There exists in England at the present time a state of affairs which seems to me to call for the close attention of all Catholics.

It is a commonplace to decry the faults of one’s own time. Everyone is in some degree a laudator temporis acti; and hope causes most men to look to the future for remedy of present ills. Yet, when due account has been taken of this human tendency, England today does present to the most casual observer some terribly alarming symptoms. Such things as the vast disorganisation of labour, the growing inability of the Government to find money for the payment of their colossal liabilities, the complete failure of compulsory State education to produce any sort of useful result, the despairing abandonment of the land are evident for all to see.

It is now sixty years since the surrender of Marshal Bazaine’s army in Metz, and only the very old can have a personal recollection of that fateful war, and only the extremely aged can have taken any active part in it, if indeed any such are still alive.

I was in Metz as a boy when we were as near to the war of 1870 as we are now to the war of 1914, and it so happened that owing to certain circumstances the events of that all important drama were early impressed on my mind to an unusual extent. I soon became fascinated by it and as I grew older read anything that bore on the subject and eagerly listened to any stories from those who had taken part in it. ‘The war,’ as we always called it, was the one outstanding event in Europe to my mind, and it has haunted me ever since.

Since that day I never re-entered Metz or Strasbourg until the year 1929, but twenty years ago I went over the battlefields round Metz, walking over the then frontier from Pagny-sur-Moselle. A dislike of seeing the German uniforms in those provinces had grown up with me, though I was not, and never have been, antiGerman as such. Indeed, the recovery of the lost provinces ought to go far to end the Franco-German hostility, just as in the sixteenth century Sir F. Walsingham said of Calais : ‘That was the great obstacle to any Anglo-French friendship, but now that it has gone (ie., the French have it), where is the difficulty?’

Non semper aliquis obedit legi ex bonitate perfectae virtutis;

It is not always through perfect goodness of virtue that one obeys the law;

The subject of the devil and his power to do evil to man is seldom discussed in the pulpit with all the exactness of sound theology. A missioner will descant on the mighty intelligence of Satan, and his relentless attack on the human race. He may even draw pictures of the dreadful state of a soul that has irrendered to the devil, and become completely possessed by him. He will warn his hearers that the devil is a powerful adversary, and that their strength is small and puny compared with Satan’s. In all this there is a good purpose, and the missioner’s words are often a very useful goad for the sluggish type of character that requires more vivid and more fiery (often in a literal sense) motives of action than the somewhat cold idea of duty to God. But there is a want of exactness and balance if no mention is made of the precise limits of Satan’s power over man, and there is the danger of causing unnecessary fear. One could wish that more attention were devoted to a careful explanation of the method of Satan’s attack, and of the limits of its efficacy.

A very important point to make, first of all, is that the devil can never act directly on the human intellect or the will. In other words, the devil has no means of getting inside a man’s soul and taking possession of man’s free-will. St. Thomas gives the following reason : to be within another is to be within his terms (terminos, limits),

Of those who scan this page there are few, if any who have not gone to pay homage to the great medieval churches of France. And surely numerous pilgrims, at Chartres of the world-famous sculptures, or other Gothic fanes of coeval raising, have found themselves asking big questions. If the French school of artists, say from the twelfth century to the fifteenth, were authors of a wealth of fine religious work, did there come from them no fair things in the sphere, after the Middle Ages had passed away, giving place to the Renaissance Period? Or must it be owned, reluctantly, that the ecclesiastical fabrics in the pointed formula, with the carven figures which adorn them, and the embellished sacred manuscripts which were wrought by men who were linked with those halls of orisons, were the ultimate rare exploit of France, in the sacerdotal realm?

In offering tribute to those very few French artists who fashioned beautiful things definable as art of the Renaissance, it is desirable to spend a moment on recalling the character of that great movement. If it is often described as the advent of a new spirit of enquiry, this description is inadequate; for the affair might also be called a deliberate harking back to the Classic or Antique styles in art. Out of the new spirit of enquiry there came in Holland, in the fourteenth century, the inauguration of the printing press, and in Flanders, at the outset of the fifteenth, the inception of oil painting.

Upon my outgoing journey with a message I met you. You came down the lane unconscious of the dignity of your presence and unaware of the desire you stirred in roe to do you reverence. I would have left the trivial machine I rode and placed myself on my knees in the dust to express my admiration for all you represent.

You who all day consort with the Omnipotent Goodness and in your consorting plead for such as I— obtaining for us all the graces which too often go unthanked for.

You more than stirred in me the repressed desire for solitude in which alone may we creatures touch in our timidity His Garments. Around your tunics hung the history of centuries; the memory of the prophets who sought Him in the deserts; the serenity of the decades of mystical revelation which came from Him alone; and in the folds of your raiment I caught glimpses of His Saints and consorts of the future.

In all the world there is no town to compare with this little walled city seated on a spur of the Umbrian Hills. No place is so intimately and exclusively bound up with the ever-continuing memory of one man. For Assisi is Saint Francis, and Saint Francis is Assisi. One cannot remain an hour there without fully realising this all-embracing fact. Yet to appreciate all that Assisi stands for, a short stay of a day or two is not enough. Some persons, even Catholics, are content to limit their visit to this city which is so wholly a shrine, to a few hours, and even take it as a place to see en passant on a motor drive from Perugia.

I myself reached Assisi with somewhat mixed feelings. The whole countryside was enveloped in mist and driving rain. Accommodation at an Albergo seemed rough, after home comforts. And—worst of all—one felt little or no devotion, only dryness in place of exaltation, and, I am even ashamed to confess the word, a sense of possible boredom in contemplating a more than very brief stay. Yet in less than twenty-four hours this feeling of desolation gave way to intense joy and inward peace. Assisi’s Saint Francis had worked that magic spell over me that has been his to exercise during seven centuries on the hearts of men of good will. I cannot explain it otherwise. The weather for an Italian May continued atrocious, and the hotel food unappetising to an English palate. But one had found the spirit of Assisi, and nothing else mattered.

A misleading title. It is, I believe, the title of an Act of Parliament; but let it not be supposed that it stands for the convenience of thirsty citizens; on the contrary, it heralds danger for those who, licensed by law to trade in liquor, venture to make their premises more comfortable for their clients. Only recently a publican suffered under the Act because he had the temerity to remove wooden partitions so as to make a wall straight instead of alcoved; he suffered, not by being imprisoned or fined, but only by being prosecuted and forced to employ King’s Counsel to save his means of livelihood; for the Act ordains that structural alterations to a licensed house are illegal unless specially sanctioned by law.

The fact that the publican in question was not more drastically punished must have perturbed many of the decorous who read of his acquittal; but let them rest secure; the Law leaves little undone that may embarrass the publican in his nefarious trade.