, David, Agnes and Dora, rather than Dickens, are the interesting persons; and even if the author does figure as a character in his own novel or play, the ordinary reader cannot know it.

A Source of continual irritation in Canada, not only in industry and business, but among the great mass of the people, is the existence of affiliations of foreign organizations in labour ranks and the influence, upon Canadian workpeople and their affairs, of unions with their headquarters and greatest membership in the United States. Trades-unionism has made giant strides in Canada in the last twenty years, more than doubling its membership,’ but to-day international labour unions have three times as many local branches and members as Canadian central labour bodies (largely founded by former members of international unions who for various reasons severed their connection with the parent bodies and are for the main part in direct opposition to the international organizations), and twice the local branches and members of all Canadian labour bodies taken together.

Without going into instances or details the objections to such a situation can readily be appreciated. Under existing conditions Canadian labour, and indirectly Canadian business, can be dictated to by United States organizations possessing the balance of weight and power and Canada, perhaps against her own will and her own best interests, involved in labour wars which may be politically inspired across the border or waged purely for the benefit of workers in a foreign country. A feeling has long been gathering strength that Canadian labour should be organized in purely Canadian organizations and Canadian workingmen be free from foreign dictation and possible exploitation.

The ideal education as here set forth is that which gives the first place in its consideration to the building up of integrated personalities. The aim of humane education must be directed towards something more complete in the- humanist sense than mere professional and vocational efficiency, however necessary this may be.

Dr. Castiello approaches the subject from the standpoint of empirical psychology and makes full use of all that is most valuable in this science. Educational psychology, however, is more concerned with problems of efficiency and skill than with cultural values. Its aim is strictly utilitarian, and so, to a great extent, materialistic. Nevertheless the various tests and devices invented for measuring intelligence and other abilities have their use, and are not to be despised.

A humane psychology of education reaches out to something beyond mere skill and ability and endeavours to penetrate more deeply into the constitution of personality.

It was the privilege of the present writer to have been able to assist at the 10th International Congress for Psychotherapy which met for the first time in England at Oxford from July 29th to August 2nd, under the presidency of the well-known Swiss psychologist, Professor C. G. Jung. The gathering included many distinguished psychotherapists from England and the Continent, and the United States of America.

As the title of the Congress indicates, the contribution of papers, discussions and exhibitions all had a bearing on the various problems connected with the diagnosis and treatment of those border line cases of mental disorder which may aptly be described as disturbances of the normal functioning of the personality during the childhood, adolescent and adult stages of life. The frequency of such disturbances and the obscurity in which their origin and characteristics were for so long—and still largely are—shrouded, have given rise to intensive studies on the part of those whose interests are focussed on the special problems of childhood. The general public, too, is becoming increasingly aware that there are problems of behaviour which call for expert treatment, but as is so often the case it is apt to become bewildered by the diversity of theories and opinions put forward from time to time. As Professor Jung observed in his opening address, various schools of thought and practice are in existence side by side, the authors of which do not see eye to eye with one another and tend to remain aloof from like theories and practice of others.

The people who are restrained in their communism by a tug from their tradition of culture form a considerable body of opinion in this country. Their state of mind is hinted at in the title of the periodical they patronize, for the New Statesman incorporates the Athenaeum, and the Week-End Review into the bargain. Catholic publishing has entered popular journalism and has also admirably engaged the Tory temper; it has not yet succeeded in addressing itself to this Liberal-Marxist sentiment, though at one time the Catholic Herald promised fair to do so. Accordingly the book Mrs. Mitchison has written to clear her own mind, should be of more than biographical interest. Her object is to bring some kind of order into the modem economic and political scene. She advances in Indian file, from question to question, or rather from questioning to questioning, sensitive to the rustle in the undergrowth, and not by deployment from massed and established premisses. To reduce this Socratic method to scholasticism reminds one of the general from home who tried to make the Virginians fight according to the drill-books. Still, they both wanted the Ohio Fork, and it may be profitable to indicate here some strategic positions held in common by St. Thomas and the symbolic Mrs. Mitchison.

Most often perhaps we Christians picture Christ in glory, at the heart of the Trinity, surrounded by a multitude of the blessed. Yet His earthly life was of the utmost loneliness. The self-emptying of the Godhead, involved in the Incarnation, found its extreme in the desertion by God of His soul at that hour when it most desperately needed support. Alone He lived, and in the isolation and the horror of self-consciousness of the damned, voluntary victim of the pain of loss as of sense, He died.

His mystical body sometimes travels on its pilgrimage with more hardship than His physical body during the hidden years. But from the first we have had Him, and although reciprocally we too are His, yet while we have all to gain from Him, He has nothing from us. He has sought one to console Him and has not found any, since He could not. For the heroism of Jesus lies in the unicity of His act. It was not He who reclined His head on the breast of John.

Since we cannot repay Him, we Christians have become accustomed, with a cynical logic, to insult His divine heart by our cool, proprietary attitude to the love wherewith He continually engulfs us in the Eucharist. So for years on end of Church history we are content to misapprehend and grossly to underestimate the contemporary moment of the Redemption. God, all-knowing of what the act involved, decided the Incarnation, but not by some toss-coin, arbitrary choice of autocratic freedom, not to manifest His glory, as though the creation did not shriek and whisper that.

