The title is that of one of Lord Acton’s Essays on Church and State (recently collected by Mr Douglas Woodruff and to be reviewed in a later issue of Blackfriars). What he wrote in The Rambler in 1859 might scarcely be expected to have an imperative meaning in the immensely changed circumstances of 1952, but Lord Acton’s prophetic quality of mind, his capacity to see beyond the immediately conditioning details of time and place, is remarkably revealed in this survey of the function of a Catholic review. His own difficulties as an editor are well known, and many of them belonged to the particular religious climate of his time. But his vindication of the absolute demands of truth is a reminder that the Faith can only be served by fidelity: fidelity to truth wherever it may be found, so that through its recognition the single Truth of all may be declared and served.

‘How often’, he writes, ‘has the eagerness and presumption which has based the defence of religion on proofs which later discoveries have exploded covered her with the appearance of ridicule! Those who are too impatient to wait till their wine is fermented are rewarded with a particularly nasty draught. Every branch of learning pursued for the sake of its own conclusions will result in the vindication of religion, and in the discomfiture of those who believe in their antagonism. The progress of knowledge is often more beneficial to the cause of religious truth than any professed apology.’

It is safe to say that the new conception of the University Apostolate, outlined in papal pronouncements and in the deliberations of Pax Romana, the international organisation for Catholic graduates and undergraduates of the universities of the world, constitutes one of the most important aspects of Catholic Action in our age. This article does not concern the Catholic Universities but solely those of the ancient secularised or the modem ‘red-brick’ variety which share the same fundamental problems. For they lack the integrity—to use Newman’s own expression—which the Church alone can give them. There is no need to diagnose the problem more fully than that, for in this age of introspection it is generally recognised. There is an ever-increasing concern, for example, over the dangers of specialisation. There is a general recognition of the fact that true university education is in danger of being lost in the pursuit of technicalism. The high-blown pride of secularisation has broken under it and there is a chastened search for the right solution.

The Church therefore has a tremendous opportunity in the middle years of this century, for her role is no longer a merely defensive one. As Cardinal Pizzardo said at Mariastein in 1949: ‘Pax Romana today can no longer limit itself—after the manner of old-fashioned Catholic Action—to protecting Catholic university people against the dangers of their environment; it must on the contrary develop in them a spirit of apostolate and conquest.’ The present Pope, speaking to the men of Italian Catholic Action in September 1947, said: ‘Not only defence but conquest. ... He who limits himself to being always on the defensive, slowly loses ground.. . . Do not isolate yourselves... . Imitate the Christians of the first centuries! Only thus, through ever-renewed action and penetration in the pagan world can the Church grow and make progress.’ And Cardinal Suhard, the late Archbishop of Paris, outlined this new approach in his now world-famous pastoral letters. It is summed up in those catch-phrases: the apostolate of ‘like to like’ and of ‘community to community’.

The members of a Committee of the British Medical Association, in giving evidence before the Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce, have recendy made proposals to add new grounds for divorce. The surprising thing is not the audacity of these marriage reformers, but their timidity. If it is true that the ancient Christian institution, in all its rigidity, is out of date and unworkable in the modern world, then the new circumstances should be studied and really sweeping changes made. The alarming increase in divorce makes it abundandy clear that all this tinkering with the ancient institution does not make it more workable, but less workable. And yet it is to preserve the institution that the changes are made. The committee say that they wish to stress the necessity for ‘permanent and stable partnerships in marriage’, and maintain ‘that the greatest possible number of sound family units is essential to the nation s health and wellbeing’, and would support ‘every effort to ensure that marriage as an institution is both stable and permanent’. Without wishing to call in question their sincerity, it must be pointed out that it can only be utter confusion of mind and blindness to the realities that can lead people, who value marriage for what it should be, to take steps that have produced, and will produce, results that are the exact opposite of their hopes. Marriage is indivisible. On no grounds whatever is there any sense or soundness in trying to make it more permanent and stable for some by making it less permanent and stable for others. They are only two views that have any prima facie case for consideration, and the ‘easier divorce’ policy is not one of them.

It is a feature of much contemporary philosophical writing that an amateur of the literature finds himself unable even to think he understands it because of the extent to which the writers draw on the technicalities of modem logic. Usually such a reader does not know where to turn for enlightenment, and very frequently on being given some references to introductory books he finds himself baffled by an austere and technical exposition of the very technicalities that he wishes to understand. These few pages contain some preliminary remarks addressed only to such investigators.

