We have said that the Resurrection of the Body, being a revealed mystery is not provable by reason, but is acceptable only on authority. As a preface to ‘the Witness of Reason,’ we set down the principle of St. Thomas :

With these words of wisdom, which should not be forgotten, we now pass from the Witness of Scripture to the Witness of Reason to the Resurrection of the Body.

Religion and education have been inseparably involved ever since the Church was founded. Just as the two Cities and the two Citizenships are inextricable : and here their jurisdictions meet. The right to teach is part of the Church’s charter, everywhere claimed. In the last struggle between the Church and Paganism, there was a curious episode connected with education—the Julianic persecution.

Julian had never been a Catholic, and when he ceased to be an Arian he became an enthusiast for Paganism. He exhibits the same sort of anti-quarianism raised to a passion and an enthusiasm, as was often found in the Renaissance. Julian forbade any Christian to teach literature, on the ground that nobody should teach what he does not believe: ancient literature is full of heathen gods and goddesses : therefore Christianity must not teach it. The principle would have interesting modern applications . . .

Paganism became intellectually and morally bankrupt. The philosophy stripped off, nothing but a devil-worship was left, which obscurely lingered on in holes and corners, where doubtless they talked of their ‘grand old independence,’ &c. But the Church discovered a part of her mission hitherto unsuspected. It became evident when the forms of Roman Civilization were flooded with barbaric material; then the only life within those forms and the only civilizing power was the Church. While Pagans were still prating about the disloyalty of Catholics as the cause of the downfall, the Church was setting about a new task.

For the satisfaction of the needs of the body, and the nourishment of the physical life, four things are required : food, clothing, fuel, and shelter. By labour, and by labour alone, can these necessary things be obtained, and that labour must be applied to the earth, created by God and placed in subjection to the dominion of man. While ever the populations of the earth are in need of food, clothing, fuel and shelter, labour engaged on the production and distribution of these primary goods is fulfilling an economic purpose and is not wasteful.

Economic waste is either of a positive character, taking place when labour is organized for the destruction of human life and the necessities of human life; or it is a negative thing, seen when labour is engaged at tasks that do not minister to the health of man or is left totally unemployed.

Of positive waste the most obvious examples are war and the whole business of armaments and the manufacture of chemical agencies for the taking of life in war. (Yet even in the case of war it may be that the very real waste of labour is sometimes the only apparent means of stopping a greater and more disastrous waste. As the advance of a raging fire must be checked, and can only be checked by clearing an area —in itself a wasteful proceeding—to the end that the fire shall die down for lack of further fuel; as the progress of an epidemic may require the pulling down of dwelling-houses lest the ravages of plague and pestilence extend unhindered;

Our newspapers, which usually offer such scanty information about China, have lately been giving us intelligence of a civil war which has just broken out to add to the sorrows of that much-tried country. We read that the pro-Japanese, Chang-Tso-Lin, has moved south from Manchuria with his well-equipped troops, while the Nationalist, Wu-Pei-Fu, has gone north from the central provinces of Hupeh and Hunan, and that the rival armies have met and are fighting in the neighbourhood of Peking. Also we are told that the professional agitator and arch-plotter, Sun-Yat-Sen, has thrown in his lot with Chang-Tso-Lin, and is preparing to set his Cantonese army against the forces of Wu-Pei-Fu.

It is all very distressing, and not very intelligible to the uninitiated. A few years ago, Sun-Yat-Sen (then in Japan) issued a public letter advising his countrymen to put themselves under the protection of Japan. More recently he has been with his confederates in the south, professing to head a republic of his own, opposed to the Japanese influences dominant in the north. Yet now he returns to his former friends, and is ready to support Chang-Tso-Lin, supposed to be the tool of Dai Nippon. Why? We are not told, and the man in the street may justly be excused for his lack of interest in a country where the political moves are so confusing and so difficult to understand. For the voice of that great nation hardly reaches the West. The representatives of what is called the Chinese Government, men with semi-European names such as Alfred Sze or Wellington Koo,