In an age like ours, when feeling predominates over thought, the title of this article will strike a very bizarre note. And yet the fact that joy can be experienced without the grosser exhilaration of the senses is a truth witnessed to by the saints in every age. The Kingdom of God in the soul is a foretaste of the joys of heaven, and if the separated soul can experience the beatific joy of gazing with unclouded vision on its God, then surely it will be able in some measure to exercise a royal independence for tasting the divine delights even in this life. Joy is an experience which normally causes the whole man to- vibrate, but although “cabin’d, cribb'd, confined” through its companionship with the body, there seems no adequate reason why the immaterial soul divinized by the indwelling of the Blessed Trinity should not be able at times to vibrate with a joy that is wholly spiritual. If the faculties of the soul shot through with the divine splendour could not occasionally breathe the more rarified atmosphere of the supernatural without the cacophony of the senses, its deeply embedded hopes of immortality would lose their tonic effect, and we should soon begin to wilt under the weight of our material surroundings.

The stammerings of the mystics point to an experience which escapes the power of rational analysis. They describe darkness in terms of light, and their growing contentment would seem to keep pace with an ever-deepening conviction of the incomprehensibility of God.

The source of most of the cruelty and at least half the folly of the world is ignorance. What we do not know may on rare occasions be magnificent. It is more frequently alarming and odious. Ineradicable ignorance of one another among the nations is the fruitful cause of war, and similar ignorance between the various classes of society is responsible for much that is unjust and indefensible in the social system. But ignorance has seldom been more harmful than when it disguises the real nature of a conflict.

In all the ancient civilizations we find the spirit of gain, and in uncivilized races also. It is one of the natural qualities which distinguish man from the other animals. There are men who rise superior to it, when they have enough to live upon without gain, and some there are who will take the chance of having enough. But for the mass it holds good under every economic system. A man wants to improve on his condition. In a money economy it is easier, because a man can save more readily. In our own civilization we find it at work in the period before the dominance of capitalism. There is the striking case of St. Godric, the Norfolk lad who began life at the bottom, then started as a pedlar and did so well that presently he acquired a vessel, took partners and traded along the East Coast and overseas with such success that in sixteen years he amassed magnas opurn divitias. His parents were pious folk and he was a devoted son of the Church.

Catholics are often criticised, where social questions are concerned, of talking much and doing little. This is not the place to make public confession—usually unwarranted, almost always odious; and whether or not there is justification for this criticism is more a matter for private examination of conscience. The fact remains that a certain empty verbosity is a fault to which fallen human nature is only too prone, and it is some gain if we are alive to the possibility in us of that strain of Pharisaism, “for they say and do not.”

The Young Christian Workers’ Movement strives to counteract this tendency. Having before its eyes the words of Pope Pius XI that ‘‘the first apostles of the workers are the workers,” it aims at transforming the conditions in which the young workers live, not by force of arms, but by the love of Christ and of souls in Him. This means being intensely practical, getting down to brass tacks, to concrete cases. A realization of this has given birth, quite spontaneously, to a House of Hospitality in London, following the example of that in Wigan. The idea of wage-earners under present conditions extending hospitality on any considerable scale may seem fantastic, and the effort in London, from very small beginnings, has not been without difficulties and seeming failures; but the work goes on, and appears to be growing. After some three months of life, this new venture is able to give some account of itself. Naturally, the control and direction of the house cannot be in the hands of those who are themselves at work elsewhere all day, and there is now a resident voluntary staff, but the Young Christian Workers, after taking an active part in the starting of the house, assist whenever they can.

The animating principle of the Christian life is love: the Christian life at every stage is shot through with suffering. God is good and omnipotent: physical and moral evil never cease to abound. The least reflective intelligence is apt to be given pause by these conjunctions. To face the attacks of unbelievers and to reduce, if may be, our own perplexities, we do well to draw certain distinctions. God is perfect but the creatures he made could not fail to be imperfect. A greater good is achieved by creating free intelligent beings whose nature involves a real possibility of moral evil than by refraining from communicating his being beyond the confines of the inner life of the Trinity. Crudely, the order we must see things in is: God, angels, satan, man capable of achieving destiny without falling into moral evil, man falling into moral evil with consequent privation of supernatural and preternatural attributes, man restored to the supernatural, i.e., heaven made available, but without the preternatural impassibility, immortality, etc. And that brings us to ourselves. All this is penny catechism matter, but worth having in mind, if we are to avoid asking ourselves questions which have no legitimacy for Christian men.

In 1929 the French archaeologists unearthed at Ras Shamra on the N. Phoenician coast the remains of a once famous city, Ugarit, and the story of the wonders there brought to light is familiar to many. Now there has come to light another and in some respects even more important city. Nearly opposite where the R. Khabour flows into the Euphrates (the “Chobar” of Ezechiel i.i, etc.) is a mound, Tell Hariri, where M. Parrot has been working since 1933. His report on his third campaign, December 1935 till March 1936, is full of interest. For here stood a mighty city on the Middle Euphrates, on a line drawn between the island of Cyprus and Ecbatana, and somewhat below Carchemish, which has now been identified as Mari, one of the eleven “cities of royalty” according to later scribes, and ranking with such well-known cities as Kish, Erech, Ur, Agade, etc. Previous to these excavations little was known of Mari, though the name of one of its rulers had appeared in an inscription, and it was also known that the famous dynasty of Isin had been founded by a Semite from Mari, c. 2180 B.C. Up to date two main features have appeared: an immense palace and a series of superimposed temples of Ishtar. The last of these temples was destroyed by Hammurabi in a campaign conducted from his thirty-third to thirty-fifth year. Under it was an earlier, pre-Sargonic temple with an extraordinary wealth of ex-votos, etc., the whole surrounded by a wall.