“Pope Denounces Communism” screamed the headlines. And of course there were the usual impertinent attempts to exploit the fact in class-interests. But the text of Divini Redemptoris proved a dangerous weapon for those concerned to preserve the social-economic status quo and to hinder the logical development of the existing industrialcapitalist society into a socialistic one. As said La Libre Belgique:

If atheistic communism is condemned, so too are all those evil “Christians” who live on the miseries of others, the selfish or blind “conservatives” who have failed to foresee that the indignation of the proletariat would impel them to rebellion, the evil rich who have so long been the object of the Saviour’s curses. . . . The vigour of the Pope’s words to them has astounded and disconcerted the more timid. But there are very few who have understood the love that lies hidden in that anger. This Encyclical is a model of righteous indignation at the service of charity, truly befitting a Father who longs for the salvation of his children.

When I speak of a hero I do not imply the possession of those qualities which we normally think of as heroic. I do not mean courage in battle, constancy in love, generosity in triumph, resignation in defeat; I do not mean the glamour of physique and the leadership of arms, although we shall find these qualities in many of Shakespeare’s people. I mean by a Shakespearean hero, not the character whom his judgment approved, but the character with whom his imagination was identified.

A very penetrating critic, Mr. Middleton Murry, to whose recent book on Shakespeare I am greatly indebted, has written as though he did not exercise the prerogative of moral judgment. He would have us believe that Shakespeare’s genius was a mirror wherein the contradictions and the multiplicity of life expressed themselves, and that it was not in his nature to interpret this movement in the light of moral principles. In a word, he was a man of imagination rather than a man of character. I do not question a limited truth in this. Shakespeare was a man of his own time. The romantic tradition of criticism, to which we owe the dangerous elucidations of Coleridge, so stressed the universal character of his genius that it forgot that he had also a “local habitation and a name.” It ignored his particularity of time and place. I can see no reason to doubt that he shared the baffled and half-sceptical philosophy of his time; nor that in the person of Hamlet he gave it a definitive voice. His mind did not move against any fixed background of theological beliefs, as Dante’s did, but he clearly inherited, along with many others of his time, a hierarchy of moral values which were the legacy of a Christian and a classical culture. He will indict Goneril and Regan for filial ingratitude, Anthony for excess of passion, Macbeth for treachery and murder. Even when his characters have committed crime or folly they are haunted by a high conception of honour.

Many extravagant claims have been made in the Press for this book, none however as sweeping as that made by a writer in the Daily Telegraph of March 5, in which he gravely assures us that “the result of his [Mr. Baskerville’s] study of these sources [the contemporary documents in the Public Record Office] is a book which one must accept as the most authoritative account yet published of this curious chapter in English history” [namely the Suppression of the monasteries]. He also tells us that the “sob-stuff” writers, against whom, he requires us to believe, Mr. Baskerville tilts with complete success, are those who “have either not consulted contemporary documents or have ignored them.”

This is indeed devastating, for the most prominent twentieth-century “sob-stuff” writer (a “sob-stuff” writer being one who refuses to accept the religious houses as “corrupt, immoral, and obviously having outlived their usefulness”) was the late Dr. James Gairdner, a nonCatholic, who during his fifty-four years of work in the Record Office edited the twenty-one volumes divided into thirty-one parts (each part a great tome) which form the Calendar of Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, a work so much appreciated by Mr. Baskerville that he has liberally helped himself from it to the extent of no less than one hundred and eighty-eight quotations. At the period of Mr. Gairdner’s work another assiduous toiler in the Record Office was the late Father C. F. Raymund Palmer, O.P., busy between 1870 and 1890 compiling his many works on the history of the English Dominicans. His is a very honourable name amongst research students.

