The period of the visible expansion of Catholicism in England which began with the Oxford Movement and the Irish Immigration may be considered to have closed with the nineteenth century. Through the converts the Church entered the professional and upper middle-classes, and through the Irish began to leaven the new industrial masses. But tho old English Catholics, though a minority in the Catholic population and despite the many changes introduced by elements foreign to their tradition, possessed the national stubbornness and power of assimilation; they preserved their type, remained the nucleus of the developing and extending temporal life of the revived Church, and largely determined its character. Ullathorne was perhaps the most representative Catholic figure of the period: by the time of his death, the Church was assuming its present form, was already an established institution in the national life, no longer an obscure sect but ranking among the four or five great religious bodies in the country. Since then the effort has been one of consolidation; the various elements in the Church have become more and more unified—partly as the result of time, partly of prudent government; a Catholic middle-class has emerged; internal organization has been perfected—education, the press, religious and cultural institutions; so that now the Church presents the spectacle of a going concern, well-run and secure, somewhat mysterious and exclusive to the outsider, a compact homogeneous body, with every appearance of being well-established, perhaps even entrenched.

But the more excellent a human tradition, the more marked is the tendency to become a privilege and a preserve.

‘Let the Consuls see to it that no harm befall the State ; that was the mandate given to the chief magistrates by the Roman Senate constituting them supreme in times of crisis. But even in the ordinary course of events the consuls were preceded by those bundles of rods encircling an axe, which signified the power of life and death. To-day this emblem once again means power, and those who wield the Fasces possess, or mean to possess authority which is supreme and against which there is no appeal. For some years now we have been accustomed to them as the standard of the Fascist party in Italy, and already, in rather more than a decade, they have been invested by British eyes with a host of relevant and irrelevant associations, for the most part noble and joyous, but among those who equate liberalism and liberty often sad and regretful. Yet even those many Englishmen who pass secure and easy judgment of approval on the new Italy may have found it something of a shock to discover the axe and rods being carried through the length and breadth of their own country. On the bookstall and in the hands of the newsvendor, on the political platform and even in the lapel of the coat, this sign has appeared with dramatic suddenness, proclaiming the birth of a new organization whose members are determined that the people shall pass the final decree, entrusting them once for all with the task of seeing to it that no harm befall the State.

The story of St. Teresa of Lisicux must be almost unique in the history of the saints. She was not quite twenty-five years old when she died, on September 30th, 1897, having been a nun for just over nine years, and many who, when she was born, were already older than she was to be when she died, lived to see her name enrolled among the saints. Indeed, her whole history from her birth to her canonization lies well within the lifetime of countless persons now living who would by no means willingly consider themselves old. This, remembering the traditional slowness of the Church in according her official recognition to the heroic sanctity of any individual, would have been remarkable enough had the stage of Teresa's life been set in public view : had she been a path-breaker in some region of active spiritual or social work: or had she been a martyr, an apostle, or a foundress. But her life, as to three fifths of it, was spent entirely within the narrow shelter of a provincial home of the petite bourgeoisie: and as to the remainder, in the virtual obliteration of a Carmelite cloister. Still more remarkable in these circumstances is the fact that canonization may verily be said to have been conferred upon her by publican Lunation even before the Church had set her seal to it. This inversion of the accustomed order of things has happened before, but then the subject of it has always (as one should expect) been one who in lifetime had already taken the public eye—one need go no further back for an example than to the Cure d'Ars or to St. Benedict Joseph Labre.

Shorn of wearisome details the recent dispute between Sir James Marchant and the British Film Institute — which acts as liason between the teachers and the Cinema Trade— reveals the disquieting fact that a complete mechanical education is to be part of our conditioned life of tomorrow. The teacher already challenged by robot Radio is to be superseded by the Talkie Educator; and even a Peoples’ Cinema University.

The Cinema Trade offers itself as an instrument in the cause of education; it would say:

‘You teachers know little of film technique, and for our part we know little about teaching; let us collaborate: we will turn out the films you need.'

Could anything be fairer than that? Make friends of the Mammon of Iniquity, of a giant organization involving some five hundred million pounds of capital, and chiefly controlled by an international ring of Jews!

