Belief in the holy Catholic Church is required on precisely the same terms and for the same reasons as is belief in the other mysteries and dogmas of the faith, such as the Blessed Trinity and the Incarnation. A passage in St. Matthew’s Gospel, the Confession of St. Peter, provides a good analogy for focussing the Mystery of the Church. Our Lord asks of His disciples concerning Himself: ‘Whom do men say that the Son of Man is?’ The different answers given: John the Baptist, Elias, Jeremias, one of the prophets, imply agreement in one thing, namely that Jesus Christ is a man, evidently a religious man and seemingly one who comes front God. Those Jews who made these judgments were right in confessing the humanity of Christ; they were wrong in not distinguishing Him from other men. For them He was only a man, though worthy to be compared with the great religious figures of their history. But He was also truly God and the Son of God. It is the recognition of this profound truth by St. Peter that moves our Lord to His eulogy that ends with the prediction of St. Peter’s position in the Church.

Our Blessed Lord said to His disciples: Now I call you not servants ... but I have called you friends. And to the Jews He said: You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

St. Paul wrote to the Galatians of the freedom wherewith Christ hath made us free; and told them: Stand, and be not holden in again with the yoke of servitude.

The cry of freedom is one to which men have always, throughout their history, rallied. That cry of freedom, in particular, which is in the New Testament has been sounded again and again by the Church throughout its history; so that, as Pope Leo XIII declared, whenever men ‘have attacked the liberty of man, the Church has defended it and protected this noble possession from destruction.’ ‘The powerful influence of the Church,’ he said again, ‘has ever been manifested in the custody and protection of the civil and political liberty of the people.’

I stood on the river-bank near Bablockhythe and watched a snake swim straight across the water. He was quite a small snake and made little stir, so that at first I saw only his head moving. It seemed odd in a fish to swim with its head out of the water. Every now and then he stopped dead, curved in the sun quite still; then was off again on his way to the opposite bank. In that silent and remote place the little live thing held all my attention. The form and movement were lovely of course, but they were not the cause of the fascination. They were only signals. What was fascinating was the appearance of Purpose, the way the silence and the swift, steady movement gave me the sense of something being done, a secret intention being followed with the entire body and soul of the creature.

It is always so with animals. They go so entirely to their ends. They are utterly absorbed in doing something. Hence their gravity, their sincerity, their entire lack of both humour and vulgarity. They may play but they do not joke, they may strut about before their females, but they are never self-conscious. They are wonderfully at ease. And how their actions interweave! A million actions and movements converged on that snake to make him swim the river at that precise moment, and he, displacing the water, was moving the whole Thames.

Every one is present to God. They have been brought from non-existence to existence at the appointed time by His eternal, unchanging knowledge. They are kept in existence through every change and adventure of their lives by that same knowledge. Their very freedom is given by it; every deed and venture of our journey to God is caused by it.

God is present to every one; but not to all in the same way. He has planned creation with each as a part, but not all know it, and of those who know, some will not accept. And of those who accept, some do so grudgingly, while others intently gather themselves to God, loving Him with all their heart and with all their mind and with all their soul and with all their strength. Nor do these last forget the second commandment of the law: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

In the enigmatic future that faces us there is one thing becoming more certain with every succeeding day of the war—the old order of civilization is passing and some new order marches swiftly down upon us. But though we know now that this new order will be here soon, we cannot tell what it will be like. It may even turn out to be no order at all, but only chaos. Hitler promises a new order, and while we are confident that he will never achieve it, we must recognize that some cataclysmic change inevitably awaits us, a revolution that will turn the whole system on which we now depend upside down. Every day brings with it death to soldiers and civilians, destruction to property; every hour records the expenditure of incalculable fortunes upon the unproductive works of warfare. As all the material benefits acquired by modern industry are poured out in a vast torrent, the capitalistic and industrial order that set up those material standards is drained of its life’s blood.

The last war produced a new order of insecurity and unrest even though the actual system of capital and industry received artificial respiration and lingered on. The increasing revolt against authority and the desire for individual freedom for the lowest as well as the highest in society made the old order insecure and led to the reaction of authoritarianism. Order demands dependence and cooperation among the ordered, while antagonism and individual independence split it into fragments.