We have seen that the idea of war as the instrument of God’s judgment permeates the Bible from Genesis to the Apocalypse. It is the ruling idea which gives unity and consistency to the most ‘militarist’ as well as to the most ‘pacifist’ passages of Scripture, diverse historical situations and epochs calling forth diverse applications of that dominant conception. It now remains to suggest that this same idea has dominated the authentic Christian idea of war and attitude towards war throughout the changing circumstances of the situation of the Christian Church in the world. For just as this conception dominates the Scriptures from Genesis to the Apocalypse, so it has ever been uppermost in the authentic mind of the Church from the Apocalypse—which foresees wars as the outcome of the outpouring of the ‘vials full of the wrath of God’—to Benedict XV—who, in September, 1914, cried, ‘We beg and implore ... all the sons of the Church ... to beg that God, mindful of His mercy, may lay aside this scourge of anger with which He inflicts on the people the penalty of their sins.’

But just as, as we have previously said, we must avoid expecting to find in the Scriptures ready-made solutions to our present problems, so, if we would scan the pages of Christian history for light in our present perplexities, we must beware of expecting to find in them exact precedents for our present attitudes and conduct.

To write on worship and family life is nearly as great an undertaking as to outline the world-wide process from its coming out from God in creation to its return to Him in praise and love. For God created the world that He might be worshipped and praised in an unending hymn of love by His creatures, of whom the highest in this world is man. Man is not only the figurehead of creation; he is, with the divine assistance, the continual promoter of this same creation; and it is in the family, above all, that he exercises this noble right to co-operate in the work of God. The family is in a sense the hub of creation, and the very raison d’etre of creation is worship. Even the natural family has an intimate touch of the divine in it, for does not God co-operate by an immediate act of creation in the production of every human soul? The first unmeaning cry of the newly-born child is in reality a cry of praise for the Omnipotent Creator.

We are concerned here especially with Christian marriage and Christian family life in which all the natural aspects of divine worship, voiced consciously or unconsciously by these co-operators in God’s creative act, are raised to a higher order and united by grace to the worship offered by the only-begotten Son of God, made Man that He might harmonize the discordant notes and restore to God a perfect Hosanna and Alleluia.

‘Poor Whites’ is a convenient label, used indiscriminately to describe the white population of North America living in two quite distinct areas south of the Mason-Dixon line; the coastal area with its coloured people and cotton and tobacco plantations, and the mountain area of the Southern Appalachians. The material poverty that marks both groups has led the industrialized Northern States to lump them together under a common condemnation. Poverty is scarcely a virtue to men whose Calvinistic background once made material prosperity a manifest sign of divine favour. Hence the average New Englander, for example, bred in a highly acquisitive tradition had little re-gaid for those whites of the South, who had been left far behind in the race for worldly possessions and still lived in circumstances not far removed from those of primitive pioneering days.

In the case of the Poor Whites proper, who live in the Tobacco and Cotton States, economic and climatic factors have been responsible for their depressed condition. Before and since Emancipation the coloured people have provided the labour in the plantations; they are better suited to heavy toil in a warm climate and cost less than white labour. Consequently the poorer whites have gained a reputation for shiftlessness and lack of enterprise. The coloured population generally refers to them as ‘Poor White Trash,’ and the name has spread all over the continent.

From Oxford Father Bede was sent to Louvain to finish off his Dominican training. He still had two years of his theological course to complete before he could exercise the full ministry of a priest and Friar Preacher. It might have been expected that his earlier ecclesiastical knowledge would have grown rusty during his three years absorption in secular studies and interests in Oxford, and that more than the normal two years would be required if he were to recover lost ground and complete his theological studies satisfactorily. Instead of that he crowded his remaining work into less than one year, and with such success that the examiners who at the end of that time awarded him his degree in theology spoke of him as the best prepared student they had ever examined. In every way Oxford made him, not a worse, but a better candidate for all ecclesiastical dignities and responsibilities.

This was the last of his examinations. He left them all behind him with a sigh of relief. Years later he could write to a young man still at the mercy of examiners:

‘I have only two bits of advice: one is never to work in the afternoon, a fatal mistake; the other is never to be angry with one’s paper. That is equally fatal. A prayer to the Holy Ghost is far simpler, more effectual, and quiets the nerves . . . Personally I hate all exams so desperately, whether or no I am ready for them, that I can’t understand anyone going near them who hasn’t got to. Since the year 1896 I have never failed in an exam, and have hated’ em all! ... Freedom is incompatible with swotting for an exam, and swotting must go on till the beastly things are all over.

‘The Church,’ said an ancient writer, ‘was created first o£ all, and for Her sake was the world made.’ Nowadays we seem to have lost much of that lofty sense, that divine view, of the Church in the purposes of God. We tend to consider Her empirically only, as one sect among many, as one section only of the human race. It is one of the functions of the revival of ecclesiology—of that branch of theology which treats of the nature and purpose of the Church —to restore that ancient sense of the Catholicity of the Church, the all-embracing society of redeemed humanity, the Kingdom of God on earth.

Amongst recent literature on the Church, Catholicisme; les Aspects Sociaux du Dogme, by Henry de Lubac, S.J., is of first importance. Based entirely upon the living theology of the Fathers, this excellent book gives a comprehensive account of the social implications of Catholicism. In an important chapter, Le Salut par I’Eglise, Father de Lubac recalls to mind the fact that mankind is naturally and instinctively a social organism, living a single, simple life; disunion and discord, the cancerous growths of sin, have rent asunder this unity, which was a spiritual harmony rooted in the love of God, and its restoration is only possible now, in the existing state of things, through Christ and His Church. ‘Seul I’Idéal que le Christ a transmis a son Eglise est assez pur et assez puissant. . . pour inspirer aux hommes de travailler a leur unité spirituelle, comme seul le Sacrifice de son Sang peut donner l’efficace leur travail.’

A recently translated work by Bishop Felder makes a sort of counterpart to his long established work known in its English version as Christ and the Critics. He resumes his defence of the New Testament against these same critics and certain of their descendants. But he is now more concerned to be constructive, and the most substantial part of the book is designed to portray the character of Christ according to the Gospels and to provide a synthesis of the New Testament doctrine concerning the messianic role and the divinity of Christ. The material thus assembled is of great value; and the spirit of the book is impressive and powerfully edifying. It can be strongly recommended to pious readers. As a work of biblical science, however, or quite simply as a piece of writing, it is not so commendable. Neglect of the historical aspect of the New Testament introduces something of flatness, of text-bookish deadness into the treatment of the doctrine. And the apologetics are defective in several ways. There is a want of sympathetic understanding of the position of opponents, and even a certain want of controversial integrity. It is difficult to grasp the point of view that, ‘In the entire history of the intellectual development of man there is hardly a disaster of more frightful tragedy than the collapse of the rationalistic criticism of the gospel and of Jesus.’ Elsewhere the discomfiture of the critics can be contemplated more cheerfully : ‘To-day serious scientists, and even light-footed poets, have at most a compassionate smile for all these clever little essays of rationalistic memory.’