If this book could take over something of the prestige enjoyed until recently by Renan's Vie de Jesus, it would be a great blessing for France and for us all—instead of the portrait of Christ according to Rousseau, to have one which despite many faults and insufficiencies is at least genuinely Catholic. It is not a preposterous hope. In our own country already the Daily Express has been placarding generous excerpts from the book. And—a more serious factor—it has found a translator who has supplied a sufficiently attractive text. However, this article is not concerned with the external success of the book, but only with certain of its internal failures. Not with the idea of condemnation, but of reaching a sober appreciation. Fortunately, it is possible in this task to make use of an article contributed to the July issue of the Revue Biblique of last year, in which Père Lagrange, O.P. —whose judgment in such a matter is pre-eminently valuable—has expressed himself freely and at some length. But only when appeal is made explicitly to this authority can the views here expressed be taken as having any supercharged value.

Monsignor Bosco Chang felt cold and stiff and tired. He could not but compare this lumbering progress from the English coast, shaken and jolted in the clumsy coach along the rutty roads, with the ease and speed of travel in China, either by air or through the new compressor tubes, where you stepped into a private padded carriage, dialled your destination, and were shot there at 700 kilometres an hour. Why, one morning he had consulted the voice records at the great central phonary of Nanking, lunched with his friend from seminary days the Vicar-General of Honan-Fu, seen his publishers at Canton in the afternoon, and started his retreat that very evening at the great Manresa in the Snowy Mountains on the borders of Tibet. So little friction, he reflected, so little distraction; the mind could concentrate and the will fix its desire on the Simple Sheer, unworried by the multitude of little things. But here one was so close to time and space, to all the trivial quantitative modalities of being; to soft and hard and sore and wet, the fleas, the cold, the grit, the shaking; congested veins and broken finger nails, the smell of a drink that lingered in the breath of the natives, sour and yet touched with the sweetness of chrysanthemums decaying in the late autumnal gardens round Ko-Hoa. And their minds and speech, so definite and slow, with the edges of a chunk of Cartesian matter and the labourings of an ox before the plough; their nerves, too, like so much muscle and bone.

In the course of a tour of the Industrial North and Midlands extending over three months and meeting, in the main, working men, their wives and families, several facts have presented themselves that concern Catholics.

The first: that there is now at work in industry a generation more alive to the inequalities of the Capitalist system than there was ever before. This is undoubtedly the fruit of education. It is arguable how far this education (elementary and secondary) has been of real worth to the Nation as a whole, and it is quite certain that a great deal of the dissatisfaction with things as they are is not, as many magistrates and social workers would have us believe, entirely due to the influence of the Cinema. The Cinema certainly does harm in so far as it is largely amoral, but not in showing pictures of a standard of living that so many of the audience believe, quite sincerely, to be theirs by right; it is only exacerbating an already running sore.

The second: the great increase of Left propaganda and ideas. In the majority of factories visited there was either the group or an individual which had taken on itself the dissemination of ideas, sometimes literature, and always with extreme fervour. They are on the spot wherever an argument starts and, once having made their “contact,” they do all they can to pin their man (or woman) down.

The presence or lack of certain philosophical or religious preoccupations at any period has a great deal to do with the prevailing attitude towards children and their education.

In primitive or spontaneous forms of human society the child is not a special subject of study. Children are naturally and roundly brought up in the large circle of the home, with its traditional wisdom and salutary rough and tumble.

In many of the Greek states, where political life was allpervasive, it was inevitable that educational theories should emphasize the primary importance of education for citizenship—a phase reproduced for us in modern states such as Italy and Germany.

A Jansenistic theology once darkened men’s outlook on human nature and, in consequence, on its budding period. This gloom and the severity which harmonized with it persisted throughout the Victorian age. It was a time when children were habitually treated as criminals latae sententiae, an evil and perverse generation, to be repressed and chastized without mercy and without truce. For men of this epoch the child was, before all, a nuisance. It had no proper place in an adult world. A child (as Maria Montessori points out) was not to sit on the grown-ups’ chairs. Nor was it to sit on the stairs. Hence, having no chair of its own, it could sit down only when some big person condescended to offer it the hospitality of a pair of knees.