It has been suggested by writers of note that the next few decades will see an advance in the social sciences comparable to the advance which has already been made in our knowledge of the material sciences. In spite of the more pessimistic view, that prejudice and class interests must necessarily render a sane solution of our social problems impossible, there is a general tendency towards a co-ordination of the work of social scientists, and from the chaos of extravagant theories certain general principles are slowly but surely gaining acceptance by the majority of students in the fields of psychology, sociology, and economics.

Nowhere is this tendency more apparent than in social anthropology, the science which studies the social structure of primitive societies with a view to understanding the motives which actuate human beings reared in an environment totally different from our own. These studies are proving of great value in the solution of social problems, and the savage, instead of being dragged in as an afterthought to justify preconceived theories, is being studied for his own sake, and the results applied to more advanced societies.

The late German revolution gives opportunity to enlarge on the present situation of Central Europe. The fall of the Republic, the rise of Hitlerism and their influence on national as well as international politics, leave much room for speculation. The reports about Jew-baiting, the contradictory pronouncements of Nazi leaders, the compulsory silence of critical public opinion, all these present some aspects of recent happenings, but they certainly fail to convey understanding. It is said that Germany has lost many friends in England; expressions like barbarism, dangerous nationalism, etc., occur in every discussion on the subject. Indeed, the most unfavourable image of Imperial Germany shows its face through the ‘National Revolution at least to the average Englishman.

It is a difficult task to give an impartial view about a national upheaval when confronted with suspicious public opinion and still more when the writer, for different reasons, has much in common with that opinion. Hitlerism, until now, has little to show that would claim sympathy from the foreign observer. Yet, however much the Nazi movement may be disliked, it would seem that it is incomprehensible in its essential force. This difficulty of understanding, which sometimes expresses itself in astonishment, more often in disappointment over Germany, gives the basis and encouragement to this article.

I remember once hearing a Bolshevik discuss the difficulties of a Soviet representative at an imaginary pan-European rapprochement. I asked him whether ne referred specifically to confusion and embarrassment in ethical issues, and he answered me with a frank outline of the hybrid, and indeed unreal, nature of an entente between traditional Western democracy and the Soviet. He talked, too, I recollect, of the obvious unfruitfulness of external arbitration in matters of justice and discipline in the U.S.S.R.

This was long before M. Litvinoff applied himself (for the benefit of Great Britain) to the defence of the G.P.U. procedure in respect of foreign nationals. If sabotage (an extremely comprehensive term, by the way) is a sin crying to the State for vengeance, and if a man be adjudged guilty by a constitutional tribunal functioning normally, who can complain because the tribunal is the G.P.U., or because (the discharge of its austere commission being a trifle arbitrary) its patients, once convicted, are dispatched swiftly and without show?

As Mr. Hannen Swaffer said some time ago, they are using Art to sell Beauty. The remark was made, I believe, on the subject of the enlightened and progressive windowdressing of the shops in Regent Street, but it applies to quite a large number of things. In the first place, the capital ‘A’ recalls the unfortunate incident described by Anatole France, where the man who had learnt all the Art in the world was suffocated in his own catalogue.

The problem which is called, very impressively, the Adjustment of Art and Life, and which, in theory, has been solved over and over again, is, in practice, the subject of the most discouraging caricature. In spite of intelligent window dressing, of fine buildings and bridges, the ultimate comment, it seems, should be ‘they are using Art to sell Beauty.’

Mr. Gill, with his classical and impersonal precision, again gives us light on the subject.

A hundred years ago eight .young law-students of the Sorbonne gathered in the back room of a Paris newspaper office. Tired of decrying the low ebb to which the Faith had fallen in the chaos of the preceding half-century they had decided to put their hopes to the test of action. Under the patronage of St. Vincent de Paul, whose indefatigable zeal for the poor was not yet forgotten, they constituted themselves into a lay confraternity with the object of achieving their own sanctification through charitable works. Their rule was perfectly simple, in its first article it welcomes all young men anxious to unite in prayer and good work, in the second it states that no work of charity may be regarded as foreign to the aims of the society.

