In the minds of many the recent events in Spain must have raised an uneasy doubt as to the boasted Catholicity of that country. Crowds look on apathetically whilst a relatively small band of ruffians pillage and burn and desecrate those things most sacred to a Christian and a Catholic. For the outburst did not limit itself to a mere schoolboy prank, in undoubtedly bad taste, for the annoyance of the more militant elements of the clerical party; but from such beginnings it spread to an inexplicable fury against all Catholic beneficent institutions, and assumed in churches and chapels the proportions of classic and revolting sacrilege.

Can this, then, be a Catholic country, where such things are suffered without protest, where the people look on apathetically and see the benefactors of their children ejected and the most sacred Mysteries of their religion profaned? The answer, like most answers, requires a careful use of distinctions.

One is somewhat at a loss to know whether the fact that so much is being written on the so-called ‘leakage’ question necessitates an apology for adding yet more, or affords an excuse for so doing. Acting on the latter hypothesis, I propose to hazard on paper a few thoughts on the subject, based mainly on experience gathered when giving Missions,

And to begin with I would ask the question : is the leakage—lamentable as all admit it to be—larger than we ought to expect? In this connection we should surely bear in mind two important factors—firstly, the great increase in our numbers during the last hundred years, together with the evident fact that we are no longer a secluded body, but mingle far more freely than of old with our non-Catholic neighbours; and, secondly, that the non-Catholic world round about us has altered almost beyond recognition so as to merit with some show of truth the epithet pagan so often applied to it. Not so long ago, in days which men of forty can easily recall, certain accepted Christian standards of morality and church-going were as vigorously maintained outside the Catholic Church as within. This no longer holds good, and the young Catholic, in moving outside his own Catholic circle, almost necessarily mingles with militant irreligion; militant because, though seldom avowedly such, to ignore religion is tantamount to proclaiming its futility.

To use the dialect Shaw loves and uses so well, he is ‘as cute as a pet fox,’ and I for one believe him when he says that many Catholics approved of his treatment of Saint Joan. What I refuse to believe is that a man of his cool judgment on so many matters could go ‘blind and bald-headed’ into that intricate subject, Amazing, truly, in the trial scene of his play is the elaborate care with which he states the case for the established order. Yet lo! the snare spread in full sight of the bird, and the birds of the less experienced order have been caught—with chaff. Shaw’s chaff in this case is an error in a matter of fact and a misreading of even the fact under his eyes. He dismisses in a word the whole rehabilitation of Saint Joan, he whitewashes Cauchon thick as plaster of Paris, and he muddles the end of the trial to justify his view of Cauchon.

In a recent article in Blackfriars it was well and truly shown how the Dominicans befriended the Maid as much as the said Cauchon would let them, which was very little indeed. It is all very fine for Shaw to ignore everything in the Rehabilitation, which was commanded by the Pope to be reopened after it had failed twice over. It is all finer still for him to ignore the pulverization administered by Andrew Lang to Anatole France’s (whatever his real name was) two-volume sneer at everyone of Joan’s century, but the man who says that all men are liars even on oath in a ‘superstitious’ age, cannot himself escape being thought a somewhat excessive liar. All this Shaw gladly risks, at the expense of ruining the best dramatic points in the muddled trial scene of his play, in order to get at the Church, and not the Church of those days, but of all time.

That ‘an Englishman is never so happy as when he is miserable’ is true up to a certain point, but we nave got far beyond that point; hence there is none to the paradox.

Englishmen just now are very miserable indeed, for there is no misery quite so poignant as that which comes from the lowest depths of pessimism. What we need in these days is fervent and true patriotism, and there is a great gulf fixed between patriotism and pessimism.

Patriotism is derided and scoffed at in England, though, curiously enough, not in ireiand, Scotland or even wales. Yet there never was a time when we Englishmen more needed true patriots, a rallying cry and a cause. The trouble is that whilst glorying in our history, we are coming to believe that we have no first-class possibility for the future. We are accepting as a first axiom that we are doomed to become a second-rate country. The peril is not so much our politics as our pessimism; not so much the Dole as the Dumps.

As a country our hopes are deteriorating, our ideals are drooping, our enthusiasms are withering. We are not moving through the desert, we are settling down there. Over England there spreads the pale cast of cynicism. We are losing heart, and when a nation loses heart, it loses everything. It is not that we are making bricks with a shortage of straw, rather that we are building without a plan. We do not know what to build. We quake and whine in the daily press and in the monthly magazines as though we were for ever vanquished.