A remarkable article appeared in La Revue Catholique des Idees et des Fails, Feb. 1929, under the title Les Juifs et le Cinema in which we are told that the production and distribution of the film in England, America and most other countries is directed by Jews with the intention of undermining, the Christian Religion. This may or may not be true; but when we recall the Jewish origins of Louis Meyer, Samuel Goldwin, Szarwassy, C. F. Bernhard, Louis Bernstein, Eisenstein, Eward Stoll, J. W. Rosenthal, Ludwig Plattner, Lupu Pick, Harry Day Levy, Denman, Hyams, Woolfe. to name but a few, there seems little doubt that the power behind the film trade is largely Jewish.

In comparison with such sciences as Chemistry, Physics or Physiology, which have acquired a certain stability of doctrine and method, Psychology at the present day appears to have little of either of these characters; an excuse is often made to the effect that psychology is still one of the younger sciences, and has not as yet quite found a firm footing. The truth is that there are no clear-cut generally-accepted principles governing either the subject matter or methods of this science, as may be seen by consulting various text-books or that interesting volume of essays, Psychologies of 1930. Psychology may perhaps be considered young as an experimental science, but in regard to a part at least of its subject, it is about as old as any enquiry one can think of, for man has always been interested in man. Speculation on the existence and nature of ‘Soul,’ of mind, of thinking, of appetition, of character and conduct, reaches back to the centuries B.c., when Greek Philosophy was at its highest and best in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. These are subjects with which psychology to-day is still concerned, but having lost contact with the ancient philosohpy it has also lost a great deal of coherence.

It is this perhaps that accounts for the vagueness in the usage of the word ‘psychology’ to-day. But this very vagueness has certain advantages which must not be under-estimated, since it provides an incentive to research, and to scientific, that is to say methodical, investigation of the problems presented by human nature.

The idea of extending the purview of the League of Nations to ‘international intellectual relations’ was first launched at the Peace Conference, where it found but little favour. The first official recognition of a movement which to some extent originated in the desperate situation of intellectual circles in the early days after the war was obtained in 1921, when the Second Assembly of the League decided to constitute an International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation—a decision which was reinforced in 1924 by the foundation, by the French Government, of an International Institute with headquarters in the Palais Royal. The lists of men and women of international repute which the League succeeded in winning for this cause include some of the greatest names of science and art: Einstein, Bergson, Madame Curie. Paul-Valery, Gilbert Murray, Galsworthy, Felix Weingartner and Bela Bartok. to mention only a few.

The central idea of intellectual co-operation is to promote, in all spheres that come within its range, co-ordination of effort and collaboration capable, not merely of saving time and facilitating information, distribution and progress, but also of encouraging the creation, gradually perhaps—but none the less surely—of an international outlook.

This programme falls naturally into two parts. The first, designed to facilitate study and research, may be described as the perfecting of an international machinery which consists largely in relations between ministries of education, ministries of fine arts, universities, students’ associations, institutes of art and history, museums, libraries and record offices.

Dr Niebuhr has given us a book’ not unlike M. Berdyaev's End of Out Time. Both works lead us to deplore the complacency of Conservatism (as we know it) and the hypocrisy of Mercantile Christianity. Both books drive us to an alternative; with M, Berdiaeff we must choose between the humanistic individualism of the Renascence and Christian individualism, while Dr Niebuhr in impressing upon us the pharisaical injustice of this closing era would induce (it seems) an aggressive and vindictive Christianity.

While M. Berdyaev may be more profound and nearer to Catholic vision, we cannot deny that the author of ‘Reflections on the End of an Era’ is more startling—may even give us more food for thought; and we are provoked to examine for ourselves the antithesis accounting for the attitude indicated in Dr Niebuhr's book—as much as to insist on the only true remedy-a Revolution based on the charity of Christ, Catholicism. The spirit of Conservatism, if we take it to mean the spirit of sheer negative laissez-faire in matters of economic justice, is derived largely from a sense of well-being, a personal satisfaction which we wish to prolong. We prosper: those who are our immediate responsibility prosper: at least we do not want; the business of blind and wholehearted conservatism is the Past; and the Present is no more than its legacy. Our concern for the future is limited to our care for our present ease.