It is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.’ (John II, 50.) You will remember that those words are attributed by the Fourth Gospel to Caiaphas, and that it tells us that ‘he spoke not of himself, but being the high priest for that year, he prophesied’. We are told that it was this official utterance of the High Priest that decided the authorities to put Jesus of Nazareth to death.

This remarkable fact is nowhere mentioned, so far as I can recall, in the twelve large volumes of Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Yet the pronouncement of Caiaphas might well have served as a motto for the whole work. Frazer, combining encyclopaedic knowledge with rare literary grace and dramatic effect, and with much of the excitement of a detective story, set out to solve a mystery—the mystery of a haggard, hunted ‘priest of the wood’ by the shores of Lake Nemi long ago, a priest who had plucked a golden bough, a priest who had murdered his predecessor, and who was now sleeplessly awaiting his own murderer and successor. And you remember how clue leads to clue as Frazer’s vast researches fan out into space and time, ransacking the annals of history, archaeology, the literature of all nations, comparative religion, anthropology, folklore. Slowly there emerges the hint of a worldwide pattern of belief and practice according to which it is expedient that one should die for the people that the whole nation perish not; that the slayer and the slain should alike be some embodiment of divinity, a divine king or priest or his son, or some representative or substitute or effigy, whose death and torment is somehow necessary if the life or power which he embodies, and on which the people depend, is to survive or revive.

Several times since I left the Communist Party nearly four years ago to become a Catholic, young priests have told me that they proposed engaging in argument or debate with members of the Communist Party. In every case they have been convinced that they had not only been given all the answers to the Marxists when they were in the seminary but, in addition, that those arguments were so devastating, so unanswerable, that any audience, any Communist even (if he were honest), would at once be obliged to accept them and to admit the intellectual defeat of Marxism. But it is not as easy as that, as a brief discussion of the lines they proposed to follow and an indication on my part of the answers which the Communists were likely to produce has usually soon demonstrated.

It is absolutely right that the young priest should be sent out with a knowledge of Marxism—for it is now, apart from anything else, the basis of all education from the elementary school to the university in nearly a quarter of the world today—and it is obviously necessary that he should be given entirely convincing answers at the time, or the consequence might well be that our seminaries would begin to produce members of the Communist Party instead of Catholic priests. But, when visiting seminaries, or talking to their younger products, I have sometimes felt that this outlining of the Marxist case followed by instruction in the pat answers to it is all a little too easy. First you put up a simplified, truncated version of Marxism and then provide the unanswerable answer. The result is a foregone conclusion. It is rather in the same category as those very popular but, I always feel, rather phoney ‘two pulpit’ performances where one priest puts up Marxism as an Aunt Sally and the other proceeds to knock it down.

For good or for ill there is every chance that the Labour Party will control the destiny of this country for perhaps fifty out of the next hundred years, and as it is a party that attracts strong support from a large proportion of the Catholics in this country it is important to think of the position of these Catholics within it. In the major industrial centres the majority of Catholics in the working class support Labour; indeed, it was once estimated in the columns of this review by Lord Pakenham that eighty per cent of the Catholic body voted Labour, and even if we agree that this figure is high, the percentage must still be very significant.

Unfortunately most of those Catholics with the ability to write and to project their ideas into the world of thought and of literature tend to be supporters of the Conservative Party, and they in no way represent the general opinion of the Catholic body. When one moves at what might be called the national level of Catholic action one finds that most of the leaders are also Conservative. No one can doubt the right of these writers or leaders to follow the politics they hold, nor can one doubt their ability to write and their ability to give time to the leadership of the Catholic body. They accomplish a magnificent job for the Catholic community, yet it is unfortunate that so one-sided an impression is given of the Catholic attitude towards our political parties.

M François Mauriac has left us in no doubt that in his view a work of art and a work of spiritual edification are two quite different things, rarely if ever combined within the pages of one book. The artist must conform to truth, that perception of truth which is peculiar to himself, and M. Mauriac implies that this truth will not, generally speaking, be edifying. In the ultimate analysis he has made the aesthetic truth which the artist must express dependent on the spiritual condition of the author, in so far as the spiritual elevation of the work is concerned. It is a matter, he has said, of purifying the source, the source from which the creatures of the imagination spring, if the artist is to produce work which testifies to the enduring strength of the spirit. Only a saint could write a novel free from taint, a novel in which sinfulness was not a dominant characteristic, provided of course that he possessed the necessary artistic genius, but the writing of works of fiction does not appear as a form of activity consonant with saintliness. The novelist, then, who is cursed with the gift of artistic creation, must go on perpetuating his sinfulness with all the aesthetic skill at his command until he has spiritually progressed to the point where he would cease to write novels. Such, if we are to believe M. Mauriac, would seem to be the unfortunate predicament in which the Christian writer finds himself, unfortunate, that is, if he does not achieve the saintliness that would end his artistic career.