Slum clearance. Catholics stress the importance of the home, and therefore, considering the great displacement of population and improvement of conditions involved, will require little persuasion as to the need of busying themselves with the workings of the recent Housing Act. This may take the form of concerted action to promote Catholic Housing Associations, through groups specially formed for the purpose or through already existing societies. To an outsider, the capacity and resources of the Knights of St. Columba seem to fit them admirably for such a work. Mr. Thomas Foster, in last month’s Blackfriars, outlined the necessity and practicability of such schemes. But there is a place for individual Catholic action as well, and in this connection we print the following letter to the Editor.

As much as any other single factor, conscription or enforced military service lies near the root of the military mentality and the atmosphere of war which weigh down on a world the vast majority of whose inhabitants hate the very idea of war. Yet the abolition of conscription has hardly figured at all in the various disarmament proposals, and no serious effort has been made to relegate it to the category of social abuses to which it belongs, serfdom, feudal service, and certain kinds of industrial wage-slaveries.

Before discussing the question of whether and when conscription is ethically justifiable, it will be worth our while to examine the reason for the mischievous part it must play in the modern world. One of the oddest characteristics of the post-war world which still claims to be democratic in spirit if not always in political organisation is the divorce between what political philosophers have called the general will of the people of a State and the actual will of the State as manifested in the policies and activities of its rulers. We may imagine, for example, the average Englishman or the average Frenchman or the average Italian opening his morning paper. He will read of this financial crisis or that, of this political squabble or the other, of the reports of the various countries’ unsympathetic reception of some disarmament proposal. What link, what nexus is there between his mind and these items of news? Practically none, unless we call fear a nexus. He may be afraid for his money, his property, still more afraid of being personally dragged into some disastrous consequence of the mismanagement of the powers that be.

A radical contradiction vitiates the political theory of Mr. Belloc. It can be stated thus: the Roman civilisation and the medieval are continuous because in the dark ages the barbarians who dominated in society thought they were Romans and accepted the Roman Empire, although with manifest decadence; the British working classes are in imminent peril of becoming a servile class by the imposition of some elements of slavery, although they will not be called or considered slaves, by themselves or others.

The former thesis (that of Europe and the Faith) assumes that society depends on the formalities of the mind: what it intends to accept. The latter thesis (that of the Servile State) assumes that society depends on what the mind actually accepts, regardless of formalities or aspects.

The area of possible controversy among Catholics is of course wide—as wide as the life of the man who is head or member of a family and a citizen. Controversy has been common enough among members of the Church in the past. It is inevitable when essentials of the Faith are concerned, and has rightly gone beyond mere words when schism or heresy raised its. head, as in the time of the Albigenses. More recently, bitter debate has been justified when the implication touched some basic principle and Rome felt called to intervene, as with the Jansenists or, in the more definitely political sphere, with the Action Française. There are lower fields of controversy, aesthetic, literary and purely political, where there is difficulty in finding justification, where the well known dirty-linen metaphor stands as a warning against entry, and where as a general rule debate should be restricted as far as reasonably possible.

There have been one or two examples recently of foolishly provoked controversy among Catholics, and in view, for one thing, of the persistence—the extreme urgency in these days—of the call for Catholic Action which first sounded in Rome, it may be worth while reflecting on the position in general terms and as discreetly as possible.

‘He was a great man,’ says Isaac Disraeli of St. Thomas Aquinas, ‘busied all his life with making the Charades of Metaphysics.’

The Charades of Metaphysics, or metaphysical charades, as we generally call them, must not be confused with the Physical Charades, invented by Francis Bacon, nor with the Dumb Charades which are our modern contribution to knowledge. They have a distinct character; they are really quite a different game. In these days when so much attention is paid to Morris Dances and medieval folk-lore, it may be a service to rescue from oblivion the varied accounts of this game which are to be found in our literature. I have drawn my quotations, not from the philosophers, but from the great literary writers of the past, because the best judges of any game are the onlookers who take no part in it. And if I seem to have a weakness for Thomases, it is because I feel that on those who received his name in Baptism, the mantle of Thomas Aquinas must surely have fallen.

Physical Charades was essentially an open-air game. Gallileo spent his spare time dropping bodies from the top of the leaning tower at Pisa: Newton played in his orchard near Grantham. Metaphysical Charades, on the contrary, was emphatically an indoor game, and for this I have the authority of no less a supporter than Thomas De Quincey.

The history of family religious life, as a microcosm of the national religious life, seems to me to offer a virgin field for research and documentation. I offer these pages as a study of one family, my own.

At the outset I wish to admit a prejudice in favour of continuity, homogeneity and unity in family religious life. It is only through these safeguards—the fruit, by the bye, of singleness of Faith—that we enjoy the blessings of mutual understanding, concord in social relationships and the benefit of a traditional ethical and spiritual culture. Under the group system of religion the nation is committed to a system that makes for misunderstanding and estrangement between group and group, faction in family life, and prejudice and suspicion between individuals. True it is, as says a Kempis: ‘He who seeks to enjoy things alone, forfeits the advantages that are in common.’

