‘We can all be apostles and we can all share in the work of Christ Our Lord in some way. But the way which seems to be most necessary to-day in England is that we should improve our knowledge of the Faith aqd do our best to explain Catholic teaching and practice to others.’

That was the conclusion of the Pastoral Letter for Lent 1944 of . His Grace the Archbishop of Birmingham ; and arising out of an earlier passage in the Letter which runs :—7” One bright spot in this rather sombre picture (of the present state of religious knowledge among Catholics in this country) is the recent formation of a Diocesan Guild of Catechists,” a footnote added: “Particulars of the Archdiocesan Guild of Catechists may be obtained from the Rev. B. Hodgson, St. Peter’s, Broad Street, Birmingham, or from the Rev. R. H. Nicholson, D.D., Oscott College, Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham.” That is, from the Director and Examiner appointed to the Guild by His Grace. It is because His Grace consented to become its President that his chosen device, as it appears on his coat of arms, seemed a suitable title for an account of the origin, aims and methods of the Guild of Catechists to which he has given his blessing as being one of the ways of working for the coming of the Kingdom.

In a recent article designed to cope with certain types of penitents, it is said that the penitent has the right to expect the confessor to be judicial, in the sense of objective. But that we cannot expect the priest to decide for us whether or not we have been sinning, or to what extent: he can tell us what is objectively moral or immoral, not what is our particular measure of guilt (Blackfriars, 1943;, p. 409). This statement, if it is not to be misleading to both confessors and penitents, calls for further clarification. There is no possibility of doubt that it is the duty of the confessor, as divinely appointed, to judge the objective and subjective morality of sins, and, as far as he is able on the evidence, to assess the objective and subjective measure of guilt. In this respect the penitent has every right to expect the confessor to be judicial, and to be able to advise him on his subjective state.

In a parallel and an anonymous article, translated from the French, entitled ‘A Spiritual ‘Cure for Scrupulosity,’ it is asserted but not proved that the juridical element, herein after to be called ‘precise legalism,’ introduced by moral theologians is responsible for the disease of scrupulosity. Experience, however, shows that scrupulosity may be found in the simplest of individuals, who have not had the remotest connection with the so-called legalism of theologians.

The doctrine of man as the Imago Dei has been brought out into the forefront of theological speculation in recent years, especially by Emil Brunner and Karl Barth; and Catholic theologians fully admit that Christian tradition needs to be re-explored before an adequate theological statement can be made in the face of the existentialist writers. The great problem, of course, is how can the two apparently irreconcilable trends in Christian tradition be synthesised without prejudice to the truth which each enunciates. How, in short, can the classic theory of St. Augustine be reconciled with the far too little known Imago Christi stress of Tertullian and St. Irenaeus? The latter school taught that man was made to the image of God in the sense that he was made after the pattern of the Christ coming in the flesh to redeem mankind : this school therefore strongly stresses the corporal likeness as a basic element in the Image doctrine. St. Augustine on the other hand, basing himself on a subtle analysis of the nature of the ‘mens,’ contends that man is made to the image of the Trinity itself, and carries in his soul a reflection of the divine life. This theory is then concerned to emphasise man’s spiritual nature as the most important element in the Imago doctrine.

[Stanislaus Zolkiewski, Chancellor of Poland, was born in 1547 and died fighting as a hero against the Turks in the fated battle of Cecora, on October 6th, 1620. He won great distinction as a classical scholar in his youth, but it is as a loyal and courageous general that he is known. For in spite of Sigismund Ill’s unfriendly distrust he served his King faithfully to the end. He advised the King against war with Muscovy, but obeyed when ordered to lead the army ; and, in spite of constant embarassment from the Sovereign’s antagonism, won the campaign at Kluszyn only to have his terms repudiated by Sigismund. His life was filled with disappointments of this sort, but his staunch faith preserved him from disloyalty or even bitterness, as may be seen in this Testament. He was an outstanding politician, a great strategist and victorious general; he was a patriot, who may also one day rank as a saint. He received the Grand Hetman’s staff in 1613, and thenceforward was engaged in fighting the infidel Turk. In so many bloody campaigns he often contemplated his own death on the field of battle. So it is not surprising that before each campaign he re-wrote his last will, amplifying it with further injunctions. As far as we know, two of these wills have been published. The first, written in the year 1606, was published by Michael Balinski at the Library of Warsaw in 1845. We here give a translation of the text edited by Arthur Sliwinski in his ‘Hetman Zolkiewski, Warsaw, 1920.’]

