The fidelity and purity of the Anglican witness to the Gospel of Christ is a matter of utmost concern to all Christians. Least of all can an English Catholic, anxious for the temporal and eternal welfare of the people of his own race and nation, be indifferent to it. It is estimated that, at the present time, some 20,000,000 souls in Great Britain and some 11,000,000 in other parts of the world, are directly dependent upon the Anglican churches for whatever they know, or humanly speaking are likely to know, of the message of salvation. When it is further remembered that, in nearly all parts of the English-speaking world, the Anglican community enjoys a prestige as an authorised representative of organised Christianity far in excess of its numbers, and is to millions of non-Christians the most familiar spokesman of Christianity, the character of its doctrine is seen to be a matter of almost cosmic importance. Distortions of the purity of the Gospel message and of the integrity of the Catholic faith by Anglican divines are as unseemly material for the headlines of sensationalist journalism as they are for the jibes and gloatings of the nagging type of proseltyser. On the other hand, it should be to the apostolic-minded Catholic a subject for praise and thanksgiving when, notwithstanding four centuries of independence from the unity of the Catholica, the Anglican churches still bear witness in an apostate world to the elements of the faith once delivered to the saints.

If you were told of a large parish where Catholics never heard Mass, never assisted at Benediction, never knelt before the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, never held a rosary in their hands, never saw a crucifix on their walls, never crossed themselves with holy water—and this through no fault of their own but only because they had been overlooked and forgotten—you would not believe it. And yet such a parish exists: scattered among all the mental hospitals in England whose tragic sufferers—the most tragic sufferers of all—have forfeited with health, sanity and freedom almost the whole practice of their religion.

In the nature of things—if nature were to be allowed the last word—no one thinks more than can be helped about insanity. Your daughter at Cambridge has a breakdown from overwork: you minimize the episode to her, to yourself, to your acquaintances. Everyone is encouraged to forget all about it as soon as possible. Your old father becomes senile: you make him as comfortable as you can in appropriate surroundings, but you do not broadcast the calamity. Someone goes under altogether: husband, wife, parent or child becomes incurably insane. It is not, for the most part, the lazy, the half-hearted, the unintelligent. It is often, in these intimidating days, the young, the ardent, the generous. It is they who, thanks to our crazy educational system over-tax their minds while they are still growing. They whose careers depend on the reiterated strain of examinations—those statutory mile-stones of imaginary progress which have so little bearing on present interests or future needs.

German economic and sociological theory has always tended to follow a line of its own, away from the general Western European tendency. In the days when the English “classical” theory, incarnated in John Stuart Mill, had provided a lucid and logical complexus of interlocking “laws” for the whole of the economic activities of society, the German “Historical School,” in the person of Roscher, denied there was such a thing as economic theory at all, merely the study of actual economic facts. Against this theory (or lack of it), and against new-arisen Marxism, the “Austrian School” erected a powerful theoretical structure in defence of Capitalism. The Germans, curiously enough (in view of the industrial development of Germany), as opposed to the Austrians, always tended to react against Industrial Capitalism. Schmoller, who succeeded Roscher as the Archimandrite of the “Historical School,” preached the preservation of the handicrafts as the sole bulwark against “domination by the monied interests”; and this tradition was carried on by Max Weber (the inventor of the famous theory of the origin of Capitalism from Calvinism), and by Werner Sombart.

From 1558 to 1598 Cecil ruled in England, under Elizabeth the Queen, and all that time Philip II reigned over Spain and America. Philip kept both his country and his continent Catholic, and nearly all his European possession. That he lost Holland can be laid to the wiles of that extraordinary character William Cecil, whose continued opposition to Catholicism was a dominant factor in making England Protestant. Here is the man as seen by a modern writer: Never in the history of England has there appeared a man Cecil’s superior in astuteness. There was something satanic about the man; an hypocrisy almost unparalleled, frightening in its profundity. His duplicity can never have been surpassed by any ruler. With equal facility he deceived friend and foe. Even Philip and the wise Cardinal Pole were his victims, and his success with Elizabeth and his defeat of the Catholics is described in lengthy and masterly fashion by Walsh, famous as the author of “Isabella of Spain,” in his new and vast life of Philip II. There was one however whom he could not deceive, Mary the Catholic, so he let his cold heart feed on his hatred till that unfortunate woman passed to the grave. Vain it was for him to clack his rosary in the church at Wimbledon and in the streets of Stamford.

