All English Catholics will be rejoiced that His Grace the Archbishop of Westminster is to be raised to the Cardinalate in the forthcoming Consistory; for it is something greater than a personal honour, since he is the representative of English Catholicism in the Universal Church.

The unity of the Church has never implied a barren uniformity among nations. It is one of the miracles of Catholic life that the acceptance of a common rule and of a single Faith has only emphasized national traits and diversity of cultures; grace has strengthened nature, not destroyed it. It is something some than a coincidence that in our own time Irish, Scottish and Welsh nationalism have all found leaders in the only vitally international society upon earth. While looking back through the past of which we are ourselves the heirs we come to realise it as a unity. Ullathorne, Milner, Challoner, St. Thomas More, all are linked not merely by a common purpose but by the means through which that purpose was achieved. Their lifeworks were only phases in a continuous tradition marked by an indomitable loyalty to the Holy See and an ineradicable Englishry. It would be naive to assert that our own tradition is necessarily better than others. It would be disloyal to forget that it is our own. It is right that we should rejoice when it is to be once more represented, and so fitly represented, in the Sacred College.

“God,” said Voltaire’s Quaker, “God, who has commanded us to love our enemies and to suffer without repining, would certainly not permit us to cross the seas, merely because murtherers, cloath'd in scarlet, and wearing caps two feet high, enlist citizens by a noise made with two little sticks on an ass’s skin extended.” The ass’s skin has largely given place to the broadcast bray and the journalistic bellow; the effect remains the same. And the central problem for the psychologist is surely this: that while war is all but universally agreed to be an unacceptable form of human activity (and the waverers now have China to help to convince them), nevertheless we are faced with the daily possibility of an outburst, and with the certainty that at a word from their politicians the people will flock to the standards and prepare to do themselves what they are now execrating the Japanese for doing. How does this come about? How is it that the politicians, on the one hand, find themselves apparently impotent to prevent war? Is it sheer malevolence and guile; is it due simply to a peculiarly low grade of general intelligence; or is it a case of psychological maladjustment, a distressing complaint, but curable? On the other hand, is the consent of the populace to be attributed simply to the wiles of press and political propaganda, or is is due to psychological factors in the subjects themselves.

On reading the quiet, always scholarly and often humorous pages of a veteran’s book on a difficult subject, it is hard to know whether it is the book or the writer that holds us most. The bibliography given in Pére Lagrange’s study of Orphism suggests the obvious remark that the lyre of the Thracian god—if he be a god and if he be a Thracian—still renders spell-bound but not dumb-founded a throng of living beings.

Needless to say this latest writer on the Thracian god has not given his time and scholarship to one of those pagan myths that were hardly more than premonitory symptoms of the present world-wide outbreak of fiction. Pére Lagrange has been by nature and choice so authentic a defender of the Ark that even in his lightest words he has been at least brushing off annoying and persistent flies.

In this remote matter of Orpheus and Orphism the assailants of the Ark are not a company of irregulars. Loisy, Reinach, Boulanger and others are worthy of Pére Lagrange’s best defence, and le beau sabreur, even in his old age, does not disappoint us. If we were allowed to summarize Pére Lagrange’s summary of his own view we would say: In Thrace, in Greece, in Crete, the (orphic) religion of Zagreus was mingled with the Egyptian cult of Osiris. About the seventh century before Christ this fusion of Zagreus and Osiris was further mixed with the cult of Dionysos which had come from Phrygia and Lydia to Greece through Thrace. If Dionysos (or Bacchus) was an element of joy and even intoxication, the Zagreus-Osiris blend was an element of fear and even of pessimism. Indeed the original Orphism, as distinct from its Dionysian element, was not the wine but the vinegar of life.

“I See so increasingly plainly the triple fault and undermining character of my influence ... If only I had looked out against the selfishness of leaning on one whom I ought to have propped still for many a day! I have dropped my own child, my first-born, whom God gave me to carry and to guard . . .”