This ill-informed and totally inadequate scribe rushed in to translate Le Soulier de Satin almost before he had read it through. In his awe (of later date) at the magnitude of the task, he was much upborne by the encouragements of the illustrious author, and in the final revisions he had the precious aid of Monsieur and Madame Paul Petit, whose keen scrutiny eliminated many a slack rendering. To them also he is deeply indebted for a glimpse into the mental and spiritual history of the present ambassador of France at Washington. The said Ambassador has translated into French the Unknown Eros of Coventry Patmore.

Claudel began life—intellectual life—as an honest Monist. Possessed by this Calvinism of Philosophy, he realised vividly the interplay of all creatures and their reactions to one another. His high poetic instincts led him on to the mysticism of the mind, less vague and specifically graver than that of Shelley, and here the French genius was never more valuable. He brooded on the nature of things and discovered for himself an Hegelian mystery, that every single reality connotes its opposite : motion connotes rest, and a starting-place as well as a winning-post; reality connotes nothingness; and can it be that there is something which is motion and rest in one, and an All-in-all which can contemplate and contain and actuate the Nothingness? So one Christmas afternoon he discovered how the Infinite had fallen in love with and embraced our nothingness, made it His very own; and from that hour Claudel may be said to have lived anew.

Catholic not being a true socialist, ought not to call himself a socialist. The Pope has said so.

The true socialist, the genuine Marxist, was never a Catholic and never could be one. For the economic theory that capitalism was fated by inexorable law to pass away, superseded by a class-conscious proletariat that would order all industry on a basis of social equality and thereby produce a co-operative commonwealth, was the dogma and the hope of the true socialist. We say was because when Lenin and his supporters resolved to enforce in their own way the Marxian doctrine in Russia, the old-fashioned Marxian socialist, particularly in England and Germany, was profoundly shocked. Hyndman, the ‘father of English socialism,’ with Kautsky and the ‘old guard’ of the German Social-Democratic Party, protested that Lenin and the Russian communists were not behaving according to plan, since no classconscious proletariat had yetbeen organised in Russia. What happened at Moscow queered the pitch altogether for socialism. The Bolshevik tyranny, in fact, did not, and has not, inaugurated social equality, neither has it produced the co-operative commonwealth of the socialist vision.

One of the chief characteristics of our time is the growing supremacy of quantity over quality. The latter is being ousted by the former in politics, in culture, in all departments of our civilisation. This struggle can, of course, have various disguises, and it can take place on several planes. Even the most conspicuous mass-movement may not necessarily be directed by quantitative valuations; or it may be first prompted by higher impulses and only later adopt a purely quantitative tendency. And a growing tendency of this kind is noticeable in the whole of modern ‘egalitarian’ democracy. This does not mean that democracy is altogether devoid of ideals, but that its ideals—provided there still be any—are on the wrong plane : on the plane of mere economic factors and of class-struggle, which not only conceal but invariably distort all deeper (ethical and spiritual) considerations. Its ultimate vision is not so much a dignified but a comfortable life : not the complete Christian Man, but the standardised Universal Bourgeois ruthlessly controlled by his equally standardised ‘comrades.’

There is, of course, nothing easier or more seductive than reducing everything to ‘economic factors.’ Moreover it has the virtue of simplifying all problems to such an extent as to explain the whole mystery of life in a sixpenny pamphlet which everyone can carry in his pocket. But a valuation of life as a whole under the auspices of economic factors alone puts the cart before the horse : it makes both life and mankind only an appendage to economics.

While a torrid August shrivels up the pleasant green earth, the minds of many Englishmen turn hopefully towards Canterbury. I do not mean that the whole Ecclesia Anglicana in The Church Times sense suddenly feels grateful, obedient, or even reverential in relation to hallowed Canterbury. I do not imagine that this Ecclesia Anglicana waits with more assurance in August than at any other time for a voice of authority to speak out of Canterbury. Nor do I refer in such general terms to the devout few Catholics of the Guild of Our Lady of Ransom, who still go thither yearly, ‘the hooly blisful martir for to seke,’ making their pilgrimage as did their forefathers in the days of Chaucer, ‘from every shiris ende of Engelonde.’ If the average Englishman were heard to say something like this : ‘Last yean I had to miss my first Canterbury festival since I was ten,’ his hearers would more naturally assume that it was cricket rather than the blissful martyr that drew him to Canterbury with yearly regularity.

It was about nine o’clock in the morning of such an August day, when the morning sun gave promise of taking up the baking qualities of the sweltering night it came on to relieve, that I stood in the market square of Bromley, some ten or twelve miles out of London. We had made up a little party, the Lumboroughs and I, to go dowrn to Canterbury by motor-coach. We had been assured that, in the words of the agent, the party would be ‘very select.’ The Franklins and Dr. Smiths had already booked seats. So at the appointed hour we took possession, noting that our fellow travellers seemed a very ‘decent’ crowd.