Dr. Newman, in 1845, not ten years after he had left Oxford, came as a ‘poor English innocent’ to Catholic Ireland, Ireland broken after the famine, after the days of Davis, into the political generation of Sadlier and Keogh, the generation when the Irish language had begun quickly to melt away, when Ireland’s poor emigrants were rushing to success or to ruin in America; and the Irish at home were being brought up in ‘National’ Schools, where no history might be taught, and where every influence tended to take from a people right national pride. Yet this people had one unbroken bond with the past, its religion; though the chiefs thereof were bishops fundamentally opposed in their ideas, as to how the religious life of the Irish should be reorganized and prepared for England’s new equalizing political rights, putting Catholics into positions of public trust, infiltrating anglicization at all pores of the Irish body politic, attending to give the needed higher education by the hands of a Protestant power unready to satisfy the instincts, or to build upon the principles, of an old Catholic people, who desired perhaps they knew not what, but who were ready to follow their bishops, and were conscious of distress in the new glare of what was brought by the foreign schoolmastering, with its worship of material success, its unimaginative practical commonplace, its dreary official irreligion, and its ideals of cleanliness, order, industry, and commercialism, together with dull uniformity, and a British imperialism; the whole thing, ‘Philistine,’

It was a stock taunt at Ruskin twenty years ago, when he began to become unfashionable, that he was 1 a schoolmaster.’ In the sense that he was mainly concerned with the imposition of a divinely-inspired discipline on a perverse and unruly generation, this is undoubtedly true. The same may be said—at least in his later manifestations—of Mr. Shaw; with the devastating difference that his curriculum is avowedly of his own devising, and does not lay claim to any sanction whatever outside the author’s invariably upright but occasionally insensitive conscience. Bearing in mind these points of contact and cleavage, it is extraordinarily interesting to read in the speech delivered by Mr. Shaw at the Ruskin Centenary Exhibition, and now re-published as Ruskin's Politics, the younger teacher’s opinion of the older.

Mr. Shaw starts, as all good pedagogues do, by arguing from the seen to the unseen. He points out the portraits of Ruskin on the walls of the exhibition— the early Mozart-like medallion; the Herkomer, strongly resembling John Stuart Mill; the photographs taken at Coniston, where the head is a naturalist’s (Grant Allen’s, to be precise); and finally, Severn’s studies of the wonderful old man like ‘God as depicted in Blake’s Book of Job.’ Through these he traces the painter, music-lover, poet, rhetorician, economist and sociologist who ended (he says) by ‘developing sociology and economics into a religion, as all economics and sociology that are worth anything do finally develop.’

Now this is very much the same thing as saying that a sufficiently devoted mill-wheel finally develops into the mountain torrent that turns it.

There are books which, after all, are but books—as cinematograph films are but films. And who ever yearned to probe the heart of the film producer, though our pockets bulge with photographs of film stars? But there are also books which are almost primarily letters of introduction to their authors. Such, in England, are the slim volumes which immortalize Lionel Johnson : such, in France, are the novels—for so we must call them—of Joris Karl Huysmans.

His is a lonely soul. Perhaps the best summaries of it are the quotations his title-pages almost always bear emblazoned on them : for these are armigerous books, even those which do not flaunt St. Benedict’s Cross for their crest. Of the rest the keynote is perhaps furnished by the sentence of Blessed John Ruys-broeck which introduces A Reborns: 11 faut que je me rejouisse au-dessus de mon temps . . . quoique le monde ait horrem de ma foie, et que sa grossièreté ne sache pas ce que je veux dire. Ruysbroeck, writing them, knew the echo : to Huysmans it came later : Sed confidite, ego vici mundum.

Another of these blazonries tells us Catholics the raison d'etre of the man. It is the shield of La Cathédrale—perhaps the only epic which has made another epic its hero : Domine, dilexi decorem domus tuae et locum habitationis gloriae tuae . . . Ne perdas cum impiis, Deus, animam meam. And in this book most of all Huysmans shows us the way to live out of an age of which so many of us are weary.