The change which Spain has undergone since the fall of the Monarchy three years ago can hardly be appreciated except by those who were well acquainted with the work of the Dictatorship previous to the establishment of the Republic. Out of the debris of the centuries-old Monarchy a new Spain is born with new ideals and a new spirit. The old traditional institutions which routine had rendered feebler with the passage of time, have in the end been overthrown and are now being superseded by new organizations with fresh energy and a new vitality. The destructive work of the Republic has been severe; but it had become necessary. The Agrarian Reform framed by the Socialists and passed by the first Cortes in 1932 was a marvellous piece of communistic propaganda. Its aim was to deprive the nobility and the big landowners of their immense property, much of which was cultivated indifferently or not at all, and to distribute it amongst the workers, and, in some cases, to consider it as a common property of the workers. This plan was put into practice for a time until the new Cortes after November 19th, 1933, revoked it, with the result that the country is in such a state that reform cannot be delayed any longer.

The religious question has similarly been discussed warmly by all the political parties, and one is glad to be able to say that the Spanish Catholics have endured an unpleasant though fruitful ordeal.

Luminous shadow and dusky light.—We, who are not poets, but who dare to maintain that poetry is an essential element of our intellectual life, are just now the somewhat helpless witnesses of a discussion in which we are not invited to take a part; a discussion of experts; and yet a discussion in which we are deeply interested even if we be kept outside it.

There are two parties to that discussion; one for whom poetry has, essentially, no relation to thought, but springs from an emotion of the soul of the poet which he transmits to his hearers in words, indeed, but not in any kind of definite thought; the other, and older school, for whom thought is not, indeed, the whole of poetry, but is certainly one of its elements, and is of its very essence.

To take, first, the former school, as presented by one or two of its leading advocates.

Mr. A. E. Housman says: The human faculty which dominated the eighteenth century and informed its literature was the intelligence, and that involved, as Arnold says, ‘some repressing and silencing of poetry’ And again: When I examine my mind and try to discern clearly in the matter, / cannot satisfy myself that there are any such things as poetical ideas.

Again, although it is almost impossible to find pure unmingled poetry, poetry independent of meaning, yet meaning is of the intellect, poetry is not.

Dante belongs to two epochs—to what, chronology apart, we call the Middle Ages, and to the tendency known as Humanism. The De Monarchia belongs to the Middle Ages that are passing away, the Divine Comedy to the Middle Ages that live on, to dawning Humanism, and to the legacy of the Middle Ages to Humanism.

It is one of the commonest distortions in our historical outlook, and one of the hardest to correct, to consider Humanism as a negation of the Middle Ages. Such an attitude supposes the two epochs in utter antithesis, the second a revolt against the first, a total opposition of values, implying sheer discontinuity between the Middle Ages and Humanism. There are certain historians who go so far as to cut the whole of the Middle Ages out of the process of thought, joining up Humanism to Greco-Roman thought, art and culture, and taking primitive Christianity into account only in so far as showing the influence of Alexandrian philosophy. On the other hand, not a few Catholic apologists not only extol the Middle Ages beyond the warrant of realities, but minimise the negative aspects of that civilization, which they see as entirely and solely Christian. They too admit a discontinuity between the two epochs, with this difference, that they do not believe the thread has ever been joined up, in spite of the tentative of the Counter Reformation, or that, less effectual, of Catholic Romanticism.

Apart from their various controversial aspects, hinc et inde, this conception rules out any sociologico-historical interpretation of human process.

In the uncertain associations it evokes, Revolution is hardly a word with one meaning. We may deplore the revolutionary economics of Karl Marx and applaud the revolutionary pedagogics of Don Bosco. The Revolte des Anges, Lucifer's assertion of self-subsistence and equality with God, the insolence of our first parents, were (it may be urged), no less revolution than the subversive mission of Jesus Christ who came to overthrow the powers of Evil, the false privilege and the unreal values they had inspired.

Or do we prefer to call Christianity counter-revolution —perceiving in it the re-establishment of human-divine intercourse, ultimate incorporation with God, through submission and service? Perceiving in Catholicism the subordination of self in contradistinction to the Satanic assertion of the Ego; service among men as opposed to the primeval assimilation of the meta-human, the snatching at the high-hanging fruit in the garden? Must we accept counterrevolution as the more accurate Christian nomenclature? For Joseph de Maistre, you will remember, insists that ‘Contre-révolution ne doit pas être une révolution contraire mais le contraire d’une révolution.’

Indeed, thus considered, the mission of Our Lord, consisting, as it did, in the reinstatement of humility, as opposed to revolt against the Divine Mind, was essentially counter-revolution. Revolution, de Maistre goes on to tell us, is essentially Satanic in that it is destructive and not creative (‘car détruire n’est pas faire’). Yet, while de Maistre and his fellows to-day insist that the nature of counter-revolution is non-revolutionary and purely reinstative, it is yet insisted in the same breath that its constructiveness does not derive ‘from hope of restoring the past.’

In a letter to Canon Brohée, President of the Centre Catholique d’Action Cinématographique, His Holiness Pope Pius XI wrote, April 25th, 1934:

On reading this letter the loyal Catholic might excusably heave a sigh of relief. Owing to the American Boycott much has been said for and against the Cinema. Some people have deplored its influence and condemned it as a medium; others have accepted it, but entirely misunderstood its power and therefore its danger; some of us have even ventured to make films . . . But amid this mass of conflicting opinion, one thing is now clear, that the Holy Father not only encourages the use of the Cinema, but considers that it is our duty to use it in the Apostolate. This in itself is a great step forward, and will relieve many a dubious conscience.