Formal logic is, and so far as it has remained true to itself, always has been, an exact science. The syllogism, we once heard a theologian remark, is not an essay in vers libre. There are indeed degrees of exactness. Aristotle, who founded the science so far as concerns its European development, laid it down as a principle that phrases equivalent in significance should be interchangeable, but what phrases these might be is left to be discovered from Iris usage and forms no part of his system. We find for instance the sentence ‘all medicine is science’ treated as a substitution in the scheme for a sentence ‘B belongs to all A’ it having been stated that ‘A’ is to be replaced by ‘medicine’ and ‘B’ by ‘science’. Correct substitution produces ‘science belongs to all medicine’, and we are left to infer that Aristotle deemed this equivalent to ‘all medicine is science’. Modem standards of exactness are more demanding. A modem logician would have stated the interchangeability of ‘B belongs to all A’ with ‘All A is B’, if he desired to have both modes of expression in his system.

The year 1950 marked the centenary of the publication by Forshall and Madden of their monumental edition of the Lollard Bible; and since then two works have appeared to remind us how many problems their edition and the scholarship which has been founded on it have failed to solve.

Professor Margaret Deanesly can claim special authority for her lecture, and our respectful attention, for it comes as an agreeable echo of her pronouncements, thirty years ago, in The Lollard Bible, upon almost every matter connected with this field of study. Her major work received Coulton’s imprimatur, and although it shows her, as do all her writings, as an impartial, generous and urbane figure, it served further to show that the facts were on Coulton’s side, in his vast and unedifying conflict with Gasquet, when he contended that St Thomas More, writing that he had seen English Bibles, ‘fair and old’, in the houses of his friends, who used them with the approval of the Church, could not possibly be referring to an orthodox, post-Wycliffite translation, because no such new translation was ever made.

In this recent lecture, Professor Deanesly presents the Lollard Bible to us not as Coulton saw it, as a great act of charity that Christ’s hungry might be fed, but rather as an instrument of Wycliffe’s policy, the grand design being the replacement of canon law by an English text of the Scriptures as the authority to which he might appeal. Wycliffe the Poor Preacher she regards as a romantic invention; and she shows us to him instead as an adroit and agile theologian, a trained controversialist, a don high in the esteem and secure in the protection of his university.

The ‘ordinary Christian’ who is attracted by the magnetism of the ‘mystics’ is baffled by a problem that is hard to solve from a scrutiny of the lives of some of these contemplative saints, either because, like the Fathers of the Desert, they are virtually unknown to us in any intimate sense, or because their natural personalities, before their supernatural development takes place, do not appear to have experienced the need out of which this problem arises. A Saint Rose of Lima, for example, or a Saint Mariana of Quito, seem, from the usual accounts of them at least, to have had that capacity for living in an almost vacuum, the incapacity for which on the part of most people constitutes the problem here in question. St John of the Cross preaches his nada, and the admiring but ordinary Christian feels that even supposing he had the courage to deny self so consistently, how in fact would he carry out the programme of annihilation short of, in fact, ascending to the top of a very tall column and quietly settling down to starve? A temperament really directed to love of creatures, however many ounces of ash are sprinkled upon the dish of spinach, will always leap forward to delight in the grey and green colour-scheme. Solitude can never be absolute, and the Romanus who brings the hermit his food will surely be rewarded with his love. Is it possible to examine the lives of any mystics in sufficient detail to discover whether there is a solution to this difficulty, and even one which the ordinary man may, in due proportion, make his own?

Marxism is undeniably the most powerful challenge to religion of our time, if not of all time. When we have estimated the enormous military might which Marxist governments and parties now have at their disposal, the vast material resources, the huge proportions of the earth’s surface, the teeming millions of human beings at their command, we have only begun to estimate its power. Indeed, if we think of these alone we have not so much as begun to assess its inner strength, and we are already on the way to be the victims of its own materialistic ideology. We have to understand the fascination which has enabled it to gather to itself even this material might. When all has been said of the brutality of its leaders, of secret police and labour camps, of denunciations and purges and liquidations, the fact must be faced that Marxist Communism inspires in millions a conviction, a faith and a hope, an enthusiasm and self-abnegation, a sense of release and of solidarity—which even the Pope, in his Christmas Allocution, contrasted with the bewildered disillusion of youth in the ‘free world’. Perhaps even more impressive than the devotion it can arouse in its party-line conformists, is the agony of genuine remorse it can produce (as Koesder and others have told us) in the renegades, the purged and the liquidated themselves.

Whence this power and fascination; Perhaps its greatest danger lies in the fact that it is so litde felt and understood by most of those who oppose it. Marxism is labelled materialistic; and we tend to dismiss it as some drab positivist theory which can see no further than solids, liquids and gases. This is not the time to expound, let alone to criticise, the intricacies of Dialectical Materialism.