I Began with the power of the Church to grow young suddenly, when she is expected to grow old slowly, and remarked that this power in a creed was one which I could only conceive as thus regularly recurrent under two conditions : first, that it was really true; and second, that the power in it was more than mortal. In the ultimate sense, these are undoubtedly the reasons for what is a revolution that really returns like the revolution of a wheel. But among the secondary and superficial causes of this rejuvenation may be specially noted, I fancy, the very fact of which religious reformers have so constantly complained; I mean the complexity of the creeds. There is a sense in which the Faith is the simplest of religions; but there is another sense in which it really is by far the most complicated. And what I am emphasising here is that, contrary to many modern notions, it owes its victory over modern minds to its complexity and not its simplicity. It owes its most recent revivals to the very fact that it is the one creed that is still not ashamed of being complicated.

The business of the Church in the world is twofold : to teach and to aid. She has to set out the divine truths, issue moral warnings, rebuke and exhort in season and out of season; further, she has the custody of those sacred signs which carry with them the grace of God, and through the communication of which the souls receiving them are enabled to carry out these divine precepts and exhortations. She teaches to the world about her the ideals of Christ, and she gives to the world the power of Christ whereby these ideals can be realised. In short, to use words which have become familiar to this generation, we can say that the Church has to perform the functions both of a priest and a prophet.

Now, if in view of these two functions we were to try to judge the Church of our own time in as detached a fashion as we could, we should probably agree that the priestly side of the Church’s office is being performed with a zeal and a response such as no other age of her history can have surpassed. To dogmatise on historical parallels between one age and another would be foolish, because impossible of verification or proof : yet the closest student of history would, I believe, be hard put to discover a period of Christian development when the sacramental system was so much frequented as it is to-day. Merely to consult any of the popular spiritual manuals of the last four centuries and to contrast them with those of to-day is to make one realise the enormous increase of sacramental devotion that has been made in these last years.

More than any other part of France, Brittany has a distinct existence apart from the rest. Its old Celtic language is still spoken habitually among the working people over a great part of its western departments, while in St. Malo, and further east still to the very borders of Normandy, Breton is still the native language of a considerable proportion of the older people, who as often as not are quite illiterate, although in the best sense of the word they are highly cultivated, with their inheritance of traditions that have their roots centuries behind the present day. Brittany includes only five in all out of the ninety more or less equal departments into which (including Alsace Lorraine) modern France is divided. But this small north-western corner is thickly populated, and while it is barely larger than one-twentieth of the whole of France, it contains all but one-tenth of the population. What is more important, Brittany is one of the very few districts in the country in which the population is actually increasing at a normal rate, thereby helping to reduce the steady shrinkage of the whole French population. It is the most conspicuous example of the obvious fact in modern French economics—so obvious that it is now openly, if reluctantly, admitted by the most anti-clerical newspapers—that it is only where the Catholic tradition has remained vital that large families are still to be found as a general rule.

Among the many shibboleths which satisfy the ‘practical men’ who utter them and exasperate the ‘visionaries’ who hanker after reality, not a few are connected with the land. ‘The stately homes of England,’ ‘the playing-fields of Eton,’ ‘our national sportsmanship,’ are examples. ‘England could never grow her own food’ is another. With those chiefly concerned it is axiomatic that fox-hunting and large estates have made England what she is! They have certainly contributed to do so, and the result is, of course, highly satisfactory to—the speaker. ‘We are at the present moment in Great Britain assisting at a third of these turning points in the history of generations, for we have just arrived at the time when only a few old people can still remember an England that was not urban, policed, and dependent upon mechanical and centralised communications. We have just entered upon the time when all living memory of the older agricultural England is passing away.’

The first National Catholic Congress in England was held at Norwich in 1912. It was a development of the ‘Conferences’ which had been organised by the Catholic Truth Society for many successive years, and it was announced that the Congress was to be an annual event. There was a Congress at Plymouth in 1913, and another at Cardiff on the eve of the Great War in 1914. Then the series was interrupted for years. When the fourth Congress met at Liverpool in 1920, there was some talk of its being followed by a fifth in the following year. Current report even said that Leeds had been definitely selected as the place of meeting. But for some reason the idea was abandoned. It is now announced that in the coming year there will be a Catholic Congress at Birmingham, the first of a new series, meeting, not annually, but every third year.

I was present at and took some part in the proceedings of two out of the four Congresses that have been already held During and after these gatherings I heard from not a few of my friends—both clerics and laymen—the criticism that these meetings did not give results of sufficient value in comparison with the expenditure of time, money and effort required for their organisation. It was argued that they were to a great extent something like oratorical field-days, in which there was a good deal of mutual self-congratulation, and very little opportunity for helpful debate on practical matters.

This device, now so nearly obsolete, has in the past been the vehicle of sound knowledge and impassioned thought; but a writer of to-day deliberately hampers his message in employing it. Is it that the construction is discredited through the heavy-handed use of it in pedagogy? It may well be that the union of the pupil’s apt observations and the instructor’s bland copiousness so impregnated the method with tedium that few dare again adventure it.

In tracing the history of Dialogue, we find two well-marked streams of development; one in the literature of knowledge and the other in the literature of emotion. It would not be reasonable to recognise its origin in that primitive stage when continuous narrative consisted only in the necessary descriptions, and the story was delivered from the mouths of the characters. We are often reminded of this in the vigorous telling of the Old Testament stories. In the book of Job is the most ancient form of the Dialogue easily accessible to us. There is a prose introduction and a prose conclusion, but the body of the poem is a series of dialogues. Undoubtedly the philosopher-poet utilised an existing epic narrative as the core of his discussion of the problem of evil; and in the dispute between the hero and the subordinate characters is developed a theory of life and conduct. With eastern subtlety, the final conclusion is suggested rather than explicitly stated.

Civilisation is in peril. Press and pulpit proclaim the fact. Politicians make its salvation their appeal to popular suffrage, and communists hail its fall as an unqualified blessing.

Of what nature is the menace to civilisation? Politicians call it Bolshevism, and communists call it the Class War. The politician and his party papers see the finger of Bolshevism in Ireland, in the German Reparations difficulty and in every industrial dispute at home and abroad. All labour members of Parliament, all trade unionists, all co-operators, all socialists are Bolshevists and, ipso facto, enemies of the existing order of society. With equal intolerance, communists regard all who compromise with society and its institutions as lacking in class-consciousness and enemies of the proletariat.