In England, and in most English-speaking countries, we are still bound fast by convention to styles of ecclesiastical art which have long since ceased to live. We are struggling to be free, but we can only think in terms of Classic or Gothic. If we only dared, some of us might build a church in the style of an Egyptian temple; but that also would be a revival. Rather than be deprived of our Gothic arch we prefer to sling it from the ferro-concrete roof. There is nothing new, no development from the past into the terms of the modern. It must all be copied. We can build beautiful factories and cinemas, but we can hardly produce one pleasing statue of a religious character.

In this state of decrepitude it is of great assistance to look to our contemporary ecclesiastical artists abroad. In Italy, Germany and Holland a modern style has developed since the War. It has not broken with the past, but in the true living tradition it is not interested in copying. An English visitor in Holland, for example, will be amazed at the modern architecture which he there finds flourishing. He has become accustomed to entering a new church and finding a Perpendicular, Romanesque or Gothic building in stone or brick covered with plaster. He expects to see lifelike statues in gaudy colours, and windows trying to look as though they were not windows at all, but sentimental pictures in stone frames. In Holland it is different. The material, being the material of the country, is nearly always the same beautiful Dutch brick in its various shades of warm brown.

One of the noteworthy features of our time is the revival of interest in the life and letters of Blessed Thomas More.

These two new Lives of the Beatus are added evidence of this interest, and of its universal character. The one is by a non-Catholic Englishwoman, who is a scholar of the University of Oxford, the other is by a Catholic American, who is a member of the English Faculty at Harvard.

Though there are already (we are told by Miss Routh) twenty-four English Lives of More of different periods, one could not spare either of these new volumes. Of a truth, as Dame Elizabeth Wordsworth is here reported to have said, Sir Thomas More is one of the figures of abiding interest in History.

This multiplication of Lives of Thomas More goes with the reproduction of his English works in the elegant edition that is in course of publication by Messrs. Eyre and Spottiswoode under the general editorship of W. E. Campbell, with the co-operation of Professor A. W. Read, Professor R. W. Chambers and Mr. W. A. Doyle Davidson: a notable constellation of Catholic and and non-Catholic scholars. The publication in this series of Harpsfield’s Life of Thomas More has given us, from the pen of Professor Chambers, an enduring essay ‘On the Continuity of English Prose from Alfred to More and his School,’ the main thesis of which may be said to be that the English of Alfred survived as a literary language, during the centuries when French and Latin were the official languages of Law and Government, through the religious writings of Englishmen who wrote on mystical subjects for the use of English communities of religious women.

Rise and Fulfilment of British Rule in India? It makes one think of Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, of B. D. Basu's Rise and Consolidation of the Christian Power in India, of the Cambridge History of British India, and The Indian Empire. The title is entrancing—and not a little enigmatic: for the authors never tell the reader in so many words what exactly they mean by ‘fulfilment.’ Whatever it be, this History of the British Raj is as lively as the Cambridge tomes are stodgy, and as impartial as Major Basu is partizan: it refutes its own motto—a saying of the Iron Duke—’that the public mind cannot be brought to attend to an Indian subject.’ Nothing is more needful to-day than that the British mind should thus attend: it will henceforth be able to do so, thanks to Messrs. Thompson and Garratt, without tears, though perhaps not without a good deal of mortification.

‘It is often said,’ observe our authors (p. 273), ‘that Britain acquired her Indian Empire in a fit of absent-mindedness: the epigram has been overworked. From Clive’s time onwards, British India never lacked minds seeing and planning far ahead.’ True, the Empire began as a mercantile adventure—and ‘of all the European interloping nations we were the last and most reluctant to draw the sword, even in defence’ (p. 5). Yet already in 1618 Sir Thomas Roe said: ‘Assure you, these people are best treated with the sword in one hand and caducean in the other’ (p. 17); and by 1641 the East India Company had fortified its factory at Masulipatam.

Twenty-Nine Catholics, most of them lay and many belonging to what is called the modern generation, spent the second week-end of September at a Dance and Phillipson mansion—elegant and comfortable, says De Quincey, who stayed there, but not splendid—square and Ionic, set in a park of rough Northamptonshire turf and beech clumps and encircled by woods of oak. Their purpose, more easily recognized than described, was to form contacts; to discuss the widening of Catholicism in themselves and their society, of Catholicism considered more as a habit of life than a system of revealed principles and organized procedure; and to prepare, if possible, for some form of group action.

The first general meeting started with the statement of two principles: first, the continuity between supernatural religion and the rest of life; secondly, the Catholic significance of every human action. ‘Spirituality’ is not a special occupation, remote from other human interests: the sacred and the profane imply a distinction but not an antithesis: there is such a thing as religious worldliness, which is not a comfortable but a difficult ideal: Catholicism is not a spasmodic treble, or for that matter a treble at all, but covers the whole human movement of living—all these are merely chapter headings, indications of an emphasis, not scientifically stated conclusions.

But while Catholicism is as wide as life, organized Catholicism denotes a special kind of life. From this life springs a special kind of activity called Catholic Action, in which all who attended the Laxton week-end take part in varying degrees.