From this modest beginning the Society has grown from strength to strength, so that in May of this year representatives of provincial Councils from the four comers of the earth met in Paris to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the foundation. Instead of merely stirring the youth of France to a proper sense of its responsibility, the Society has come to be one of the most active spiritual organisations for Catholic laymen, and as such perhaps the best example of social action in modem times. Yet because its work is done unobtrusively, it is not as well known as it deserves to be outside the humble homes which enjoy its special care. Yet in the course of a hundred years of diligent activity the society has increasingly shown its ability to cope with the multifarious problems which are not and cannot be dealt with directly by the Church.

When a hundred years ago Sivio Pellico published his Le Mie Prigioni, the description of his ten years’ imprisonment in an Austrian fortress, it was with no political purpose. Partly, one may guess, as the result of those terrible years, and partly because, before the intensity of his religious experience during those same years, all else paled and became insignificant, on his release he turned away from politics, and all his writings henceforth would be on religious and moral themes. And if he published the story of his sufferings, it was at the instance of his parish priest, with the sole aim, as he says,

When an eminent Protestant told him that he had been converted to Catholicism by an eloquent passage in praise of confession, Silvio Pellico felt he had not written it in vain. That his book should seize the imaginations of Europe and do more than any other to shake the Austrian domination in Italy, was neither in his expectations nor intentions.

After a short trip to Russia Lord Passfield has published a few articles dealing with Russia and Communism. Russia, according to him, ‘has a will and a plan,’ whether it is the will of the people themselves, or one which has been forcibly imposed upon them, the writer does not tell us, and yet this is precisely what the average reader is anxious to know. Nevertheless, despite this reticence, Lord Passfield conveys a sufficiently clear idea of the only state which has adopted in its totality the teaching of Communism.

To begin with, the population of this Socialist State is strictly divided into classes. At the summit stands a very small minority—the Communist Party. The writer estimates it at one and an half million strong, which represents less than one per cent, of the total population of one hundred and sixty millions. This Communist Party, which does not wish to increase its membership but remains numerically stationary by a process of continuous weeding-out, is, as the writer puts it, the ‘governing class’ holding all power in the State. Next to it stand the candidates for membership. These are selected from another half million whose fidelity to the régime has been tested. Then come various other classes of the population graded according to their economic importance to the State, and lastly the people who have no right to exist in the Socialist State and must be ‘liquidated’ or destroyed not only as classes but as individuals also. These Socialist ‘untouchables’ do not interest Lord Passfield: he knew of their existence, for in one of his articles he has a passing reference to one of such classes, namely the kulaki.

The Ordo Vagorum was already cutting its teeth when Gerdibert was born. But the infant was precocious and caught up with the vagabonds in the second lap; by his majority he was well apace with them. Not officially one of their number, their spirit was his, their doctrine his creed. He was not one of them because circumstances against which his character—more ready to smile winsomely on adversity than to attack it—could not compete, thrust him early into a very different environment. Thanks to the pious impatience of a romantic and rather erratic mother he was clapped into a cloister, sicut denarium furatum in bursam as he said, and hidden with a like despatch from the curious gaze of the world. Gerdibert was certainly in those early years too soft and submitting to be entirely lovable. Yet lovable he was even then, with his mane of fair hair that was always unruly, his brilliant eyes, his chiselled nose, his full yet delicate lips which tempted many a maid and matron, his ready amenity. Perhaps at first he found the cloistral solitude soothing, for it freed him from the matrons with marriageable daughters, a pest by no means confined to our later ages, who pursued him, as he said, sicut leonissae quaerentes quern devorent. His friend Philibert had capped the quotation: ‘quibus resiste fortis in coelibatu,’ adding the Tu autern Domine miserere mihi, for he himself was wed some fourteen years and had spent thirteen and three-quarters regretting it.

In the Church's appeal to common action hardly any sphere of activity has received less attention from either clergy or laity than the universities. This remissness suggests that in the hurried apostolate of our times there is a lack of appreciation of the great importance of university education in the social life of the Church. It cannot therefore be a matter of surprise to those who have had this in mind, to see how in many countries ecclesiastical authorities are now much alarmed by the feelings of distrust and opposition exhibited by the anti-clerical or non-clerical attitude of young intellectuals. As no movement in the Church is more alive to the position of university students than Pax Romana, its annual report may be considered a suitable starting point for some observations on this question.