In the name of the Most Holy Trinity God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

Before the eyes of every man should always be the uncertainty of his transient life, for it is subject to innumerable mishaps.

It is just fifty years ago since Theodor Herzl, a Viennese Jew who, short of baptism, was completely assimilated, went to Paris to report the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jew and an officer of the French army who, like Herzl, had ceased to be Jewish in anything but name. The extraordinary outburst of anti-semitism to which the trial gave rise and the completely unjustifiable conviction of Dreyfus moved Herzl to the depths. The Jewish problem, the present plight and future destiny of the Jewish people, became the dominating concern of the remaining years of his life. Three years later a Zionist organisation was set up under his leadership. Its aim was formulated foy its first Congress, held at Basle in August, 1897. ‘Zionism,’ the Congress declared, ‘aims at establishing-for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law.’

Twenty-five years later, on November 2nd, 1917, a letter was addressed to the then Lord Rothschild by Arthur James Balfour, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, viewing with favour ‘the establishment in Palestine of a “national home for the Jewish people,’ and undertaking to ‘use their best endeavour to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’

The period during which the scientific attitude of mind was linked with materialism is past : in every field of study, physics, botany, astronomy, psychology, the foremost experts have reached the conclusion that the neat mechanism of a previous generation is no longer tenable. It takes time, of course, for these conclusions to become known; but the result is that the scientific mind no longer finds religion intolerable. On the contrary, religion is seen as a necessity : as something which is demanded by the very limitations of science itself. This has, of course, been the consistent assertion of the Christian Church ; but it would certainly be wrong to suppose that the change of attitude in an important part of the scientific world means that there is any kind of movement back to traditional religious beliefs. There is, indeed, a movement towards religion; but traditional Christianity is distinguished from other religions by all that is meant by the word ‘supernatural’ and ‘revealed’; and neither of these two words commends itself, it would seem, to the scientist. What actually seems to be taking place is an attempt to get behind religious formulations to something upon which those formulations depend : no need is felt for creeds and dogmas; religion is something individual, an attitude of mind, a response of the personality.

The Lord God formed man from the slime of the earth, and breathed into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul. . . . And the Lord God took man and put him into the paradise of pleasure, to dress it and keep it.’—Book of Genesis, c. 1.

The Land ! The very word strikes a chord in the heart of every true Englishman. It brings to mind a vision of life healthy, in harmony with nature, happy. It makes the heart glow with wonder at the fertile goodness and the mysterious beauty of the earth. It leads the soul to faith in God whose perfect Holiness is reflected and made manifest in the harmony, goodness and beauty of nature.

The paradise of pleasure in which grew all manner of trees fair to behold and pleasant to eat; in the midst of which also grew the tree of life, is no legend. It was a Golden Age at the outset of human history when as God told Job : ‘The morning stars praised me together, and all the sons of God made a joyful melody.’ Deep down in the memory of mankind, and therefore in each one of us, is the sense of a holiness that was once our happiness, a holiness that was a harmony between man and the earth which God gave him and between man and the heaven God opened to him, a holiness that was a fulfilment of the Destiny God set us. And if this deep memory has left a glow from the past, surely it has also given a hope for the future, a yearning in us all to regain that health, to re-establish that harmony and to recover that holiness in which alone lies our happiness.