Father D’arcy, in his book on St. Thomas Aquinas, has pointed out that, although the tnought and writings of the saint continued after the Renaissance to be potent influences on the Continent, in England they fell into almost total neglect. ‘E ew among the lovers of the New Learning imitated the example of Erasmus and excepted Aquinas from their censure of the Scholastics. The majority were of the mind of Bacon .... The tradition of medieval thought and culture lingered on in Oxford .... but was seldom, if ever, renovated by an adequate knowledge of the writings of St. Thomas/ And m another passage, ‘No one, save a Catholic, thought of studying his system from the point of view of pure philosophy.’

This is indubitably a fact; and one that renders all the more interesting those individuals who ran counter to so strong a current of national thought and feeling. For there are brilliant, though sometimes unsuspected, exceptions to this general rule of neglect. The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas continued to influence the few if not the many; and of these none is more worthy of note than Thomas Traherne, that most attractive seventeenth century devotional writer, who has been rediscovered by our own age, and who is being proclaimed as one of the greatest mystics England has produced, perhaps the greatest Nature-mystic the world has ever seen. This Traherne, whose limpid poetry and surpassingly lovely prose are attracting more and more readers to-day, owes much of his power to the beauty and wholeness of the personality his writings reveal; and from this point of view it is interesting to discover how deeply he was influenced by the spirit and thought of Aquinas.

Our ignorance of the fortunes of Catholics in the Scotland of the Commonwealth period is for the most part utterly abysmal. Happily, Major Hay has been busy writh the manuscripts and other historical documents in Blairs College, with the result that now we may really know a good deal of what happened in the years that immediately followed the execution of Charles I. It is ‘a story of courageous struggle against cunningly-devised persecution’; of gallant adventure for Catholic clergy, regular and secular, with disappointments and hardships, hopes and fears, and the inevitable quarrels and mistakes. _

The Scottish Jesuits of this period ‘come to life again, with their virtues and defects, with theif likes and dislikes; they are real men of Scotland, not phantoms from a hagiological romance,’

Father John Seton, S.J., for instance, seeking to rally Catholics to the standard of Montrose (which work, no doubt, ‘was contrary to the rule of the society’), and keeping his mission secret, ‘not only from his enemies, but from his fellow-Jesuits in Paris.’ Howbeit the good fathers were not undisturbed by the mysterious comings and goings of this intrepid priest, whose fate it was to die of fever in the Scots College in Madrid.

Into an England where Faith was indigenous, Charity a common virtue, and Hope a sane, constructive effort, Caxton was admitted as a man with a wonderful new toy. He was, in fact, the pioneer of materialism, and the legacy we have inherited from him after more than four centuries, is the chaos of the modern world.

We live now, at best, in a maze of false optimism. Most men realise that something is wrong with the world; they know that Faith is a limited psychological phenomenon with a certain commercial value, that Charity is either a convincing gesture (also with a commercial value) or a weakness that encourages the lower classes, and that Hope is a pious wish that, in spite of Socialism, Mammon may come into his own; but ‘hard-headed business men’ and their satellites are the last people to face realities; self-preservation is the antithesis of soul-preservation, and the one is pleasing and lucrative, the other painful and exacting, so the issue is cloaked in the obscurity of ink which itself is the maggot that has bred our present corruption. Ink, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is a black liquid ejected by a cuttle-fish to assist its escape from a foe.

The worst enemies of an art are those of its own household, the people with natural talent but no aesthetic education, and whose technical training too often merely gives them greater facility in expressing and more show of authority in propagating their own bad taste. For how many art schools, even among the best, teach anything of the general and fundamental principles on which all craftsmanship should be based? In an age of classic art instinctive good taste might be looked for as part of natural talent, but in these days the critical faculty is warped before it has time to develop, by low standards in music, literature, architecture and art in the narrower sense of the word, whether domestic, decorative or pictorial. Even Rubens, for all his genius, did not escape the coarsening influences which the later Renaissance left behind it; and his pictures could never be universally loved for their beauty as are those of a Fra Angelico who, although his drawing is not always accurate, had lived in fourteenth century Florence. How many potential musicians might be found in a jazz band, writers among journalists who have never read an English classic, and artists in the perpetrators of the so-called devotional art displayed in ‘Catholic repositories.’

