“If life must come to an end,” says Fritz Strich, “it is not in itself necessary; it is not bound to live. Out of the depths of this dolorous recognition and experience there arises that which alone makes the spirit to be spirit, and man, man: the will to something that is necessary in itself, that necessarily must perdure and never can terminate.”

“The will to something necessary”: echoes of the Schopenhauerian world as will and imagination? An eminently “Western” will; a will to action, to movement. A will to change, then? And yet a will to something unchangeable, necessary in itself, solidly static!

“Unquiet is the human heart, until it rests in Thee, O God,” confessed St. Augustine. He did not, in the first place, “will” God: before willing Him, He recognized that He was already, and that He is necessary in Himself—not only so, but that He is the only thing that is necessary in itself. Knowing God, he willed to rest in Him and thus to transcend the world of change and death, of becoming and ending, the world of samsâra, as Indian thought would express itself.

It is no new thing for attacks to be made upon the Public Schools, and although many of the arguments are, I believe, specious, there is a sufficient body of solid and well-considered criticism which should and must be fairly met, if schools of the older tradition are to survive; and I would like to try, in the short space available, briefly to take stock of the position and attempt to justify a system which many students of education believe to be obsolete. The angle of attack has, I think, shifted in recent times; the argument which was once very prevalent was the complaint that schools turn out all their boys to one pattern, individuality and originality being sacrificed in the process. Few people denied that the pattern was a good one, but it was felt by critics that any deviation from the set model was regarded with undue suspicion and dislike. This argument has lost some of its force to-day, because conditions have changed and public opinion in a school is far more lenient towards diversity of outlook and difference of taste; certainly it is not true now, and I much doubt if it ever was, that a boy interested in the fine arts, music or poetry is regarded as a curious or undesirable person. Possibly the very friendly relations which exist in most modem schools between master and boy may have helped in this change, if it is not presumptuous for masters to hope that they do have a humane and civilizing influence.

The work of the philosopher may be considered fundamentally from two points of view: as an activity directed to an object which is of its nature an end and pointing to nothing outside itself, or as concentrated upon an object to be regarded as a bonum utile, a means to be employed to some further purpose. Accordingly as either of these tendencies predominates will the mind receive, so to say, its determination and character, its philosophical habitus. For those who accept the first point of view philosophy will be an activity formally of the speculative intellect, essentially contemplative; for those who accept the second it will be an exercise of the practical intelligence, a work, in a sense, artistic and creative.

It will hardly be questioned that for St. Thomas Aquinas the object of the speculative intellect, truth (or being as known) can never be subjected to any kind of intellectual utilitarianism; for the contemplation of truth is the supreme end of man, an end which alone gives point and meaning to all subordinate activities, itself, in an ultimate and sublime sense, completely useless. Consistently then with this view, if the philosopher engages in the practical work of teaching, his task is not one of rendering the transcendental order acceptable to the tastes of his disciples, but of leading their minds to the contemplation of truth in its essential clarity by subtilizing and strengthening their native powers of apprehension; fortificando virtutem intellectivam; in this way he participates, in his own degree, in the angelic activity of “illumination”: illuminare nihil aliud est quam manifestationem cognitae veritatis alteri tradere (Summa Theol. I, cvi, i).

“Now it appears to me that almost any man may, like the spider, spin from his own inwards, his own airy citadel. The points of leaves and twigs on which the spider begins her work are few, and she fills the air with a beautiful circuiting. Man should be content with as few points to tip with the fine web of his soul, and weave a tapestry empyrean—full of symbols for his spiritual eye, of softness for his spiritual touch, of space for his wanderings, of distinctness for his luxury.” These words of a nineteenth century poet are the doctrine of a decadent scholasticism in creative art. Objectivity is passivity to a world that is only a function of oneself—“the innocent eye,” or else it is creation by the self. But beauty is not a measurement of an eye that first blinds itself to the object measured. It has to be conquered and found, and conquest means pain. It requires the effort of a body and soul caught up in life, in the commerce of the wind and the rain. The philosopher approaches truth by several routes, to do justice to its diversity and without prejudice to its unity: similarly the writer must approach beauty actively otherwise his view will be remote and partial. The Pre-Raphaelite aesthetes selected beautiful words from a dictionary and so composed their poems. The Georgians abandoned the dictionary for the countryside, and the late Georgian, Mr. Auden, abandons the countryside for the town. But objectivity requires only one abandonment, and that abandonment neither the nineteenth century nor the twentieth century can countenance: and that is the abandonment of the self. The work of art is not the visual tension, the interplay of convex and concave. It is plastic action.

