The past year has been one of intense anxiety for the Catholics of France, and although, after steering a bold course through great dangers, they can for the moment regard the situation with much more confidence than was possible even three months ago, it is too soon to say that their trials or their dangers are yet at an end. Their leaders have at any rate shown themselves capable of making the utmost use of their tactical advantages, which have given them, in the present time of national crisis, a strength out of all proportion to their numbers in relation to the rest of F ranee. And so long as the present critical conditions continue, the Catholics, as a powerfully organized and coherent minority, will be able to exert constant pressure on any Government which contemplates a policy of internal discord.

Yet less than six months ago M. Herriot was still in power, fulminating against the usurpations of the ‘clerical reaction’ during the years of the war and threatening to carry out a whole programme of anti-Catholic legislation. He had already decreed the abolition of the Vatican Embassy. His Minister for the Interior had carried out a thorough investigation all over France to discover how many members of the proscribed religious communities had come back to France, with a view to expelling them once more. His Education Minister was delivering violent tirades against the Jesuits and the other teaching orders, and was preparing a complete scheme for re-establishing a State monopoly of education all over the country.

It is an interesting experiment to take ten Catholics at haphazard and to ask them two questions :

1. Do you buy a Catholic weekly paper?

2. What chiefly do you buy it to read?

The experiment is interesting and even illuminating because of the curious judgements passed, the strange motives given, and the individual character of the replies.

First, to Question i the majority answered that they did not buy it themselves, but that they usually ‘saw’ a Catholic paper, though they could not honestly say that they read it through. They ‘looked at it,’ which seemed to mean that they scanned headlines and sometimes for some particular reason read an article or heard bits of an article read out to them at home. Indeed, the usual answer given to Question i was, ‘No, I don’t buy it myself, but they usually take it at home.’ Naturally Question produced a far greater variety of answers. Here it would not be possible to give any ‘majority report’ ; almost each had a different reason for buying it. Those who bought a Catholic paper for themselves and regularly, answered for the most part that their chief motive was that they supposed it was the proper thing to do. You went to Mass and ate fish on Fridays, and sent your children to a Catholic school and had a Catholic paper in the house, and you did these things more or less as part of the general scheme of salvation. Duty, not pleasure, was evidently the dominant motive for supporting the Catholic press!

How hymns have been serviceable to man in the service of his Creator who needs to be told? The words et hymno dicto resound in the memory . . speaking to one another in psalms and hymns. . . The Liturgy has used more hymns in the past than it does to-day. Those who know Dreves’ Analecta Hymnica must conceive hymns as in tens of thousands. The many of what have been are no longer wanted; yet the Dreves collection may serve the divine worship at some later day.

Hymns and spiritual songs are needed too for private and semi-private use. What have we for those of English speech? It is better to let this rhetorical question hang without its pendant. To ask why there is no English hymn in this or that authorized collection which a Christian could without blushing sing, for example, before the Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, equals a more direct question : Whose office is it to write English hymns? Suggested answer: Dryden, Crashaw, Southwell, Coventry Patmore, Michael Feld, Lionel Johnson, Gerard Hopkins. Lengthen the list to fancy.

I choose great and reputable names of poets who could make some defence against the charge of neglect to perform an obvious duty. Can living men and women who have inherited the charge return even so supportable an apology as their predecessors?

In this meagre collection it would seem as if the stones had cried out. ‘If those wont, some one must’ is almost legible in Mr. Sainsbury’s brilliantly printed and ornamented pages.

We have no wish, nor capability, to offer a criticism of the astronomies and mathematics of Professor Einstein. Whilst some of the experts capable of giving a sound judgment are not yet on Einstein’s side, the vast bulk of scientific opinion would seem solidly in his favour. By profession he is a mathematican. If then he has succeeded in giving a new simplification of cosmic mathematics, his life’s work has fitted him for discovery.