L'ouvroir liturgique, quoted in Vestments and Vesture (pp. 220-221) on the subject of professional workshops, says:

There are several reasons why one should visit Roscoff, apart from the good and sufficient reason —for those who like to take their travelling individually—that nowadays one rarely does. I doubt if the real Brittany—the Bretagne bretonnante of speech, clothing and song—is anywhere less sophisticated; while for an Englishwoman who is one-half Welsh, Roscoff has old affinities, historical and domestic, romantic and homely, but all harmonious and affectionate.

A small granite fishing-haven on the northerly seaboard of Finistere, Roscoff owes the fig-trees and magnolias of its walled gardens to the Isle de Batz, some three miles of rocky island, surmounted by a tall white lighthouse, which lies couchant across the entrance to Roscoff’s almost landlocked harbour. Only a mile or so of channel intervenes between Batz and the mainland; and you can sail across, if you will, and see the island’s only treasure—the stole of St. Pol-de-Leon laid carefully by since the sixth century. It is said to be a Byzantine stole of blue silk tissue, cheerfully embroidered with huntsmen, dogs, horses and falcons; and its accredited owner, St. Pol, was one of those genuine but legend-bedizened evangelists between Wales (or Cornwall) and Armorica, whose antecedents and exploits were (as I have been informed and believe) the bane of the learned compilers of the Dictionary of National Biography. Being entirely incompetent to sift the views of the D.N.B., of the Bollandists, and of the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould, all of whom have lavished themselves with different results on St. Pol, I will only submit that Paulus Aurelianus of Pen hoen in Glamorganshire (or Cornwall) seems to have fled from the onus and honor of a British bishopric, only to be tricked (by a sealed letter borne by himself) into accepting a French one.

It is now some thirty years since the Summa Theologica began to circulate in an English translation. Little or no notice was taken of it even by those whom it was calculated to serve in their service of scientific truth. But the lack of welcome which befell it had no dismays for those responsible for an enterprise which seemed on the verge of folly. They were not moved when they were told that no good and little profit could come of an attempt to put the clock of modern progress back seven centuries to the age of Aquinas. Such friendly dissuasion as they were offered they met by silence and a more dogged resolve to forgive even their enemies by offering them not a cup of water but a wine-cup of the best!

Experience and instinct had taught them that after the bewilderment of modern materialistic expansion had settled, the human mind would begin to ask questions, that is, to seek ultimate causes. Some sort of unity would be demanded by the finer minds who could not brook a mere welter of multiplicity. Men would seek to discuss with their fellow men the What and Whence and Why. They would desire both a Synthesis and the power to discuss that synthesis with minds of like desire. All this meant that they would demand such a Synthesis if it existed and accept some standarised vocabulary in order that discussion might become a possibility.

Had anyone roused Father Jucundus and asked him what he was doing, the answer would have been that he was praying. If was after the evening meal, his first community exercise since his return from a tour of spectacular preaching, that too travel-weary to stay more than a few minutes in the oratory, he had sought his cell for final prayer and then repose. His gift of lively imagination, he thought, would help his prayer. So with no curb to his fancifulness, he roamed through the courts of Heaven meeting an occasional saint although the night was well advanced. He took care to comport himself properly in the presence of one, and said all the right things to another. There really was something of the actor in his gate-crashing mode of entry into the celestial realms.

Then quite suddenly he seemed to leave Heaven behind. The atmosphere became oppressive, and he, hot and sickly. He did not like the change at all, and was on the point of taking a good look around, when his attention was held by a curious figure that plumped himself down in front of him, apparently from nowhere.

What he saw was a very old man with all the signs of youthful vitality. The head was remarkably large, the sort of head so often rightly judged to be the envelope for more than normal intelligence.

There was an expression of amused enjoyment or. the cunning old face that went with the wise old head.

In somewhat unprofessional language Fr. Jucundus asked ‘Who the devil are you?’ And the answer came, ‘I am your own familiar little devil.’

The return to Europe of Bishop Francis Steinmetz, Vicar Apostolic of Dahomey, after thirty-eight years in French West Africa, recalls a romance of missionary enterprise which is worth recording. He belongs to the Lyons Society of African Missions, founded by Mgr. Marion de Brésillac in 1856. The holy founder applied in the first instance for Dahomey, but was refused by Propaganda on account of its evil reputation. It was considered the most pernicious district of the West African Coast from the malignity of its climate and the barbarity of its population. Instead he was allotted Sierra Leone, itself a sufficiently difficult post, as events were to prove. It was only at a later period, after his death, that it was found practicable to attempt the evangelisation of Dahomey : that, therefore, Bishop Steinmetz has been able to rule his tropical diocese for twenty years or more, and return to Europe in full health and vigour, is eloquent testimony of the progress made in the Dark Continent.