‘Another movement,’ one can hear the weary parish priest exclaim. There are so many movements, societies, guilds, and so on, in Catholic parishes that the sensible thing would seem to be to eliminate some of them rather than to introduce new ones. That is a rational point of view, and largely necessary. But it is clear that the process of selection must be made on the grounds of whether this or that society fulfils an essential and indispensable function or not. The J.O.C. which as yet is only in embryo in England claims that its work is indispensable, and since this view has the strong backing of the Pope, it seems worth while to devote a little attention to it.

The radical change in the social system which is the dominating feature of our time compels the attention of religion. The exact details of the future society may be left for imaginative minds to describe. But there are two points about it that may be predicted without undue rashness. The first is that it will be a society in which the working class will have come into its own; the achievement will be difficult; there will be set-backs; but sooner or later it is inevitable that just as the middle class may be taken as the typical, the representative class of the last century, so the workers will become typical and representative of ours. The second point concerns the spiritual character of this new society. We can make some judgment with regard to this by observing the youth of this generation; for the youth of to-day are the citizens of to-morrow. Doubtless conditions here in this respect are less extreme than on the Continent; nevertheless, it is not an imprudent assertion to say that the mass of young workers of both sexes are already very largely secularized.