The knowledge that Christ was both God and man must be the central fact in the life of every Christian. Because He was a man, He has given an example for us to follow; because He was God, He has given us the strength to follow His example, and for every Christian the central lesson to be learnt from Christ is to love, to give and to endure.

Looking back over two thousand years, the details of Christ’s life on earth can seem very far away. The setting can seem so very different from anything that we have known; the barren, stony hillsides of Judea, the crowded market places, the small white flat-roofed houses, the groups of orientals moving slowly along the dusty roads. Yet so many of the details are commonplace enough. The birth in poverty, the childhood in a poor household, the years as a workman, and then apparent success, apparent failure, death. All that could have happened, all that has happened, in any country, and in any time. The setting alters, but the rhythm of human life and the problems of human choice remain the same. Everything that is fundamental, the capacity of loving, the power of giving, the will to be alive, joy and agony and death, remain unaltered since Christ lived at Nazareth. Yet if only we could see it, they are no longer the same as they were before the Word took flesh and dwelt amongst us. The life that we know, and the death that we know, confronted Christ. He was man as well as God. He lived and died.

The Incarnation may be said to have for Its object the drawing of men from misery to happiness. Being the act of God It is the greatest of all rhetorical acts and therefore the greatest of all works of art. And as from the fatherhood of God all paternity is named in heaven and earth, so from His creative power all art is named. In the Incarnation we do not only know a fact of history or a truth of religion; we behold a work of art, a thing made. As a fact of history It is the most interesting and illuminating of all historical happenings. As a truth of religion It is of primary and fundamental importance. But It is as a work of art that It has a saving power, power to persuade, power to heal, power to rescue, power to redeem.

But the word ‘art,’ in spite of the obsequious worship which the modern world gives to the works of painters and sculptors and musicians, is not a holy word in these days. Art, the word, which primarily means skill and thus human skill and thus human skill in doing and making, has, in literary circles and among the upper classes, come to mean only the fine arts, and the fine arts have ceased to be rhetorical and are now exclusively aesthetic; they aim only to give pleasure.

If there is one temptation more strong than any other in this time of falling bombs and unbelievable cruelties it is to despair of man. As in the time of Tacitus we have entered upon ‘a time rich in disasters, gloomy with wars, rent with seditions and savage in its very hour of peace.’ Purges within the states, wars between the states, cities flaming to heaven, women and children buried beneath the ruins, death raining from the sky, a new and brutal generation of scientific killers riding down fleeing refugees in their tanks or spraying machine-gun bullets on defenceless streets, on children at play—the list is endless. And this is human society. These are men. What can we hope from such corruption? Even if we survive the war, what can be built upon a generation whose nerves have been shattered by constant bombing and whose characters are maimed by the orgy of killing in which they have grown up? Even where bodies are intact, what can be hoped from these twisted souls? It is an obvious reaction to abandon all interest in the future of human society, to concentrate on the otherness of the spirit, the transcendance of God, the nothingness of creation, to adopt an apocalyptic attitude towards the present struggle.

History in a general sense is concerned with past human events. But it does not consider them simply as bare facts succeeding each other in the unrolling of time; it gathers them together as vital parts of a variegated and complex unity and deals not merely with the subject matter of these events, but with their cause and effect, by which they are welded into a whole. The historian, who is both scientist and artist, must gather the seemingly chaotic and accidental succession of events into a synthesis. Knowledge must always ultimately unite; and it is in this process of unification that the Catholic historian is bound to differ from any other kind of historian.

The past events with which the historian is dealing are human events, not the eruptions and radiations of the mineral world, not the burgeonings and seeding of the vegetable world, not the fights and amours of the animal kingdom, but the successive actions of MAN. Man is the subject of this science and so it is in man that we may find the guiding principles of historical unity. Certainly we are not here concerned immediately with the nature of man. That is the field of psychology which considers man according to his constitution with his intellect and his will. Nevertheless, the historian depends essentially upon rational psychology to describe to him the nature of man, as well as upon revelation itself to give a concrete view of that nature. The silversmith must understand the nature of the metal he proposes to work.

It needed a choir of angels to explain to some Jewish shepherds that the Babe in yonder manger was Christ the Lord: it needed a special star to show three Gentile sages the swaddling clothes of Holy Wisdom. Without such startling messengers men might not have noticed Salvation as it lay at their feet.

It has needed a world war and the destruction, enslavement, maiming of countless millions to make men conscious of a religion which has not for one moment been kept a secret. ‘Mein Kampf’ has been translated into almost every language of the world: and the deeds and words of Hitler are its faithful confirmation. Do we now understand the ‘why’ which conjured up the Nazi djinn, the ‘why’ which gives it more than human power, the ‘why’ which gives us the key to its destruction? Do we now understand that Nazism is simply the conscious parody of Christianity?