It is only right and proper in a world which seems to be going rapidly more and more insane that good Christians should make every effort to sound the recall to Reason. It is only our bare duty to reaffirm the elements and applications of the natural law in a world which seems to be becoming more and more insensible to the natural law. For this reason, it is impossible to over-estimate the debt we owe to those Catholic thinkers who have made it their task in recent years to re-state the natural ethics of war and peace and to apply it to modern conditions of international relationships and methods of warfare. It is salutary that the philosophia perennis of ends and means should be reasserted and applied realistically to new sets of facts such as aerial bombardment and bacteriological warfare, to the impending realities of war waged by the sovereign State conditioned by the exigencies of imperialistic capitalist economy.

Yet we shall be mistaken if, having done all these things, we imagine that we have done anything specifically Christian. We are perhaps too ready to call a Christian doctrine of war what are in fact only dictates of the natural reason. Grace does not destroy Nature; Revelation is not contrary to Reason. But the fact remains that we cannot give a distinctively Christian witness to the events in the world around us in terms solely of natural reason and natural law. Nor can I answer the burning question, ‘What am I as a Christian to do in the event of war?’ solely in terms of a natural ethic, however rigorous.

One of the most terrifying of contemporary phenomena is the emergence of virulent anti-semitism, not in Germany or in Italy, not under this or that political regime, but within the Church. It is terrifying; because it means that the devil is active in the Church in a way for which there is perhaps no previous parallel. Evil has always been active in the Church; but it has taken the form of lust, avarice, ambition, pride. This is something far worse. The essence of Christianity is love, and understanding based on love. The essence of ideological anti-semitism is hatred, and stupidity based on hatred. One was shown recently some leaflets written, according to their own testimony, by a Catholic, and urging Catholics to unite against the Jews and their threat of world domination. They made painful reading because of their extraordinary vulgarity. But they were terrifying because of the sheer violence of hatred they revealed. One felt that one was looking at the naked face of evil. Suppose that the author of these leaflets were right in his contention that world Jewry is plotting to dominate the world, to destroy Christendom; there could still be no excuse for tearing the Christian faith to shreds in a way that no outside force, Jewish or otherwise, could ever begin to do. To disseminate this poison in the name of Christ is a betrayal that is only possible to a Christian. But in face of such a betrayal, all calamities to the Church from without are negligible.

The rather long quotation with which this paper opens comes from the pen of a man whose life has been spent in the harassing work, of administration in the near East during the troubled years that followed the last war. The point I wish to fasten on is this: in the thorny and arid task of trying to reconcile Arab and Zionist claims in Palestine he turned again and again for solace to literature, music and architecture. For him, as for so many of us, Science, the achievement of man to-day, can bring some measure of bodily comfort, but no comfort of spirit; and I am afraid, in moments of depression, it may occasion a feeling of acute fear, for the part it seems destined to play in the destruction of our civilization.

If criticism, like charity, begins at home, both virtues are probably served best by examining not the manifest faults, but the hidden ones. If Britain’s official position to-day is that a lead was given to the world and not followed, and that rearmament is a justified and overdue result, it is important to be sure whether or not such is the historical truth. If it is, then the new British policy of 1939 can command the resolute and unreserved support of everyone except a complete pacifist. But if it is not, then the new policy is unsound for lack of a moral certitude, and has none of the easy convenience of unavoidability. And the matter can only be clarified by examining British policy in two ways—our record at key-points, and our greatest post-war achievements as judged by ourselves.

The first key-point occurred very early: in 1919. During the Peace Conference, Britain and the United States had agreed jointly (on June 28th) to strengthen the League system by guaranteeing the territorial integrity of France, backed by force. When the United States Government rejected the Covenant and withdrew from the guarantee, the British Government withdrew also, feeling unable to guarantee the frontiers of France single-handed. But, six years later, we did give precisely such a guarantee, in the Treaty of Locarno. And there is real tragedy in the sequence of events. For, in virtue of the principle that a guarantor can influence the party guaranteed, we have been able since Locarno to influence and to moderate French policy. Had we given the guarantee in 1919 we should have had that power from the start.

To the Editor of Blackfriars.

Sir,—I must resolutely disregard the red herrings drawn across my path by the correspondents who give such a sinister reading of my notice of Roy Campbell’s Flowering Rifle. I criticised the book only on literary grounds, and mentioned that works like Auden’s Spain and Spender’s Vienna were also poor art because of their excessive political preoccupations; and because I reject inferior Leftist art along with Rightist work, I apparently suggest that the Rightist writer is Leftist. A re

markable piece of reasoning to come from a great theological college.

It is precisely on literary grounds that the critics neglect to base their criticism. The book is lyrical invective at best, and in trying to make an epic of it, the poet has executed a mechanical exercise, which oftenest sounds like a brass band at its brassiest repeating ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ ad nauseam. The language of the less prosy parts is worn-out ‘poetical’ currency like ‘golden,’ ‘scarlet,’ ‘silver,’ ‘storm-red,’ while often the faded literary metaphors of ‘rhyme,’ etc., are used to jolt the poem into life. The author himself says the poem is not meant to emulate people like Claudel, and we can easily agree when we read such bathos as :

—the capitals being used to galvanise the cliche into some shadow of life. But above all, the epic lacks the structure of an epic, and is largely a broken record of literary quarrels.