But even as far back as Plato it was agreed that it is hard for a mathematician to be a philosopher. If then we offer some criticisms on the philosophy of Professor Einstein, it is not that we who are students of the Scholastic Philosophy are impertinently prying into mathematics, but, on the contrary, a genius in mathematics has been tempted beyond his furrow into the field of Philosophy.

Many attempts have been made to fasten upon Capitalism the ‘blame for the evils of this age. In spite of the unrivalled eloquence of our leaders and the courage of their followers, no one has succeeded in making out an unanswerable case, founded upon unimpeachable authority, until now. It has remained for one unworthy to put his pen to the word, and therefore to the argument, which shall give Capitalism, and its attendant monster, Industrialism, their death-blow. The word is RESPONSIBILITY.

Before we proceed to the unanswerable argument we must name the unimpeachable authority and, as words are useless unless defined and definition is the one thing words lack in these days, we must first of all give definitions. But, we shall find, merely to define the words is to imply the argument. The words being understood, the compatibilities and incompatibilities are obvious. It will only be necessary to add some notes. This we shall do, and the blow will have been struck.

The first and most important thing to do is to define Catholicism; for the Catholic Church is the unimpeachable authority. Here we have our backs against the wall. Unless it be admitted that the Catholic Church speaks with the authority of God Himself, we cannot proceed. It is useless to proceed; for there is no other person or institution that makes even the claim to such authority, and no lesser authority can be called unimpeachable.

If the Reverend John MacEnery (1796-1841), an obscure Catholic priest of Torquay, had not died prematurely, he might have been honoured at the present day with the title of ‘Father’ of English Prehistory. During the first five years of the reign of George IV he made discoveries which undoubtedly proved the existence in England of a prehistoric race more ancient than that hitherto known to archaeologists—Palaeolithic Man. But the conservatism of the scientific world of his day little encouraged, him to press home his discoveries; while lack of funds and ill-health prevented him from bringing them before the public in book form.

As a foreword to the story of MacEnery’s ‘ Systematic observations of Kent’s Hole and other caverns’ in South Devon, of which his monument in the parish churchyard of Tor proclaims him to have been the pioneer, one must recall the state at that period of this type of scientific investigation.

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, geology was but emerging from an elementary stage, and as a separate science and recognised under that name it was barely fifty years old. The work of cave research, however, had been pushed forward in Germany about the end of the eighteenth century; and Cuvier’s marvellous identification of the extinct mammalia from fossil fragments had given it further impetus. In England papers had been read to the Royal Society, in 1817 and 1821, describing fossil bones discovered by workmen while quarrying limestone, at Oreston, for the Plymouth breakwater.

This true story begins in a little English town called Wotton-under-Edge, in the Cotswolds, about half-way between Bristol and Gloucester, and ends in the city of Lille sometime in October in the year 1918.

I am afraid it will be a disconnected, rambling tale, full of digressions and irrelevances. When it all happened, I was one of the many wanderers on the face of France, one in the vast army that was advancing on the heels of the Germans in the last phase of the Great War. Little wonder if in those stirring days the rambling spirit took hold of one’s mind and one’s thoughts. Little wonder if the war of movement, even as a memory, tends to disconnect one’s thoughts. However, the story may recommend itself by its only quality, its truth.

For about six months before becoming a Chaplain to the Forces, I used to say Mass on Sundays at Wotton-under-Edge and at Dursley for the Belgian refugees whom the war had brought into our neighbourhood. We used to call them the ‘Motor Missions,’ because the priest usually travelled to and fro from our monastery at Woodchester on a motor-bicycle.

Among the Belgians at Wotton-under-Edge was one whom I shall call Henri. Henri was a painter. I do not mean that he was a painter in a specialistic sense. He did not produce wild masses of colour on canvas; but he served his fellow-men in a humbler and more effective manner by painting their houses and doors in bold, primary colours. With his colours he could play upon the emotions with all the wizard’s power of a Pied Piper.