To many Catholics the condemnation of the Action Française by the Holy See has brought a sharp awakening, firstly to the dangers of dependence on a movement of alien spirit, and secondly to the need for a political theory giving full and adequate expression to the Catholic ideal.

In view of this a study of the work of Don Luigi Sturzo is of especial interest, a work of which the informing principle, constant and invariable, has been the effort to permeate the political and social life of his country with the religious, moral and social elements of Christianity.

If as a theorist this distinguished Sicilian priest ranks among the foremost political thinkers of the day, it is impossible to dissociate his theory and his practice, for he has invariably translated his ideas into action.

His early education was classical and literary, with aesthetic tendencies, giving a large place to scholastic philosophy. Having completed his theological studies with the Jesuits of the Gregorian University of Rome he became professor of philosophy and political economy in the seminary of his native Caltagirone. Rerum Novarum was then four years old and the Christian Democratic movement in the ardour of its first youth. Under its influence his free hours were given to work among the peasants and workers whom he organised in co-operative, agricultural banking associations and trade unions, helping them in their fight against usury and exploitation.

The United States of America began eight years ago to deal with the drink problem on a national scale. Professor Gilbert Murray has ranked that experiment in the New World with another great experiment in the Old World, the League of Nations. These two stand for him as earnest of world progress.

The vast majority of people in this country dismiss Prohibition with a shrug, and complain that it has nothing to do with them. They are hostile to it, as an idea, just as they are hostile to Bolshevism as an idea, but with this difference: the latter is a useful pawn in current politics : the former is not. I doubt very much whether the Liquor Popular Control Bill (known as the ‘Oxford’ Bill), and its rediscussion in the House of Lords in an amended form, has done more than annoy the Brewers and hearten the Temperance Societies—not that the ‘Oxford Bill is a measure of Prohibition: it is a measure of the country’s interest in liquor control. The Observer, which is a regular champion of the Bill and Temperance in general, takes to task the Government spokesman in the Lords debate for dismissing Prohibition in America by a contemptuous reference to Bootleggers. Yet American fiction and drama, as studied in this country, are largely responsible for this. The strength of Socialism in England could hardly Be gauged by the references of music-hall artists.

A theologian is too conscientiously concerned with truth, even with physical truth, not to take a deep interest in the yearly meetings of the British Association. Especially does he interest himself in the Presidential Address, which is given with such an accepted sense of finality that it is not open to the discussion of the subsequent meetings. Part of the theologian’s almost exaggerated respect for this Presidential Address is his reverence for human reason when it flies, as Dryden says, at ‘its own quarry.’ Every theologian guides his thoughts by the profoundly humble wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas. ‘Since Scripture can be explained in a multiplicity of senses, one should adhere to a particular explanation only in such measure as to be ready to abandon it if it be proved with certainty (certa ratione) to be false; lest Holy Scripture be exposed to the ridicule of unbelievers and an obstacle be placed to their believing’ The theologian’s failure to accept the assured findings of Science would be an infidelity not only to Science but also to Theology. Scientists who, as such, are not dealing with ethical categories can have no idea of the theologian’s concern to accept and assimilate every truth which comes to him with the ‘certa ratio’ —the certainty of a unanimous science.

On Easter Tuesday a rebuke, which reads amusingly, was administered to Cardinal Bourne by the Anglican Bishop of Durham. In a sermon at York on Easter Sunday, the Cardinal reminded his hearers that only those who are in communion with Rome can claim to be legitimate successors of St. Paulinus, Archbishop of York. The Anglican Bishop, in reply, virtually reprimands His Eminence for neglecting his Easter Duties—as these are understood in Durham nowadays.

He is a bold Bishop who ventures to think that many Anglicans must agree with him upon any question which involves the central verities of the Christian religion. There are, however, occasions when, without being at all rash, even an Anglican Bishop may presume that not many but all Romans must agree with him. One such occasion is when an Anglican Bishop speaks sound common sense; for all Romans are obliged, under pain of ceasing to be Romans, to agree with sound sense whencesoever it comes. Another occasion is when an Anglican Bishop hits upon some deep truth which is beyond the range of commonsense, and finds himself stating something with which all

It has been the fate of a long line of patriotic young Irishmen since the days of the Act of Union to be cut short in the best promise of their youth; snatched away dramatically and suddenly in a crisis, they have left a memory which has, in all probability, been more cherished than if they had lived to a more mature age. Robert Emmet, Wolfe Tone, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, have through generations been the romantic figures of modern Irish history. It is impossible to think of them otherwise than as young men who had already done their work, in the service of the country to which they had devoted every fibre of their young strength. Thomas Davis, a generation later, is still remembered as the chief figure in the Young Ireland movement, while his abler colleague, Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, is half forgotten. Anticlimax has overtaken all the older leaders of the Irish people with a depth of personal tragedy which is scarcely paralleled in other countries. In Ireland, so long as the struggle for self-government was carried on, there could be no easy retirement nor honours for old age. Daniel O’Connell, Isaac Butt, Parnell, John Redmond, each in his turn, was practically hounded out of public life. Only those who died young have left an untarnished memory.

