Total war has clearly shown the interdependence of all European countries. It has taught us that a European country cannot save itself by geography, valour, or neutrality. If a few isolated European countries have been able during the war to maintain their existence by declaring themselves neutral it is solely due to the fact that Nazism and Fascism have lost the war before they had succeeded in accomplishing their final aims.

Great Britain, with her Empire and possessions scattered throughout the world, is closely bound up with the interests and aims of the non-European continents. But this does not alter the fact that this country and the Empire can no longer dissociate themselves from the fate of Europe and that an isolation policy—such as was advocated before the war by certain responsible political circles—has now become an inner impossibility. If any extra proof is needed it can be seen in the invasion of the Continent by the allied nations and in the use of the newly-invented technical weapons. These have proved how vital it is for Great Britain to prevent any potentially hostile power from using the ports of the Lower countries and France for an attack on her. Beyond that, we must reckon with the perfection of these weapons in future. Nobody can predict whether one day it will not be possible to send flying bombs from Central or even East Europe.

The task of reconstruction which faces the present generation is indeed overwhelming. It requires not only vast economic and political readjustments. It involves also the spiritual regeneration of Europe. To-day Europe is threatened far more seriously than was the Roman Empire by the barbarian invaders for the barbarian invaders could only destroy its body, its spirit proved indestructible. It was powerful enough to wean the conqueror from’ his barbarous ways, and to bring forth that flower of civilization in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. With its spirit the grandeur that was Rome lived on, shaping the Empire of Charlemagne, that high - minded attempt to express the spiritual unity of Europe in a political form, permeating the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, more a dream than a reality. In a thousand ways it moulded the thoughts of Europeans, a tower of strength, a pattern of virtue, an inspiration to action. It lived on in the Church.

Europe derives her strength and her mission from Christianity alone. But the European nations have recklessly squandered their Christian patrimony. They have allowed paganism to raise its head. They have succumbed to the spirit of materialism. They have drifted so far away from God and His Christ that the present age can justly be styled the post-Christian era. They are even now preparing to settle the world without recourse to its Creator, disregarding His laws, in a spirit diametrically opposed to that of His love.

At the beginning of this essay we noted that what a philosopher, reflecting on poetry, observes first of all is that it belongs to the sphere of Art or productive activity. Now the proper end of Art is not knowledge but production or ‘creation,’ not in the manner of physical nature, as radium produces helium or one living thing another, but in the free manner of the mind; it is intellectual productivity ad extra.

Of itself the intellect is expressive; it produces within itself its ‘mental words’ which, besides being the media through which it knows things, are also effects of its own spiritual plenitude, expressions or inward manifestations of the things it knows.

Further, this plenitude is a superabundance which tends of itself, naturally, to an external expression and manifestation, to a song. Not only does the mind’s vitality form words within, it tends also to overflow into works; and this with a natural need or desire which reaches out over the frontiers of intellect itself, and which therefore can only be realized with the aid of the will and the other appetites whose movement, whereby the intellect goes out from itself following a desire natural to itself, is initiated and nourished at its source by the intellect, in such a way that, following this start, they predetermine in a general way the primary tendency of the operative intellect in a poetic (in the aristotelian sense) or in a practical direction. Once this original determination has been given, the ‘poetic ‘activity develops along a line that is much more purely intellectual—the human will with its characteristic ends and purposes being far less involved—than is the line of moral activity (Ethics as a mode of the practical).

Translated into the terms of concrete human life and work, man’s answerableness in the divine image means free obedience to normative law. Such is the character of human obedience and the proximate definition of man's responsibility. All four of its terms are equally essential. Thus an unfree obedience, whether of ignorance or of force, is to that extent irresponsible, and a freedom which is not essentially qualified as obedience altogether lacks the condition of responsibility, for it is answerable to nothing. Again, an obedience, however free, which has nothing to do with law lacks an essential mark of human responsibility, namely order in and towards the common good. And although we may obey other laws, the character of the law that binds us precisely as responsible beings is to be normative. For a norm is the truth of things understood as a nature to be served and thus binds our will not arbitrarily but through our understanding.

We should recall, as Eric Gill was wont to recall ad nauseam, that man’s nature is twofold, bodily and spiritual (‘spirit and matter, both real and both good’) : that human life is the unity of these two elements which are resolved only by death and by false philosophy. But our death looks forward to the resurrection of our bodies. Thus our dependance upon the divine Image is also twofold. It shares the dependance of all created things upon their Exemplar as bodily creatures share it, being fashioned in a determinate scope of growth, of development and decay; and it obeys the laws of heaven as the grass of the field obeys them. But our dependance is also spiritual, of knowledge and of love.

The period during which the scientific attitude of mind was linked with materialism is past : in every field of study, physics, botany, astronomy, psychology, the foremost experts have reached the conclusion that the neat mechanism of a previous generation is no longer tenable. It takes time, of course, for these conclusions to become known; but the result is that the scientific mind no longer finds religion intolerable. On the contrary, religion is seen as a necessity : as something which is demanded by the very limitations of science itself. This has, of course, been the consistent assertion of the Christian Church ; but it would certainly be wrong to suppose that the change of attitude in an important part of the scientific world means that there is any kind of movement back to traditional religious beliefs. There is, indeed, a movement towards religion; but traditional Christianity is distinguished from other religions by all that is meant by the word ‘supernatural’ and ‘revealed’; and neither of these two words commends itself, it would seem, to the scientist. What actually seems to be taking place is an attempt to get behind religious formulations to something upon which those formulations depend : no need is felt for creeds and dogmas; religion is something individual, an attitude of mind, a response of the personality.