The truth of the crisis upon which England is entering is becoming clear to a growing number of people. In that fact lies the hope of her ultimate regeneration.

Let us summarize the position.

A little more than a century and a half ago, England —or rather her governing classes—plumped for industrialism. That is to say they deliberately set themselves to destroy what was then in the main a land of peasants, owning and cultivating their patches of land and sharing the advantages of the commons, and to convert it into a commercial unit based upon factories and overseas trade. The immediate pecuniary advantages to a limited, number of people were striking. We had a start of the world, and our expanding dominions provided us with an abundance of markets. The richness of the land itself in coal and iron ore accelerated the success of the experiment. The English developed a machine-sense and a money-mind, and the gradual disappearance of her agriculture was compensated for by the large profits made (by the controlling minority) from the sale of manufactured goods. Banks and a huge system of credit grew apace; for they were the life-blood of the new enterprise. The directness of local production of food and clothing for local consumption and use gave way to the dazzling indirectness of a network of exchanges, in which each mesh of the net gave opportunity to the manipulator to squeeze out his little bit of usury. We became the carrying and banking centre of the world.

In the minds of many the recent events in Spain must have raised an uneasy doubt as to the boasted Catholicity of that country. Crowds look on apathetically whilst a relatively small band of ruffians pillage and burn and desecrate those things most sacred to a Christian and a Catholic. For the outburst did not limit itself to a mere schoolboy prank, in undoubtedly bad taste, for the annoyance of the more militant elements of the clerical party; but from such beginnings it spread to an inexplicable fury against all Catholic beneficent institutions, and assumed in churches and chapels the proportions of classic and revolting sacrilege.

Can this, then, be a Catholic country, where such things are suffered without protest, where the people look on apathetically and see the benefactors of their children ejected and the most sacred Mysteries of their religion profaned? The answer, like most answers, requires a careful use of distinctions.

This ill-informed and totally inadequate scribe rushed in to translate Le Soulier de Satin almost before he had read it through. In his awe (of later date) at the magnitude of the task, he was much upborne by the encouragements of the illustrious author, and in the final revisions he had the precious aid of Monsieur and Madame Paul Petit, whose keen scrutiny eliminated many a slack rendering. To them also he is deeply indebted for a glimpse into the mental and spiritual history of the present ambassador of France at Washington. The said Ambassador has translated into French the Unknown Eros of Coventry Patmore.

Claudel began life—intellectual life—as an honest Monist. Possessed by this Calvinism of Philosophy, he realised vividly the interplay of all creatures and their reactions to one another. His high poetic instincts led him on to the mysticism of the mind, less vague and specifically graver than that of Shelley, and here the French genius was never more valuable. He brooded on the nature of things and discovered for himself an Hegelian mystery, that every single reality connotes its opposite : motion connotes rest, and a starting-place as well as a winning-post; reality connotes nothingness; and can it be that there is something which is motion and rest in one, and an All-in-all which can contemplate and contain and actuate the Nothingness? So one Christmas afternoon he discovered how the Infinite had fallen in love with and embraced our nothingness, made it His very own; and from that hour Claudel may be said to have lived anew.

James’s solitary horseman could walk his horse up to a signpost, and duly following the directions, come upon a village, The clang of hammer upon anvil would lead him to the forge, and the hanging sign of an inn would swing its invitation to him. Should he want squire or parson or cornchandler, there was the local inhabitant fearlessly walking his own village street to tell where they were to be found.

Perhaps it may be an idle and retrogressive sentiment that makes one regret the day when sign-board and signpost met the needs of commerce and transport. The motor and the general speeding up of life have changed all that, and it seems as if a stark ugliness is to be an unavoidable adjunct to life as it is rushed nowadays.

If we except the domain of the Soviets, where the schismatic church is in fetters, the small ancient dependencies of Portugal and France, the struggling missions in Japan, China, India, the Malayan States and Islands, Persia, and Asia Minor, nearly the whole of the vast and densely-populated Orient is still immersed in the darkness of error, still aloof from the Christian Faith. There is, however, one bright spot in this all-pervading gloom, one polity which can distinctly claim for itself the title of Christian, one centre in union with the Apostolic See which radiates the light of truth among the pagan nations surrounding it.

The Philippines, which are said to comprise more than seven thousand islands, though only some ten or twelve of these are of considerable size, possess more than eight million Catholics in a population of say ten million. The largest island, Luzon, about the size of Great Britain, is almost entirely Catholic and contains the famed harbour of Manila, capital of the islands and the seat of government. It was in March, 1521, that the Portuguese navigator Magellan on his way back from South America—he has given his name to the straits separating Tierra del Fuego from the rest of that Continent—disembarked at Mindanao, the second largest island of the archipelago, and caused the first Mass to be celebrated there on the 30th of the same month. He himself died on the following 27th of April in the island of Mactan. Forty years later Philip II, after whom the name Philippines, husband of Mary Tudor, decided to annex the islands to Spain and despatched a fleet which set sail from Mexico under the command of Miguel Lopez de Legazpi and arrived at Leyte, one of the islands, in the early spring of 1565.

How did our Catholic forefathers live in penal days? Was life an unceasing nightmare? Was every other man they met a Topcliff? After the death of Elizabeth it would seem that persecution went by fits and starts. The protracted negotiations for the Spanish marriage, from 1617 to 1623, meant a decided lull in active measures against recusants, though when those negotiations were broken off there was a recrudescence of brutality. It was the same after the ill-fated rebellion of 1715, and a milder outbreak recurred in the Lord George Gordon riots. But such happenings tell us little of the ordinary life of Catholics at the time when persecution was not active.

A great deal of material is at hand now in the publications of the Catholic Record Society, also in several volumes brought out by Mr. John Orlebar Payne. As we peruse these records many curious facts emerge. Apostasies were, of course, numerous. This was inevitable when life became more and more burdensome day by day. Still it is sad to read that whereas in the year 1750 the Catholic congregation at Upton in Berkshire totalled ninety-eight exclusive of the members of the principal family there—Perkins— ‘it is curious to notice how many of the families whose names are there given still exist in the neighbourhood, although there is not now a single Catholic among them.’ The sequestration of estates was hard to bear and there is pathos in the will of John Purcell, of the Hays in Shropshire, who in 1729 said : ‘My will and desire is that the penal statutes be never taken against my mother or any of my brothers and sisters except my brother-in-law Thomas Penson so long, that is, as they do not seek to secure more than the annuities allowed them.’