And no generation of young men in all Irish history has been decimated to the same extent as that of Kevin O’Higgins. I was at school with him at Clon-gowes; and looking back now at the list of those who seemed most full of promise among his contemporaries to within ten years or so, one stands aghast at the devastating record of their mortality.

Reading may be a disease or a delight; in either case, there are attendant evils and delicious rewards. From a very early age it has been my greatest pleasure, and I remember one or two occasions when, having been sent to the corn-chandler for pigeons’ food, I was coerced into a display of precocity by being made to read aloud some entirely unintelligible section of a newspaper for the edification of another customer. The merchant took a strange pleasure in my accomplishment; I used to think him amiably eccentric in consequence, especially as he gave me a penny for my pains.

There is much pleasure in reading aloud : I discovered it while I was at a kindergarten school, and exasperated my family by declaiming what was in my own book while they wished to peruse theirs in silence. It was vanity, I suppose, but I didn’t think of that until a man told me frankly, a few years ago, that his chief satisfaction in reading aloud was to hear the sound of his own voice. I was shocked. Honesty is so shocking.

On the 22nd of June, four hundred years ago, Niccolo Machiavelli died at San Casciano, not far from Florence, where he had lived since his dismissal from the office of Secretary to the Florentine Republic in 1512. A typical representative of his times, although his life, habits and ideals were those of a pagan, he died a Christian death : all the neo-pagans of the Italian Renaissance did the same. It was the fashion.

A broken and disappointed man, discarded by the Medici, to whom in vain he had offered his services and experience, ready to sacrifice his political convictions if they could employ him, were it only in rolling a stone,’ suspected by his old political friends as one who fawned on princes and a traitor to the Republican cause, Machiavelli passed the last few years of his life cursing fate, fighting against poverty and chafing under this enforced idleness, which to a man of his undoubted capabilities, accustomed for many a year to transact diplomatic business with the most renowned princes of the epoch, must have been truly unbearable. It is with pity and sympathy, not unmingled with a sense of disgust, that one reads Machiavelli’s own account of how he used to pass his days in the semiexile of San Casciano. Rising at dawn, after passing a couple of hours in the woods of the estate he used to go and sit by a spring reading Dante, Petrarch, Tibullus and Ovid, meditating pleasantly on ‘their amorous transports and the history of their loves’ ; thence betaking himself to an inn by the roadside to gossip with passers-by and ‘note the varied tastes and diverse fancies of mankind. . . . Dinner over, I go back to the inn.

The popular game of archaeology is played with bucket and spade. Some things are dug up, and others are buried away out of sight. It is an easy game, for the exhumations and interments proceed simultaneously. The rubbish removed from one spot has to be tipped somewhere else; so that a hole and a mound are engineered in a single process. While you are discovering new wonders in the hole, you are covering up old wonders under the mound. In the hole you find Elephas antiquus, Rhinoceros merckii, Ran gif er tarandus, Ursus spelaeus and other worthies, whose names and dignified bearing invite you to give them a place in or near the middle line of your genealogical tree. Under the mound you bury Parentes protoflasti, Pomum noxiale, Proditor multiformis, Opus salutis, Virgo mater, Agmina coelitum, Apostolorum chorus, Prophetarum numerus, Martyrum exercitus, Sumtna Trias, Verbum incarnatum, Salutaris hostia and every other legendary name that has hitherto made your ancestral stock a laughing stock.

Being only a game, archaeology cannot be expected to lead to any profitable end, or to arrive at any natural conclusion. If art is long, sport is longer. The only way of getting to the end of it is to call ‘Time.’ And even time cannot end sport; it merely marks an interval, after which every game begins again. The only end of sport is recreation. A really good game wrecks creation over and over again; and over and over again re-creates creation.

