In the month of December, 1939, His Eminence Cardinal Hinsley stirred England with a broadcast address, which he called ‘The Sword of the Spirit.’ The address was published and had an immense circulation. In the month of August, 1940, His Eminence inspired the Catholic laity, and, one imagines, a great part of the clergy also, by launching the movement which he likewise called ‘The Sword of the Spirit.’ This movement, like the addresses from which it takes its title, may be said to be, or at any rate is intended to be, the response of the soul and mind and will of the Catholic body in England to the spiritual and intellectual and moral necessities of the time. These necessities were, for those who had eyes to see, plain and evident enough in time of peace. They became clamant with the outbreak of war.

England had inherited from the Middle Ages with all their traditions an admirable series of Christian institutions—for example, the great Cathedrals, the great Universities, and the Common Law—and the whole body of theological and philosophical and moral principles that gave life to these institutions and to the civilisation that they served. During the century that followed (shall we say?) Catholic Emancipation, the life of England and the institutions that served it at first gradually and then more and more rapidly ceased to be Christian. Take one example: In the year 1829, I believe it to be true that each of the Fellows in each of the Colleges of Oxford and Cambridge was not only expected to be a Christian, but was also required to be a celibate and in Orders.

Some men profess to look first at examples, some at the exemplar. The difference of air about the two has often been commented on; that they get along together for the most part as well as they do is due to the fact that the former do admit the existence of an exemplar, and that the latter do concern themselves with the production and improvement of the examples. The first standpoint has been subtly expressed in the lines

Though Plato no doubt was a corker, yet our philosopher Is that it's must be ready for dinner when dinner is ready for we;

whereas the others would be chiefly concerned to adapt the dinner hour to their own needs. They will still be able to go amicably in to dinner because both will at least agree that dinner is desirable. They will agree on the existence of standards, wherever they are to be found, and a world to be conformed to them and indeed demanding their embodiment. And to that extent, a wide one, they present us with the classical ideal. For the classical world, now or two thousand years ago, is a world which recognises standards, standards of thought and action, to be discovered, recognised, accepted, and imposed both on individual and communal life. That ideal is not particularly non-Christian, not particularly Christian; it transcends these categories. And like other ideas which transcend categories, it is realised as the same yet very differently in each. The armies of Constantine and Julian, they too had standards, the cross and the eagles, and the demands made on each by the ideals thus represented were very different yet in a tray the same.

In these last months England, individualistic, active, bustling England, has been called upon to defend for Europe, and for the world, the precious treasure of Christian Culture. That culture has, however, been handed down to us, not by an active, utilitarian philanthropy characteristic of all that is not mere self-seeking in England to-day, but by the tradition of Christian contemplation incarnate in the contemplative orders of the Church, and in particular in the Order of St. Benedict. England has become permeated with that American pragmatism which discountenances contemplation as useless, and at best she retains a certain attachment to ‘useless’ knowledge and to art only as the remnant of the pagan classical period of enlightenment that forsook Christianity and the supernatural order and adopted a purely natural type of contemplation and culture. If the British victory for which we hope and pray is, therefore, to prove itself worthy of its noble cause it would be necessary for the British citizen to return to a more integral Christian life which should include a contemplative culture that is basically supernatural.

It often seems to us who view the Church from within that the primitive simplicity of her organisation and life has developed into something quite unnecessarily complex. The mind almost reels before the numerical vastness of the different religious orders, congregations, societies, institutes, companies, etc., especially when considered in conjunction with the yet vaster number of lay associations, sodalities, societies, guilds, confraternities, etc. Yet this is not all, for hardly a week passes that one does not read of some new movement being proposed by someone or other. Very bewildering sometimes even to those of the faith, and certainly incomprehensible to those outside the Church. The explanation, however, is quite simple and natural.

Here is an interesting point, that it is not the works of art, but the works of raw Nature that wonder the heart of man. However great be the thing man made, there is always the reflection that it was a man who did it, a man like myself, I might have done it; why not have a try? But Nature defies me from the first and it wins my love by winning my respect. The works of Nature produce wonder, but art elicits delight from the heart of man. This must not be taken as an absolute statement, as such it is most certainly not true. Nor is it meant as a generalisation, but rather as a description of a radical difference. There are many works of art which produce wonder, but the wonder comes rather from an affinity with Nature which these particular works possess than from the fact that they are art. There is a word which I love to use to characterise such art; it is ‘creational,’ and it is not irrelevant to notice that the Creation provided the first great occasion for its use. The first chapters of Genesis are beautiful poetry and therefore great art, but they produce wonder in the heart of man because they speak of the making of Nature.

‘Plainly I am an extreme revolutionary,’ says Mr. H. G. Wells in his recent booklet on the Rights of Man. An extreme revolutionary, I suppose, is a person who turns things, other people and himself right round; and there can be no doubt that things, other people and ourselves do sometimes need to Ire turned right round. Penance and Conversion: to change your mind and change your direction. But the context shows that Mr. Wells is talking politics: ‘I do not believe it possible to go on with the present way of living that prevails throughout the world, with the sovereign governments we have and the economic practices that prevail.’ Such governments and practices are in a sense ‘ways of living,’ and nobody should be childish enough to blame Mr. Wells for attending so busily to the organisation of the world, for being a revolutionary in this department of ethics alone. And in any case the department involves the whole. Mr. ‘Wells wants to change our minds at the root, and not merely our methods of government. This is implied by the sweeping completeness of his desire and vision of World-Reform; at least he thinks they are sweepingly complete, and that is the point here. Less egotistic than Hitler, Mr. A Veils is just as certain that his view is not only right but complete. But the completeness is negative, and that is the best that can be said for it. His horizontal view of the world cannot be accused of distorting the depths, for it simply disregards them. They cannot be distorted, for they are not even included.