The administrative secretary, M. Rudi Salat, merely hints at this problem when he says ‘Car pour le travail international catholique futur, la sympathie et la collaboration des théologiens est indispensable.’ The question at issue is, therefore, not only the desirability but even the need of the co-operation of priests and students in catholic activity. That this collaboration is of prime importance can be of little doubt, but it seems that the way in which it should be brought about has not yet been sufficiently discussed.

The world’s a revolving stage, and the scene changes diurnally. Indeed, the admirer of this era of the machine would say that it is, in effect and appropriately enough, a stage supporting a ‘talkie’ screen, for the flicker of changing terrestial affairs occupies the eye of the remote unsleeping observer throughout the twenty-four hours. At our midnight, the light still shines above the earth’s Big Ben, and discussion or action, charged with immanence of immediate influence on the life of man, is taking place half way, east or west, towards the other side of the globe.

While, as always, we know not what to-morrow will bring forth, we dare no longer tempt fate by forecast. If a state of war does not formally exist in the Far East, war is proceeding in actual fact, tentatively or may be very explosively, with a prompt possibility of louder local repercussions, and a more remote chance of extensive international complications. At the same time two men sit over a cup of tea in Washington, and their talk may decide the fate of mankind for generations and may reinforce or disintegrate the very foundations of our civilization.

Vedic tradition envisages the voyage of the individual after death as a passing on from one plane of being to another; and though there is the possibility of perpetuity on any given plane until the End of Time, when all Determinations are resolved, there is no conception of the possibility of a return to any past state. The later doctrine of reincarnation, in which the possibility of a return to a previous condition is conceived, seems to reflect an edifying tendency of the religious and psychological extensions, perhaps incorporating popular, non-Vedic elements.

The voyage has its end on the Farther Shore of the Sea of Life. When land is made there, the contingent Self knows itself as the Supreme Self, absolute space in the heart is known as the absolute space body of Being and Non-Being, and the Sea of Life is counter-seen by the Self as the multiplicity of its own identity. Voyaging, we are given intimations of that Paradise in Union consummating Thought, in Ecstasy consummating Will, and in the Consent of Art; knowledge, love, and work becoming Pure Act. There is in fact an ever present possibility of Immediate Enfranchisement by return to the Centre of our Being, to the Eternal Now, one and the same wherever and whenever we may be, in Heaven or on Earth. But as we are speaking in terms of Time, the possibility of severing in this way at one stroke all the knots of the heart remains only virtual. What we foresee is an Enfranchisement reached by a process of ripening and preparation; our ado is not with the Comprehensor, but the Wayfarer.

Mr. Dudley Wright’s note on Charles Lamb and St. Thomas (Blackfriars, February, 1933) opens up an attractive question which has never been treated with any fullness—namely, how many of our eighteenth and early nineteenth century writers were familiar with the works of the Angelic Doctor.

In 1814 Hallam wrote as follows:

‘Perhaps I may have imagined the scholastics to be more forgotten than they really are. Within a short time I have met with four living English writers who have read parts of Thomas Aquinas: Mr. Turner, Mr. Berington, Mr. Coleridge, and the Edinburgh Reviewer (Macaulay). Still, I cannot bring myself to think that there are four more in this country who can say the same,’

In these days of widespread anxieties with little trust, owing to small belief, anything, any influence which may bring assurance, in whatever degree, should be welcomed. It is fortitude based on confidence that we need, as we face the issues of life seeking how they may emerge, whether to our welfare or our undoing, before all things asking—do we see guidance or is it chaos that confronts us?

It is to the great towns and cities, particularly the industrial and manufacturing, that we would draw attention here, and to London imprimis, the World City; our quest —how these influence their indwellers especially their outlook visual and mental; for the business of the thronging multitudes is wont to obscure the sight by interposing a pall of smoke and dust betwixt them and the skies. Nor is this all of obscurity that results from the activities of men, for strange to say their very efforts to illumine the darkness of their thoroughfares by night, do but hide the more effectively the lights of heaven: —in the glare of the street lamp even thy glories, Orion, are extinguished; and thus it comes about that the more brilliant the near light, the more are our eyes blinded for far-vision, to our incalculable loss.