Future ages when chronicling the canonization of Thomas More by Pope Pius XI, on the 19th May, 1935. may perhaps ask their contemporaries to account it a pivotal event in the history of mankind. First of all it is an event in the city of Rome, which some cartographers claim to be the geographical centre of the habitable earth. Moreover it is a solemn and irrevocable nomination to the Peerage of Mankind made by a spiritual sovereign whose native land and whose official metropolis are Italy and Rome. Lastly, it is the strange almost bewildering action of an Italian giving supreme ennoblement to an Englishman beheaded by an English king four hundred years ago.

To those of us who know that Rome is Rome and that Simon Bar-Jona is Peter, because Jesus, Son of Mary, is Son of God, the canonization of an English Lord Chancellor or of a French shepherd-lass or of a South American halfcaste is but the arrival of the expected. Rome either is or is prepared to be the nursing mother of all nations, i.e., of all groups of human beings welded into one by the seemingly opposite forces of authority and liberty. It is not a matter of surprise to us Catholics, therefore, that an Englishman of the English should be given world-wide honour and recognition by the same Italian-centred force which one day sent the Levantine, Augustine of Tarsus, to weld warring settlers into the religious, and incidentally into the political, unity called England.

If at times Alma Mater Ecclesia tried to meet her somewhat spendthrift outgoings by demands upon her children, no accountant would dare to show that she had demanded over-payment for her nursing and teaching cares.

Americans, as a result of regional divergencies, are often more remote in culture from each other than from England or even from the Continent. But the roots of our culture are Protestant and English and there is, moreover, a similarity of spiritual background and problem which unites American and English Catholics. We are confronted by the same religious apathy within the fold; we must combat the same ignorance from without. Americans are beginning to realize how different would have been the background and the atmosphere of our country had the French and Spanish continued to settle North America; not because these settlers were Latins, but because they were steeped in a culture engendered by the living tradition of the Latin Church. The friars in California, the French in the south and in Canada might have moulded a people to beauty, as M. Maritain says, and we would not be in our present dire need of traditional influences and customs which must become aged in wood or stone or generation. Ere they were forged, our links with a Catholic past were broken by the Yankee ascendancy. In England the surviving faithful few held the broken ends together. So it follows that the culture of the American is more bankrupt than the culture of the average Englishman. But we may take heart, for as Mgr. William J. Kerby told the students of the National Catholic Schoool of Social Service: “Our Catholic vision of life is wide and our countiy's need of that vision is profound. We bring the best in motive.“*

As the work of the lay apostolate swings into the mental orbit of the earnest American Catholic, there are certain high lights which illumine his vision, certain dim torches which would bum bravely if given the impetus.

Gale turned the luxurious pages of the tiny treatise with a sense of thrilled satisfaction. It was good to possess at last so capital a work as Cajetan’s De Nominum Analogia, competently, exhaustively edited, printed in the best Italian tradition on paper of fine texture. He did not at once begin to read but enjoyed the sense of possession and of authority. So slight in size the corner piece of a now authoritative library. As he rose to find a place for the book on his shelves, a place that must be at once adequate and inevitable, he saw that the light had gone out of the summer evening. He forgot his shelves, leaving the book on the arm of a chair.

The rain came suddenly with a crash of thunder and a simultaneous flicker of lightning. The wonder of storms. From the window he could barely see the railings of the park, so fierce the fall of the rain. Immediate the stride of the storm. Here thundering at the door with its guns of water, and as suddenly would be gone and the world changed in a moment's bombardment. Somewhere at the back of his mind an uneasiness Cajetan would not solve. Sustained violence, an unthinkable thing. Natural causes, his mind told him, workaday, but powerful, tremendous.

The crash and assault of the rain beat the evergreens before his window, tore petals from the few flowers. Window panes aswim with switchback scenery. An early light wept lucidly, pools of yellow in the window frames. A man was standing, coat caught up to the chin, in the inadequate shelter of the grandiose pillared porch, gusts of rain sweeping his legs like impetuous brooms. Gale watched him slantwise through the blear panes. Trousers sodden: would run water soon. He thought of the bell; Thompson his servant; unfriendly? No, he would go to the door himself.

To accept authority is natural to man. Authority is a kind of status given to those who have proved themselves competent to exercise it, usually a confirmation of authority acquired by practice, but it may be accorded to the incompetent, it may be bought with political honours, and all desire its benefits. The “educated” classes have probably the firmest hold on economic authority, parents pay out large sums for the education of their children expecting some return, hence the Government is obliged to maintain a large number of appointments to which no one who has not qualified through these educational channels has access. It is worth while investing some thousands of pounds in a college course if it secure your child in a good job at the end of it. Nevertheless the authority for which there is the greatest respect is that of talent and ability. The student is not only thinking of ultimate securities but preparing himself to serve his neighbours with medicine, legal advice, bread, boots, houses, lessons in astronomy, even to shrive, anoint and decently bury them. Most men hope to be producers of benefits or goods and not receivers only, they consider themselves fortunate when they have a natural love of the work to be done and unhappy when insensitive of any particular affinity with it.

Hence, in the order of authority which goes with merit, there are two classes: those who work for the work’s sake and those who labour only for a reward outside the work.

It is with the first class with which I am here concerned. Where there is love of the work there is an intuitive power denied to those who acquire proficiency merely by the exercise of the will.

As articles and comments in Blackfrlars have testified from time to time, Catholic opinion has in some ways become considerably divided. Nevertheless, it seems true to say that there is but one fundamental divergence, of which various controversies are the manifestations. We can group them under three convenient heads: Contemplation v. Activity; Retreat v. Penetration; Authority v. Lay Initiative and Freedom.

We suggest that these difficulties might never have arisen or might more easily be solved, if Catholics were to consider in the first place the practical nature of Truth. It is possible to discover a direction for right action even before considering the circumstances of the particular problem. It seems clear, from historical examination, that in nine cases out of ten an outright opinion or answer cannot be other than suspect. The practical characteristics of Truth are detachment, balance, and synthesis, together with a certain bias towards one aspect. Thus, the Church combines in herself the ideas both of authority and liberty, but with a bias towards authority as the basis and preserver of freedom. This description of the practical nature of Truth is validated in the Orders of Nature and Art. The river is stemmed and its vital movement formed by its banks. In Music, as enclosing the sweep and swing of emotional play, we have the bar and the sonata-form. If, beside the idea of Authority, we place the analogues of Form, Institution, Dogma, and beside the idea of Freedom the analogues of Spirit, Vitality, Creativeness, we can see how Order depends on the latter being conserved and made effective by the former. It is the rules which give zest and meaning to the game. Order is Truth.

Tucked away, among a million other books, there is in the British Museum Library a handsome small volume which must have had quite an eventful history of its own before it reached its present peaceful seclusion, but which must, nevertheless, be wishing that its purport and contents were better known, especially in these days when so much has been said and written on account of the twelfth centenary of the death of Saint Bede the Venerable. Not that there is any secret as to its existence. For many years this particular volume has been there, duly catalogued, for all to find who might chance that way. Yet so few people, apparently, are aware of it, that it seems worth while not only to draw attention to it but to its author and subject besides.

The fly-leaf alone is worthy of notice. It is covered with bold writing in several hands, which in themselves betray a little of the romance that can follow a humble book. These inscriptions read thus:

And the third, which supersedes both the others, apparently, is quainter still:

These three inscriptions leave no doubt about it, that this book did indeed belong at one time to the Dominican Nuns at Brussels, and, from the style of handwriting, it seems at a date soon after its publication, in 1650-1658.