In the eleventh chapter of St. Matthew, Our Lord says (v. 29):

‘Take up my yoke upon you, and learn of me, because I am meek, and humble of heart: And you will find rest for your souls.’

These words are patient of a threefold interpretation:

First, Christ might be pointing to himself as the exemplar, and mean: Learn meekness and humility of me. This is the usual and popular interpretation of the text; though there can be little doubt that so understood it was not intended by Christ and is an accommodated sense. The correct translation of the conjunction, in the Greek original of St. Matthew, is ‘because’ or ‘by reason of.’ Père Lagrange renders the passage: ‘Recevez mes leçons par ce que je suis doux et humble de cceur.’ ‘Embrace my teaching, because I am meek and humble of heart.’

Though many may disagree profoundly with the conclusions reached in The Coming Struggle for Power, by John Strachey, nevertheless they will admit that they are grateful for its publication. It requires such a book, which challenges all the ideals upon which this and previous generations have been brought up, to rouse people from taking things for granted and to make them ask themselves such questions as ‘whither is our civilization leading us?’

Mr. Strachey has no doubts but that communism is the goal to be aimed at, and that it is also the goal towards which we are being irresistibly drawn. It would be unprofitable to examine in detail the multiplicity of arguments which he has advanced in support of his general thesis, but the general trend of the argument in the book needs careful attention—Mr. Strachey first points to all the evils which at present exist in the world; wars, famine, and poverty on the one side, over-production and accumulation of vast fortunes on the other; periodical crises, booms and slumps; tendencies towards monopolies and nationalism. All these, he says, are the obvious results of capitalism, and it is impossible for capitalism to provide a cure for these evils. This, in brief, is the first stage in his argument, and I think it is worth our while to consider it at some length.

The days have passed when, on the Continent anyhow, to be on the stage was to be outside the Church. This was brought home by the Master-General of the Dominican Order, at a meeting of the English Catholic Stage Guild last summer, when he, who had been its Director, spoke of the activities and spiritual life of the Stage Guild of France.

The theatre is the prodigal daughter of the Church; she was born of the Church and her first playgrounds were in the churches. Now in a ‘far land’ she is, at least in this country, in spiritual destitution and has hardly the strength to arise and return to her home, but the Church, her mother, has set out on the road to meet her.

In England, it is true, the theatre did not go of her own accord from the Church, she was carried away from it in the arms of public life. We may find in the pages of Shakespeare many traces of the Church’s influence and much hankering for the home that the theatre had been torn from; but since Shakespeare the Drama in England has been purely secular, but not as in countries where it was in active rebellion, and not until our own day, irreligious. The Puritan element in the country looked at the theatre askance and not until late Victorian days was it considered a respectable institution.

The beginning of April witnessed the opening of the Holy Year and the proclamation of the extraordinary jubilee. The Redemption is the chief event in history, not only for Catholics, but for everyone for whom Christ is not merely a name, but a living reality. It is out of the Redemption that ‘has come this civilisation in which we rejoice and on which we pride ourselves.’ This event carries with it ‘a wonderful succession of divine gesta,’ above all ‘the institution at the Last Supper of the Holy Eucharist, entrusted to the Apostles, who saw themselves elevated to the priestly order by these words: Do this in memory of Me; the Passion of Jesus Christ, His Crucifixion and His death for the salvation of men; the Virgin Mary, constituted, at the foot of the Cross of Her Son, Mother of all men; then the wonderful Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the sign and assurance of our own; presently the dispensation to the Apostles of the power of forgiving sins; the true primacy of jurisdiction given and confirmed to Peter and his successors; and, lastly, the Ascension of Our Lord, the descent of the Holy Spirit, and forthwith the prodigious and triumphant teaching of the Apostles.’

In his Christmas broadcast, the Pope had said that although 1933 is regarded as the centenary year in the common opinion of the faithful, and that in this they have scientific support, scholars have not yet fixed the date of the Crucifixion with absolute certitude. As some controversy has lately arisen on this point, it may be well to review briefly the grounds on which the date has been traditionally established.

The case against the moderns is clear enough. Less than three centuries has been sufficient to allow the inductive method an uninterrupted passage through the domain of the physical sciences. And face to face with problems no longer of inanimate nature but of conscious behaviour, the modern mind (for our present purpose essentially the product of inductive procedure) continues unchecked in the impetus of conquest. Infatuated by his discoveries, the scientist incontinently postulates faith in wholly unverified theses—enchanting his disciples with the vague and the transcendental.

Psychology is substituted for metaphysic. Empirical introspection is found a more amusing pursuit than the problems of ontology. Subjective verification is the vogue. To criticise the interrogation of consciousness (to identify introspection with the arrestation of the process under examination) is to return amidst contumely to the Middle Ages. Psychology in its turn is content to take its media axiomata from physiology. There is little resentment at the annexation of mind to matter: attention is unduly urged towards the physical antecedents of what were formerly know as moral states and actions. Nor does the specialist abstain from aggressive dogmatism on matters which lie wholly outside his legitimate province. We are fairly familiar with the physician turned Father Confessor, the journalist turned theologian, the tradesman turned economist. And the hopeless diffusiveness which is mistaken for universality goes hand-in-hand with a mania for unification.