Mr. Eliot’s criticism of Joyce has been of two kinds; moral and technical. Moral, in such phrases as ‘the most ethically orthodox of the more eminent men of my time ‘and ‘an extremely serious and improving writer,’ technical, as in the introductory note to the present selection, where the reader is told that ‘Stuart Gilbert’s Ulysses is the standard analysis of the structure of that work; and An Exagmination of ‘Work in Progress ... is a useful introduction to Finnegan’s Wake.’ In all cases a moral judgement in literary criticism is more valuable than a technical one because it is more inclusive. In criticism of Joyce a moral judgement is the only judgement because a technical judgement is not only irrelevant, it is misleading. It is misleading because it distracts from an attempt to reply to another, and a very different, moral judgement—D. H. Lawrence’s ‘My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is ! Nothing but old fags and cabbage-stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness,—what old and hard-worked staleness, masquerading as the all-new! ‘It distracts from a firm realization that Finnegan’s Wake is gibberish.

Finnegan’s Wake fails even in Mr. Eliot’s own minimal requirement of literature—‘to communicate before it is understood.’ The fact is so obvious that it is rarely stated. The function of an ‘introducer ‘of Joyce should not be to refer the reader to An Exagmination of Work in Progress but should be to explain to him how the change from the earlier to the later prose took place’. Such an explanation is contained in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in a passage which Mr. Eliot includes in his selection. Stephen is replying to Cranly, who has been questioning him why he left the Church : ‘Look here, Cranly, he said.

Of all goods which can be privately owned, none is more conformable to the teaching of Rerum Novarum than the land, the plot of earth on which the family lives and from ihe fruits of which, wholly or in part, it draws its livelihood. . . Only the stability which has its roots in the land privately owned, makes the family tne most perfect and fertile living cell of society, causing as it does a coherent continuity between present and future.’—Pius XII., Whitsuntide, 1941.

For one whose training has been mainly historical, to review two books on the land might seem a misapplication of industry. But, as John Selden said, ‘most men’s learning is nothing but history duly taken up ‘; and it is their historical grasp of what agriculture has meant and must mean to civilization that Tenders Sir George Stapledon’s work and Mr. Rolf Gardiner’s important. England to whom agriculture has come to signify merely an industry with a snag in it—the least effective of all the many extant methods of exploiting humanity—must listen to such men or die. Their ‘history duly taken up ‘allies them to that of many papal pronouncements, which they—more than any English Catholics, except a handful of Distributists—have done their best to implement.

Sir George Stapledon, whose reclamation of grass-lands is world-famous, has found time to become one of the land’s foremost evangelists. He now annotates and enlarges on the agricultural programme of one of England’s most far-sighted statesmen. That Disraeli was never in a position to carry out the land policy he urged, was a national disaster which Disraeli and the New Age bewails and explains. The policy, however, is there to be reconstructed. And that is where Sir George Stapledon comes in.

This Modern Age with its Radio, Cinema and extended educational fields has caused the working people to desire increasing improvements in their living conditions. This in itself is good, but coupled with a growing materialism it has become of too great an importance even to Catholics. But the fact is undeniable that we do set a great store by our creature comforts these days. And Catholics should be the last to cry down any attempt, at levelling up as opposed to the all-too-frequently expressed desire for levelling down.

The fulfilment of this desire for a nice home, well dressed children and other amenities of life has, especially among the great and increasing lower middle-class, caused new and exceedingly grave problems to appear. To understand these problems it is essential to understand the mental attitude of those to whom they apply.

These people are the great suburban dwellers, with their small but well appointed houses which they, very naturally, love. The non-Catholic parents of, perhaps, only two children find no great problem. They have raised their families to suit their own wishes and their means, and often not for several years after marriage. The possibility of more children with the added expense and the greatly added work does not. arise. They have the means to prevent any such unwelcome additions to the family, so they live as they have chosen to do, and have the time and the money to bring their children up well, materially at least, and still maintain a high standard of living. Their house is favourably compared to any in the street.