Whether we date the beginning of the English Labour Movement from the years when the famous “Junta” of trade union secretaries consolidated the societies of skilled workmen in the mid-Victorian period, trace its origins to fiercely democratic Chartism, or earlier still to Robert Owen's “socialism” and the national trades-union of a “New Moral World,” the Labour Movement as we know it to-day in Great Britain is really but little more than fifty years old—its course steadily, at first almost imperceptibly, directed to a co-operative commonwealth.

Two notes in the character of this movement have always puzzled and often shocked the leaders of continental trade unionism. Our British trade unions never require profession of political faith from their members; neither do they encourage hostility to the Christian religion. They seek neither to overturn the state nor intrude the dogma of atheism. This indifference to the “materialist conception of history”, and all the rest of it as revealed to Karl Marx, perplexed and distressed the German labour leaders in the years before the War. The Marxian “class-conscious proletariate” should quite definitely affirm its aloofness from Christianity the Germans maintained. French leaders of labour, Catholic and secularist alike, shrugged their shoulders at les Anglais, with their Catholics and Protestants, agnostics and freethinkers, all mixed up in the same trade unions.

In considering first the Second Part of the Report on Doctrine in the Church of England, we have deliberately postponed consideration of those sections which have aroused most discussion and which would seem to indicate trends and tendencies very different from those in the section on The Church and Sacraments. Before trying to form an estimate of the significance of the whole from the standpoint of those concerned with the fidelity of the Christian witness and with the prospects of Christian unity, we may, without attempting a full analysis, draw attention to some salient points raised in these other sections.

The first of the three main divisions of the Report covers The Doctrines of God and of Redemption. Herein the doctrine of the Triune God is confined within a page and a half, not of dogmatic or theological exposition, but of pure history of dogma. The question What do we mean by the word “God”? is answered exclusively in terms of purely natural theology without reference to Revelation; but it is found subsequently that the “Biblical conception [of the ‘Living God’] is greatly to be preferred,” for purely pragmatic reasons, to “the leading conceptions entertained by Greek philosophers and Indian sages.”

In a recent essay on education in a Catholic review, the writer was concerned to show how “vocational education” (i.e., school training in manual work for particular occupations) might be accompanied by “cultural and religious” training so that pupils should have the advantages of all three. He was anxious that clerical attainments should not make for contempt of manual work, but thought that all would be well if teachers would “blend but not confuse” in those whom they taught the “three streams of education, the religious, the cultural and the economic.” So taught (he concluded hopefully) “the individual will be content to earn his living at the job, whatever it may be, that he is best fitted to perform.”

The writer was a man of great experience in education, but it is to be regretted that words like “culture” and “vocation” should have been used without apology as they are used by secular sentimental thought; that almost no reference should have been made to Christian principles and tradition; and that any idea of integration should, seemingly, have been dismissed from the writer’s mind. Doubtless he thought some truths too plain to need repeating; I differ, and shall repeat them here.

We hold as Catholics that the truths of our faith should be the basis and life-giving principle of our ideas and judgements and actions in every department of our lives, and that nothing should be excluded from the all-inclusive influence of that principle. I had not been teaching very long before I began to be conscious that, as in the life of ordinary Catholics in the world, so in school life, there were often two distinct areas. One area was an explicitly Catholic area, in which Christian standards were fully realized and fully applied; but there was another area, and in school this was chiefly covered by what are termed the secular studies, where Christian standards were not indeed denied, but either not applied at all or only applied occasionally at certain isolated points where their non-application would have been glaringly apparent. At other less prominent points our standards of judgment were not really Christian at all, but those of the world around us. In other words, we were not living the Christian life integrally; the principles of the faith were not penetrating into and informing every idea and judgement in every department of our lives; and in consequence we were producing characters, forming personalities, that were all-unconsciously divided in allegiance, in the service of two masters, ruled in part by Christian principles, but in part either without definite standards of any kind or ruled by standards that were not Christ’s and that in the last analysis were quite irreconciliable with Christ’s law.

The life of the spirit is the life of freedom, the life that responds to nature’s charms, to her colour, her cadences, her music: the poetry that sums these up and calls them evanescent and calls them also beauty. Spirit is not created art. Spirit is the poised brush; it is gazing; it is listening. Spirit is sensitivity that asks not why nor whether, that simply enjoys and through enjoyment may give rise to creativity.

What is the Imagination? That it is a very important thing, or an essential human faculty, we can all agree; but after that the trouble begins. And, as generally happens, those who have spoken of it with most seriousness and authority are the hardest to understand. “Imagination is the Human existence itself,” said Blake, who had plenty of of it. It is “the esemplastic power”—that is, the power of shaping diversity into unity—said Coleridge. “It may be compared to Adam’s dream.” A. C. Bradley, elucidating this, yet speaking with his own authority, said: “Wherever the imagination is satisfied, there, if we had a knowledge we had not, we should discover no idle fancy, but an image of a truth. “ That brings us back to Blake again, in his dictum: “Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.”

The people who are restrained in their communism by a tug from their tradition of culture form a considerable body of opinion in this country. Their state of mind is hinted at in the title of the periodical they patronize, for the New Statesman incorporates the Athenaeum, and the Week-End Review into the bargain. Catholic publishing has entered popular journalism and has also admirably engaged the Tory temper; it has not yet succeeded in addressing itself to this Liberal-Marxist sentiment, though at one time the Catholic Herald promised fair to do so. Accordingly the book Mrs. Mitchison has written to clear her own mind, should be of more than biographical interest. Her object is to bring some kind of order into the modem economic and political scene. She advances in Indian file, from question to question, or rather from questioning to questioning, sensitive to the rustle in the undergrowth, and not by deployment from massed and established premisses. To reduce this Socratic method to scholasticism reminds one of the general from home who tried to make the Virginians fight according to the drill-books. Still, they both wanted the Ohio Fork, and it may be profitable to indicate here some strategic positions held in common by St. Thomas and the symbolic Mrs. Mitchison.