SINCE the preoccupations of an age are expressed in its current catchwords, it is perhaps not strange that our contemporaries should employ, in every context and without examination, the idiom of pseudo-economics in which is enshrined commercial wisdom. Among the stock phrases which recur in everyday conversations, and which appear to exercise an incantatory power over the minds of those who speak or hear them, ‘the law of supply and demand’ is most frequently evoked; not necessarily because the speaker is intimate with the workings of this mysterious law, but because it is intended to place the discussion, whether moral, political or artistic, upon a wholesome basis of commercial expediency.

Thus it is argued that in the work of the English playwright or novelist there is no scope for Catholic Action, not because of any incompatibility in the activities which it is proposed to combine, but because ‘the public does not want religion; there is no demand for it.’

Before trying the strength of this objection, it will be good to question whether a medium as comparatively frivolous as that in which either the playwright or the novelist works, can be employed in Catholic Action. To do this we must examine the common function of the playwright and novelist, which is to provide the public with a means of living vicariously, projected into an imagined existence, and thus forgetting present circumstances. Where there is great ignorance of the supernatural, such as religious ‘reformation’ has achieved in English-speaking countries, this escape from the apparent harshness of reality must become particularly desirable.