In an article in Blackfriars some months back, describing the circumstances that led up to the condemnation of the Action Franćaise by Cardinal Andrieu, which has since been followed by a formal promulgation by the Pope of the condemnation of the Action Franćaise which was decided upon early in 1914, I quoted the opinion of certain French Catholics who believed that the condemnation would, after a difficult tussle, result in a great strengthening of the Catholic forces in the country. Subsequent developments have, I believe, very considerably confirmed that view. With one exception there has been no apparent breach in the solidarity of the French hierarchy’s approval of Cardinal Andrieu’s action. And since the Pope has formally taken up the matter, and especially in view of the open defiance of the Holy See by the Action F rangaise leaders and their newspaper, it would be absurd to suggest that even the Bishop of Montauban—who at most only expressed his opinion that the first moves in the condemnation were no more than a serious warning against its tendencies—has any mental reservations whatever on the matter.

Needless to say, there has been a great commotion over the condemnation. Some, prominent Catholics have even gone so far as to express openly their conviction that the Pope has been misled by pro-German influences, notwithstanding the fact that the recent condemnation does little more than promulgate a condemnation which was already confirmed by Pope Pius X and Pope Benedict XV more than ten years ago.

It is a little difficult for the ordinary person who has merely the press to guide him to see his way into the confusion of China and to understand what the trouble is about.

But it is not really so difficult if the reader of the newspapers has certain facts well in view. He had better leave alone most of the names; the Changs and Chiangs will only make the muddle greater to him. There is really no need at the beginning for him to trouble himself with these. First, however, let him take as the simplest idea that the awakening sense of nationality is the dominant feature of the situation. Let him look on the South or the Cantonese as being mainly interested in this. The sense of nationality has reached the Chinese chiefly through the Western insistence on it. They have learnt this from us. The way in which it expresses itself may be happy or unhappy, may be right or wrong; but we must realise what is the power and the force of this before we can grasp what has happened in China, and what has to be done.

Awakening, then, to a sense of nationality, the China of to-day sees itself differently treated from other nations. It is the obvious exception to the rest. On its soil foreigners are encamped in a way that does not happen elsewhere. This hurts their pride or their self-consciousness. Now, self-conscious nationality is always bellicose, like a young man who feels his own strength. Rodin’s Bronze Age shows you the awakening of man to his manhood and its power. He stretches his arms out to their fullest, because he is now awake.

To be the parish priest of St. Emilion—that home of a great vintage whose name is more ruthlessly profaned than that of almost any other in the cheaper English restaurants—is in itself a picturesque and interesting title. But the Abbé Bergey, who is in fact the cure of that famous little town, is far more picturesque and interesting than his title. There has been nothing like his incursion into French politics within modern memory ; and in France he is regarded more or less as the prototype of M. Clément Vautel’s bestseller, Mon Curé chez les riches. The resemblance is only superficial; for the Abbé Bergey is a genius of extraordinary vigour and abilities; and M. Clément Vautel’s hero was a very retiring little country priest who came back from the trenches, talking army slang and scandalising the bourgeoisie by his preference for the society of common people.

Allowing for differences of character, however, and still more for the absurd ideas of M. Clément Vautel as to how his ecclesiastical superiors would regard such a man, the Abbé Bergey’s career has been somewhat similar. As a young priest he left his parish to serve in the trenches, and like all the French priests with the army he distinguished himself by his personal bravery and his moral example. It is since his return from the war that his story becomes really exciting. He did come back very much with the ideas of the plain blunt man who had learnt a good deal in the war, who felt that the comradeship of the trenches was the biggest thing he had ever encountered, and that those who had not experienced it belonged to a different world.

The, news about China doled out to the man in the street by our daily and weekly newspapers, even the best, is but scanty, and all of the same monotonous type. Civil wars, and rumours of civil wars, make up the bulk of it. The struggle of one Tu-chun against another, the march of Southerners against Northerners, captures of cities, surrenders, betrayals, flights of leaders, and re-appearances of defeated generals, and what seem to him aimless expeditions and useless fighting fill up the picture of the present state of the Middle Kingdom. It is quite incomprehensible to the ordinary Englishman; and those who have lived in the Far East and have had some dealings with the Chinese are often asked by their friends what is the meaning of it, and how it is all going to end. If wary, they will remember the wise saying ‘Never prophesy unless you know,’ for he would indeed be a rash person who professed to foresee with any certainty the final outcome of the present turmoil in that distant land. One thing is to be remembered, that the Chinese have a long history, that they have passed through many periods of worse disorder than the present, but that the ship of state has righted herself, and the country settled down again to the cultivation of the soil and the other arts of peace. There is no reason to suspect they will not eventually do so once more—if left to themselves.

In an article in The Morning Post (Nov. 6, 1926) it was stated that ‘the interested Foreign Powers in China were agreed upon one point, which is that there shall be no joint intervention in the internal affairs of that distracted country.’