Christianity has ever been faced with the challenge of that conception of life which we call humanism, originated and elaborated by the philosophy of the Greeks, It would be possible and interesting to trace the long history of the adventures of Christianity’s encounters with humanistic conceptions. It did not begin with the Renaissance, nor have the encounters been concerned solely with problems of aesthetic. Indeed, they call in question an attitude of life which concerns the very foundations of our intellectual life and our moral conduct.

What is to be the distinctively Christian attitude to humanism? Is there a Christian humanism, and if so what principles must govern it? These are questions which the science of theology alone can decide with competence and finality. With its aid, we shall here set out some of the more important principles which must be taken into account in any definition of authentic Christian humanism.

“May not Wisdom and the English people,” runs the closing sentence of Mr. Huntly Carter’s book, The New Spirit in the Cinema, “build a splendid Theatre-Cinema, temple to initiate all into a new philosophy and a new religion?”

This sentence, which is curiously symptomatic of the age in which we live, provides a useful starting point for a discussion of the cinema. For the cinema must not be regarded as an isolated phenomenon. It must be seen against the social background of our time and as the latest phase in the development of modem art.

There has been a pronounced tendency in recent critical theory to make art serve some purpose beyond itself, often to turn it into a substitute for religion. Instead of looking to religion to provide them with their philosophy, it is to art that educated people are more and more inclined to turn. It is poetry or the novel or, according to Mr. Carter, the cinema that will initiate us into that new philosophy and that new religion which remain significantly so vague and ill-defined.

For the origins of this attitude we must go back to the upheavals of the sixteenth century which destroyed European unity and divided culture into a vast number of tiny independent cells—some religious, others not—each basing its life on a different and usually contradictory philosophy.

No one should attempt to read what I shall write unless they understand a principle which alone could justify what may seem like a justification of Communism. I think I first realised the principle when discussing Henry VIII with Protestants whom Froude’s glorification of Henry had infected. The Froude-infected mind proclaims the great good that came of Henry’s policy; as if the increased fertility of the infant burial place at Bethlehem justified Herod in slaughtering the Innocents. On hearing this mode of arguing I did not refuse to grant, for the sake of argument, that some or even that much good had come of Henry’s thefts and murders; but I refused to grant that Henry’s policy was a good policy because good came of it; or even that Henry was either a great or good man because great good had come of his way of acting.

The abstract principle which Henry VIII’s legal thefts and murders made me see and accept was this: A man, a programme, a policy is not good merely because good comes of it; especially if the good that comes of it has come by the operation of a good-will. Just as there is nothing so good that a bad will cannot turn it to bad, so there is nothing so bad that a good will cannot turn to good.

With the admirable intention of giving the English public reliable and authentic information about present-day Germany and in the hope of thereby promoting friendlier relations between the two countries twenty-one prominent Germans have collaborated to produce a book called Germany Speaks. In many respects the work is well done. It is an attractive-looking book, lengthy without being too discursive, and generous in the amount of information about many aspects of German life and policy. Unfortunately it fails to give anything like an adequate account precisely of those questions which have caused the average Englishman to take up an attitude which is at best distrustful, at worst positively hostile, towards Germany.

The fundamental principles behind the Nazi system, labour, social and economic conditions and Germany's external relations are of interest chiefly to politicians and intellectuals and the average man is prepared to admit the truth and justice of much that appears under these headings. The problems which do need an explanation if the ordinary Englishman is to be won over to sympathetic understanding of Germany and which are omitted or scarcely touched on in this book may be reduced to four.

Relief of distress is one thing, endowment of destitution quite another. Naturally we give the cup of cold water—more probably of hot tea—to the vagrant men and women who ask for it at the door. Naturally the spare coat or shirt goes to the man in want of it. These benevolent acts we all perform, as we supply the match (always supposing we have one) to the casual smoker unprovided with the means of ignition. Which of us would berate the smoker for his carelessness, or require the filling up of a form to explain why he left his matches at home? The natural law enjoins relief of one’s neighbour.

Endowment of honourable and voluntary poverty— dowries and other provision for the sons and daughters of our Lady Poverty vowed to religion—this has been the practice of mankind in many lands long before the coming of Christianity. Plainly it is a matter unrelated to the endowment of destitution.

Nor again because we are bound to do our best for the poor who “are always with us,” the halt, lame and blind, the mentally and physically defective, the orphan, the aged and infirm, must we confound this entirely just and charitable provision with the endowment of persons unwillingly destitute and fully capable of earning their living.

The acceptance of destitution as the inevitable lot of thousands, a merely regrettable feature in our otherwise admirable civilisation, is the shameful thing to-day. Destitution accepted and tolerated by our elected rulers from every political party; accepted and tolerated by our Catholic legislators in Lords and Commons as unprotestingly as by non-Catholic. Only the question of “how much” the destitute shall be given to save them from starvation is hotly debated.

Most often perhaps we Christians picture Christ in glory, at the heart of the Trinity, surrounded by a multitude of the blessed. Yet His earthly life was of the utmost loneliness. The self-emptying of the Godhead, involved in the Incarnation, found its extreme in the desertion by God of His soul at that hour when it most desperately needed support. Alone He lived, and in the isolation and the horror of self-consciousness of the damned, voluntary victim of the pain of loss as of sense, He died.

His mystical body sometimes travels on its pilgrimage with more hardship than His physical body during the hidden years. But from the first we have had Him, and although reciprocally we too are His, yet while we have all to gain from Him, He has nothing from us. He has sought one to console Him and has not found any, since He could not. For the heroism of Jesus lies in the unicity of His act. It was not He who reclined His head on the breast of John.

Since we cannot repay Him, we Christians have become accustomed, with a cynical logic, to insult His divine heart by our cool, proprietary attitude to the love wherewith He continually engulfs us in the Eucharist. So for years on end of Church history we are content to misapprehend and grossly to underestimate the contemporary moment of the Redemption. God, all-knowing of what the act involved, decided the Incarnation, but not by some toss-coin, arbitrary choice of autocratic freedom, not to manifest His glory, as though the creation did not shriek and whisper that.