A Play whether moral or otherwise is a plot, an action in which one human force is pitted against another to culminate in victory or defeat. It is not a reality of human ambition, joy of suffering, but a figure, a picture, a statement of it, a thing made for presentation by actors to an audience. It is, therefore, conditioned by the language, knowledge and experience of those for whose delight or instruction it is performed. Not only each word and action but all costume, properties, lighting and scenery should be designed to develop or explain the plot. The author, the producer and the actor must know why a character is “garbed in black tights, dull red jersey and black cheese-cloth veil,” or in khaki and a steel helmet; why the Lighting plot is for “Red and blue Foots and Borders” at the rise of the curtain; and why a Castle of the World is made of silver blocks in the form of a triangle.

In an age like ours, when feeling predominates over thought, the title of this article will strike a very bizarre note. And yet the fact that joy can be experienced without the grosser exhilaration of the senses is a truth witnessed to by the saints in every age. The Kingdom of God in the soul is a foretaste of the joys of heaven, and if the separated soul can experience the beatific joy of gazing with unclouded vision on its God, then surely it will be able in some measure to exercise a royal independence for tasting the divine delights even in this life. Joy is an experience which normally causes the whole man to- vibrate, but although “cabin’d, cribb'd, confined” through its companionship with the body, there seems no adequate reason why the immaterial soul divinized by the indwelling of the Blessed Trinity should not be able at times to vibrate with a joy that is wholly spiritual. If the faculties of the soul shot through with the divine splendour could not occasionally breathe the more rarified atmosphere of the supernatural without the cacophony of the senses, its deeply embedded hopes of immortality would lose their tonic effect, and we should soon begin to wilt under the weight of our material surroundings.

The stammerings of the mystics point to an experience which escapes the power of rational analysis. They describe darkness in terms of light, and their growing contentment would seem to keep pace with an ever-deepening conviction of the incomprehensibility of God.

It is not without significance that in these days we no longer speak of the craft of building but rather of the “building trade.” As in most of the occupations of the working man there has been a revolution, so in building great changes have been made. It seems likely that the revolution in all branches of industry is ultimately traceable to a few common factors.

In this paper I do not wish to examine the morals of the industrial change as a whole, but rather to consider one small and apparently unimportant matter—what the use of concrete has meant to the human side of building. But. in passing, it is worthy of note that practically all these changes have one common result—they all deprive the workman of the exercise of his function as an artist. When something vital in the make up of man is treated as though it did not exist, the sociological consequences are nothing less than tragic. Unemployment over long periods results in something more than the lowering of material standards of living.

In the earliest architecture of which we know enough to consider it as a particular type—that of Egypt—is symbolised the social nature of the age which gave it birth. Most of the important factors in ancient Egyptian social life are reflected in the architectural remains from that time. Examination of a temple, for example, reveals an extraordinary area of construction, and this massivity of plan is repeated in elevation and perspective.

A Spiritual force incarnate and commingling with the material movement and flux of history. Beneath the phenomena a fact—the concreted result of a supreme revelation of the spiritual in space and time. That is the tremendous historic reality of the Religion of Jesus Christ. A hundred questions at once press forward to be uttered. This fact which the whole world recognizes, can it be defined, fixed, interpreted? Can the categories of the human mind enfold it adequately, or at all? What is the relation between defined doctrine and formulated thing, between the affirmation of faith and the reflection of theology, miracle and truth testified? What are our criteria and how are they to be applied to history? What is history for faith?

Less than a century ago there was a relatively limited number of answers. The human mind was comparatively insular—confined to its individual expressions in this man and that man and this and that class, country and creed. For protestant and papist, liberal and agnostic, there was a well-spread assortment of “cumulative” arguments. Each, being insulated, could afford to mix his own apologetic panacea (they still exist), and his position of stable equilibrium was chiefly determined by the ingredients he chose. Looked at from the angle of the isolated subject on his intellectual desert-island each position was curiously compelling.