Our first duty, now that war is upon us—and it will be increasingly our duty until the conflict is ended—must be to remind ourselves of what our attitude towards it should be as Christians. Morality is not Christian unless it is subsumed under religion; right action is determined primarily by our whole attitude to God; and in the context of war there is a Christian attitude of mind towards it in general as well as a detailed system of ethical principles. That attitude of mind should be our first concern now. In the litany of the saints we pray: From pestilence, famine and war, O Lord deliver us. War is set beside the other two scouiges with which God chastises the sins of the world. In the recognition of that fact, that war for the Christian is chastisement, lies the root of our attitude. For needless to say, the sin of which we shall think is not the sin of somebody else. It is easy, all too easy, to project the moral guilt on to our neighbour—in this case, those with whom we are at war. It is so easy that it is the first thing to guard against. It is not a question here of assigning the political responsibility. The drama of war is played on two planes, the temporal and the spiritual; on the one level we may as a nation be guilty or we may not; on the other, it would be the negation of all that Christianity teaches to regard ourselves as innocent. It is a platitude to say that the perhaps unspectacular sins of the Christian are more grievous than the spectacular sins of the pagan because they are a deeper injury to God’s love; but it is a platitude of Which we do well to remind ourselves. The first thing, then, is penitence: to desire, and work for, and pray for, a change of heart within ourselves.

In June, 1914, when he had been six years an active member of the Dominican community in London, Father Bede’s brethren elected him their Prior. He was unusually young for such an office—only thirty-three. To his other duties was now added the heavy responsibility of governing a community of religious men, priests and lay-brothers, and exercising authority and jurisdiction over them according to the Dominican Constitutions in all matters spiritual and temporal.

‘As you can guess,’ he wrote to a friend who had sent him congratulations, ‘it is all rather distasteful to me, so that I should be grateful for your prayers when you have any to let.’

Scarcely had he entered upon this new phase of his life when the European war broke out. England entered into it on the Feast of St. Dominic, August 4th.

He published in the Rosary Magazine a translation of the prayers pro pace, ordered by the Cardinal, and added:

‘All our thoughts are preoccupied with the war. Waking, it is perhaps our first thought, and sleeping our last. We have each of us friends and relations who have gone off to their ships or regiments to do battle for their country’s cause, and there are the far larger number of those who, at home, live the more difficult life of peace. Prayer, of course, must take a very large place in our energies. But we must add to that the activities of practice.’

In discussing the idealism of the Y.C.W. I am taking a great deal for granted. I am taking it as a proven fact that the conditions in which many of our young people to-day are forced to earn their daily bread are very often, if not usually, diametrically opposed to the ideals of the Christian Gospel. I am also taking it as an assumption that every real Christian will admit the necessity of some form of organized apostolate within the Church to cater for the Young Christian Worker in these anti-spiritual, anti-Christian conditions. Now the Y.C.W. movement claims to cater for this need and can claim a large measure of success in Belgium, France and elsewhere. I put forward here some brief outline of the ideals which have guided the founder of the Movement, Canon Cardijn, ideals which he has expressed many times, ideals which are their own recommendation.

We commence with two principles: the first, that all Young Christian Workers must be missionaries of their milieu, missionaries, that is, in their ordinary surroundings, in the ordinary atmosphere of the workshop, but, above all, missionaries who give a religious soul to every act of their life: and the second, that there is no external means of caring for the Young Worker at the present day. With regard to the first principle, note that I insist on the interior formation of the apostle, for the interior life is a source of activity of itself and in itself to which no other can be compared. Wc recall the words of the incomparable Bossuet: ‘Hands raised aloft in prayer smash more battalions than hands which strike.’ Yes, the inner life of the young apostle must be the branch filled with strong sap, of which his external works are but the flowers.

The writing of History is commonly advertised as a twofold labour: it is necessary not only to ascertain the facts but to interpret their meaning. The vocation of Karl Marx was scarcely less arduous; for, having established the principle of social evolution, there remained the labour of investing it with a positive content. This precisely was done by postulating an economic interpretation of History.

Sociologists and biologists to whom the whole of nature was the result of development from the simple to the complex (and all reality derived from the homogeneous distribution of matter) could scarcely pass the ball from one to another with more ease than that with which the cloak of Victorian morphology fell to the Sociologist.

Analysing those economic forces whose inter-play was according to him the cause of social behaviour, Karl Marx claimed to have found the key of history. Robert Owen and the Utopians, awaiting a swift transformation of Society without violence, fell by the way even as Utopians have fallen since. Owen’s New Moral World would not dawn. How could it? Evolution, said Marx, was a strictly Gontinouous process and since the operating forces were no longer occult there could be no surprise in store for society. This is all the best part of a century ago; but at no time, surely, has historico-political thought re-acted so obediently to the mood of evolutionists as to-day.

There are still those of us old enough to treasure recollection of history classes in which our media axiomata of all time (and for all time) was the triumph of Christianity over the paganism of the ancient world. Today in an ever increasing number of instances the cosmos-changing mission of Jesus Christ is presented to young students as merely an emphatic point in the cycle, classical, subclassical and Christian.

In a comparative study of modern French and English culture published in a recent number of the Spectator, Mr. D. R. Gillie commented on the ‘unnatural prolongation of the joint reign of Mr. H. G. Wells and Mr. Bernard Shaw over British reason.’ Whatever explanations may be offered—and Mr. Gillie himself attaches high importance to the success of the Group Movement, despised by the great majority of thinking people—there can surely be no doubting the substantial accuracy of the statement itself. If Mr. Shaw’s influence is more that of an individual and peculiar genius whose strength lies in the field of destructive criticism, Mr. Wells has managed to identify himself with the spirit and ethos of his age in a manner altogether remarkable. He is, as he proudly asserts in his latest work, The Fate of Homo Sapiens, ‘a fair sample of the more progressive thought of my time’ (p. 99), which, as he candidly confesses elsewhere, ‘no doubt owes much more than I realize to the phrases and assumptions of the liberal, protestant, progressive world of half a century ago’ (pp. 110-11). This new book is therefore of particular interest and importance in giving us the summarized thought of one who regards himself above all as a ‘sample of a generation.’

As one reader sees it, the strength of Mr. Wells’s thought seems to lie in three very positive qualities; its consistency, its clarity and, from one aspect, its rationalism. No one can ever mistake his meaning; it is always abundantly dear.

Throughout the fourteenth century the great Mongol Tartar Empire dominated Asia. Under its benevolent religious policy Christian missionaries were enabled to penetrate to districts never before reached by preachers of the Gospel. With the exception of some Augustinian Friars, working in Persia and Armenia in the latter years of the century, these missionaries were all members of the Preaching or Minor Friars. Hand in hand the two Orders faced hardship and martyrdom amid the snow-swept peaks of Armenia and the Caucasus, on the barren wastes of Turkestan and in the burning heat of India, in the union and brotherhood of their Saintly Founders.

The word of the Great Khan in Khanbaliq (Peking) was law from the shores of the Yellow Sea to the banks of the Vistula, and from the Himalayas to Siberia. South of the Himalayas, where the Mongol horsemen had not penetrated, lay the Moslem Sultanate of Delhi, whose rulers were of Turki race. They claimed dominion over the whole peninsula, but even after Alaud-din’s conquest of the Deccan in 1330, their effective sovereignty did not extend far beyond the modern Bombay. In the south, among the native rulers of the Malabar Coast, its acknowledgement was confined to the occasional appearance of some Moslem pirate levying toll for himself in the name of his Delhi master. Away beyond the foothills, in the interior of the country, even this ephemeral authority was wanting.