The zeal which has come over some of us to develop Catholic Action in obedience to the Holy Father’s command is altogether admirable and it is unfortunate that there are still so many yet untouched by it. But there is a danger, which has already appeared in a mild degree, of this zeal developing into a mere passion for external works. The inner spirit which gives rise to Catholic Action gradually disappears and those who have not yet acquired the zeal are still less inclined to take part in the new apostolate. The excesses of the fervent and the criticism of the lukewarm are alike due to the error which consists in thinking that unless we are obviously doing something we are not participating in Catholic Action. To many of us Catholic Action still means principally public demonstrations, protests to members of Parliament, anti-Birth-Control agitation, accompanied by the painful futility of numerous committee meetings. Some of these external effects are indeed produced by Catholic Action, but they are quite secondary to the real movement, which is simply the overflowing of the inner life of the Catholic.

For Catholic Action is essentially Catholic Life, we are told by the Pope, who has done most to inaugurate this movement of modem times. “Catholic Action is justly identified with the Christian life,” said Pope Pius XI to the students of the Mexican Institute on May 29, 1934. It is the characteristic of life to give rise to external works, to common social activity, but these are not the essence of life, nor are they the essence of Catholic Action.

Venerable Robert Nutter, O.P.: Martyred at Lancaster, July 26, 1600, “a man of a strong body but of a stronger soul, who rather despised than conquered death, and went before his companion (Mr. Thwing) to the gallows with as much cheerfulness and joy, as if he had been going to a feast, to the astonishment of the spectators.” (Dr. Champney.)

In the year 1579, two brothers arrived at the Douai College (Rheims) to pursue their studies for the priesthood. Their names were Robert and John Nutter, of Burnley in Lancashire. After having been ordained priests, they both left France in the year 1582, in order to devote the remainder of their lives to the salvation of their fellow-countrymen in ‘England. John Nutter was shipwrecked off the coast of Suffolk and, being discovered, arrested on suspicion of being a priest. He was imprisoned for two years in the Marshalsea and finally suffered martyrdom at Tyburn on February 12, 1584. The other brother, Robert, appears to have landed on the Hampshire coasts for, on the report of a spy named Dodwell, he frequented the houses of the Hampshire gentry.

In those days a price was set upon the head of every seminary priest arriving upon these shores. Discovery meant death to the priest. Those who harboured the priests were liable to be charged as “abettors of treason.” A high place of honour should therefore be accorded to those gentry in Hampshire who received Father Robert Nutter in their homes.

Peter, a clergyman’s son, the only child of a late marriage, was born in ‘92. To his father's superlatively unstable career and change from place to place, he attributed not only his own tendency to gyrovagrancy—but the passion for nature, for the elemental, for width of vision, for adventure in human contingency that for him was character and fate. For the parsonages in which his childhood was spent looked in rapid turn on the watery business of the Mersey, the chimney stacks of Birmingham, the ivied fragments and vistaed landscape of Hazelcrom, on Yorkshire moors, and the expanse of tidal flood at Southampton. The Reverend Walter Michaelham, a rebel spirit clad picturesquely in Pauline pate and beard, with haggard, restless eyes, might in other circumstances have been an anarchist. But the temperamental egotism, irritibility, energy and heroic generosity that might (half a century later) have been enlisted by Socialism and Revolution found vent in a rebellious Evangelicanism. At Oxford as a young man, he was a fierce opponent of the Oxford movement, then for most a living memory. Evangelical reaction was gaining strength and the prospect of discrediting Tractarianism captured his imagination. Pusey a ghost from sad years appeared infrequently in the pulpit, amongst the rising generation, at least, a diminishing influence, a robed stooping figure, going to and fro the Cathedral, and little more. Wilberforce was in a weak way. Jowett professed Greek, Arnold poetry. With the latter many of the rising generation professed affinity. And there were those of exploratory and dialectic turn of mind to whom the legacy of Whately was a stronger appeal than the teaching of Keble or Pusey.