These words occur in the poignant appeal which Baron von Hiigel addressed to his newly-found friend, Father George Tyrrell, S.J., in 1897. The Baron, lonely in his unique intellectual and spiritual greatness, hungry for companionship and understanding, had made his twenty-year-old daughter his confidant and the close sharer of his mental strife. In so doing he had wrecked her health and her faith, and he turned to Father Tyrrell to help her in her need. Tyrrell responded nobly and wisely, and wrote to von Hiigel:

Is intellectual work compatible with the religious life? According to St. Thomas Aquinas a life of contemplation and asceticism normally demands it. Intellectual activity is closely bound up with contemplation and the teaching apostolate. Study is not just idle curiosity; for it springs from a love of all truths included in the Supreme Truth, in the Being Whose essence is Truth: God. Love of God demands contemplation, and contemplation, in its turn, demands study. Whosoever loves God desires to know Him and to explore the secrets of His infinite perfection; and without study it is impossible to have a clear and intelligent faith. Again, if contemplation should express and complete itself in the mission to teach divine truth to others, a knowledge of religious doctrine, as complete as possible is obviously essential.

The Order of Friars Preachers has so thoroughly understood the importance of intellectual work that it regards the latter as a fundamental necessity and has placed it, alongside of the Divine Office, first in the hierarchy of means. It was St. Dominic’s wish that his sons should be sufficiently detached from primary material interests to apply themselves, without intermission, to study, prayer and preaching. The Order of Preachers was, in fact, the first religious group to make organised and collective study an essential part of the religious life. The Friars Preachers were students; and there has been no modification of this characteristic of theirs during the course of the centuries.

Though it is eminently true that there is but one way for all men through the tangled wilderness of human life, namely the way that has been opened and trodden by Him Who declared: I am, the Way, nevertheless there is a sense in which it is true to say that the ways of God are as diversified as the individuality of those who seek Him. All are Members of the Mystical Body of Christ, but the hierarchy of place and function within that Body comprehends, and indeed demands, a variety of state and action that covers all the needs and capacities of human nature. It is not a difference of way, but rather a difference of emphasis. In its essentials the Christian life and the Christian ideals are the same for all men—union with God through union with the God-man; but in its variety of emphasis the Christ-life which men are called to lead is a jewel of a myriad facets.

It is in this sense of emphasis, therefore, that we may speak of Dominican spirituality as the Way of Truth, without wishing to appropriate that quality exclusively to the Order of St. Dominic. The word Veritas, the distinctive motto of the Order, undoubtedly sums up the ideal which St. Dominic realized in his own life and set before the members of his Order as the essential means of their sanctification and of their apostolate. Into how great a tree this mustard seed can grow is made strikingly clear in a notable work of the late Père Joret, O.P., which has recently appeared in its English translation.

Speaking as one less wise in such matters, I should say that Mr. Epstein's object in the grotesqueness of his sculptured figures is twofold: first, to bring out, by deliberate over-emphasis, points that others might overlook; and secondly, to balance the inadequacy of his medium, stone.

The first point explains the exaggeration of feature in his figures. And how justifiable this is I was able to note upon seeing in the flesh the original of one of the busts, exhibited in the Leicester Galleries, standing alongside the bust itself. To look at the original immediately after seeing the reproduction was to see how much one had missed in the former —and what a great sculptor Mr. Epstein is.

The second object explains what one might call the brutality of his technique, the hard mathematical lines, the artificial disproportions, and the rough, clay-model surfacing. A sculptor’s problem is this: he has to produce out of stone upon the observer the same dynamic effect as a living personality produces. Stone with the lines of a human face is something much less than the lines of a human form in flesh and blood vitalized by a human personality. The deficit has to be made up. There are many ways of making it up. Mr. Epstein’s way is to change the lines or usual appearance so that the thing presented is calculated, by its very strangeness, to jolt the mind and encourage the recognition of underlying realities, or suggested realities.

It is now a year since the Wigan House of Hospitality started its work. In that time we have made many mistakes, and have learnt much. In this report we are attempting to give some idea of the work, the difficulties, the needs, and the spirit.

Houses of Hospitality, though bearing much resemblance to other expressions of the Church’s care to apply the Corporal Works of Mercy, are something peculiar to our times, and work in a way which, though modern, is nevertheless the essential Christian way.

The first House of Hospitality was opened in New York, and there are now several in various towns of the United States. In Canada there are several more under the name of Friendship Houses. This Wigan House is the first in England, and is inspired by the New York one.

The spirit is that of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew, Chapters v, vi, and vii). It is an attempt to accept the face meaning of the words of Christ and to have Faith in His promises.