As so often in history, so in our time, a gross disorder in Christendom was heralded by a wave of anti-Semitic persecution.

Had we been used to thinking of Christendom as an entity, we should have been more alarmed when this happened. The Jews are a sign, a witness. Mediaeval consciousness was tormentingly aware of the presence of these strangers with its sublime or sinister meaning. It was angry with them: the Jews whose conversion was to precede the Second Coming delayed the kingdom of glory by their refusal. They stood for the official sign of disbelief, but also for God’s answer to it; they were man’s denial of the Incarnation, yet the Incarnation had made their wounds the wounds of Christ.

Was it part of their business to harry the Christian conscience? Did not their spiritual pride quicken humility? Was not their lack of faith somehow a testing of the fruits of faith? Did they not even mysteriously escape God’s condemnation so long as there was an excuse for not recognising His Son in those who should manifest Him? Perhaps they were like hard seeds left in a wintry soil, closed up until the water of baptism had softened it and charity had made it gentle for the slow shoots to break out into the daylight of faith. This might not happen until the end of the world; meanwhile, the world had to suffer it and be prevented from crystalising into mineral perfection.

‘Adversity,’ wrote Francis Bacon, ‘like a toad ugly and venomous, yet holds a precious jewel in its head.’ In our present adversity the ugliness and venom bulk so large that the precious jewel, the one redeeming feature best calculated to afford consolation, may be easily missed. To the thoughtful mind, and especially to the religious mind that is rooted in God as the one sure foundation of all things, this consoling side can most easily be seen in a comparison between the sort of victory that most were looking for and the kind of victor)-’ that must now be won.

Most people began with a short-sighted view of the war as a conflict for supremacy between certain combinations of nations. They hoped that we had a better combination than our opponents, and that in the long run we should beat them by the weight of our resources and superior position rather than, necessarily, in the field. That seemed the easiest way and the least painful to ourselves. It was but human nature to hope for victory without great suffering to ourselves. Such a view, however, misses both the deeper underlying nature of the conflict and the fact that such a victory would have no more chance, rather considerably less, of solving the real problems than did the victory of 1918. Not peace, but an armed truce would be again the state of the world.

How shall we approach him, this unique figure in English literature, and what are we to name him—Englishman and Frenchman, poet and politician, reactionary and revolutionary, essayist, historian, satirist, soldier and seaman, thinker and man of action, sceptic and Christian? In mood merry and sad and bitter, in style exuberant and austere—what common factor, if any, is to be found in him?

The key to this many-sided man is at once complex and simple. He is concerned, in a word, with all the activities of man, political, social, artistic and religious, as seen in the light of the living Christian tradition of Catholic Europe; a tradition which has caught up into itself and made its own the civilisations of Greece and Rome and the long searching and finding of the Jews, and which claims to interpret for all time God to man and man to himself. It is, for better or worse, our tradition. It is in the atmosphere we breathe, it is the soil from which we spring, it is so familiar that at times we do not notice it, it is so complex that we all know little of it directly, so simple that we find it hard to accept, so exacting that we snatch at the excuse of fashion and distaste to abandon it, yet so penetrating that we are coloured by it against our will, and bear its marks even in revolt. It is a tradition that has again and again grown weak from within and been assailed from without, it has never been unchallenged and never utterly overthrown, and its fortunes were nevermore vital or more uncertain than at the present day.

Amongst the many tasks that St. Pius V was faced with when he ascended the papal throne was the reform of the College of Cardinals decreed by the General Council of Trent. One source of abuse had been the demands made on the Holy See by secular governments for the elevation of royal children or favoured ministers to the purple, also the appointment of unworthy relatives of the Popes. Much against his will St. Pius, early in his reign, allowed himself to be persuaded by the cardinals to admit his nephew, Michael Bonelli, into their ranks; but although he had agreed to their request he insisted on the young cardinal retaining his Dominican dress, refused him permission to wear the red biretta or the silk robes of his new dignity, to use silver plate at his table, and other cardinalitial privileges. He had hopes that Bonelli would prove himself another Charles Borromeo, but if this was beyond his nephew’s powers St. Pius’s choice was nevertheless a good one, and Bonelli remained until his death thirty-two years later one of the best prelates in Rome.

The Christian life is a life of friendship with God, ‘I have called you friends.’ More, we are called to share the divine life itself in fellowship with Christ and as members of God’s family; ‘God is faithful, by whom you are called unto the fellowship of His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.’ He is our elder brother, ‘the firstborn among many brethren,’ and we receive the spirit of adoption of sons, and are joint heirs with Christ.

The fullness of the divine life is to be ours hereafter in the blessed, all-satisfying vision and love of God eternally possessed. Then ‘we shall be like to him, because we shall see him as he is-we shall see face to face, and know even as we are known. This life of eternal blessedness is indeed promised as a reward for a life well lived here below, but it will be only the full development of the divine life already begun in this world. ‘He that believeth in the son hath eternal life’; ‘we are now the sons of God.’ At Baptism the soul is born again to the higher life by adoptive sonship, and by this higher life, which we are accustomed to call sanctifying grace, we are ‘partakers of the divine nature.’