Is any religion better than none? The Church of England has evidently come to this conclusion, for it is hard to believe that any other alternative would have led the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London to give a personal ‘commission’ at Lambeth and St. Paul’s to an American Lutheran minister and a mixed crowd of five hundred amateur evangelists of every religious denomination for the purpose of converting London. I think it is true to say that fifteen years ago this could not have happened, and it is little less than a confession of spiritual penury that it can happen now. That the Bishop of Calcutta is sponsoring the Group Movement ‘Campaign’ has, perhaps, something to do with this official patronage, but nevertheless there is little that accords with the traditions and beliefs of the best type of Anglicanism in this strange mingle-mangle of Lutheran pietism, psycho-analytic methods and modern publicity propaganda.

I Wish, in this paper, to say something about the spirit in which theology should be studied. I begin with a quotation for the length of which I must crave your indulgence :

On a sunny morning in August I walked out of Donauworth and took the straight tree-lined road which leads up the Danube valley towards Ulm. The time was still one for harvesting; peasants dotted the wide and open plain, piling bullock waggons with their sheaves, or eating the midday ration in the shade.

A warm silence hung over contented fields. Geese gossiping down the village street, a white church rising among its cottages—these were the things of yesterday and tomorrow, the gentle ornaments of peace.

In my mind’s eye, as drew nearer the battlefield of Blenheim, I saw other and less soothing symbols: English red-coats, lively with the rumour of action, tramping along the same road, with their heavy cannon lumbering behind.

From the church tower at Tapfheim, on the evening of August the twelfth, 1704, Marlborough and Prince Eugene were watching the infantry of France, as they moved without suspicion of alarm to their encampment on the vast plain before them. And even I, walking through Tapfheim in the year 1933, could sense a little of their exaltation.

On a bright day in June of 1376, With the mistral blowing the brown waters of the Rhone into waves, and the sunlight shining on the walls of the new palace at Avignon, a woman on horseback entered beneath the town gates and went to her lodgings in the twisting streets. The woman was one of twenty-five children of a poor Sienese dyer. Persuaded of her religious vocation, she had persisted in a life of chastity and self-discipline, become a Dominican Tertiary, and, while still carrying on her household duties, had acquired a reputation in Siena for sanctity and for that power, miraculous in the uneducated daughter of an ordinary citizen, of solving the most difficult problems with a sanity and common sense, a grasp of principle, and an insistence in purpose, which are the marks of great Saints alone. Her reputation had spread through Siena, through Italy, and to-day she was entering Avignon as the mediator between the city of Florence and the Frenchman Pierre Roger, become Pope at Avignon. The embassy, however, was not the main purpose in the remarkable woman’s mind. She had quietly resolved in the back streets of Siena to bring back the Pope from Avignon to Rome.

‘With Uriel: a hymn in praise of Divine Immanence,’ said The Times on July 28th, 1933, ‘Mr. W. Force Stead takes his place among the foremost of to-day’s poets. Uriel may be called a philosophical poem, but it springs radiantly lyrical from an immediacy of experience. There is abundant testimony both to faith and to poetry in this lovely work.’

On August 17th, 1933, Mr. Stead was received into the Catholic Church. The week before he had resigned his post as Chaplain and Fellow of Worcester College. For three years he had been the only American to hold a Fellowship in Oxford; he had begun his career in the American Consular Service, after a course in the University of Virginia at Charlotteville—a course which is still remembered there. Though he has never fully given up his American citizenship or lost his love for the United States, it could hardly be said that Mr. Stead is typical of his republic: he is, it is true, devoted to the United States, but his loyalties are centred in the traditions of the Southern aristocracy from which he sprang: he is a fervent Tory and monarchist; and he has found most of his inspiration in Europe, and especially in the English countryside.

If we consider religious art, not as an end in itself, but from the religious point of view, we may distinguish two processes at work, the one a perfecting, the other a beginning. Just as machinery has two purposes, the one to produce leisure, the other to use that leisure, so two similar purposes may be discovered in religious art. It is either intended to lead from the senses to internal acts of religion —Faith, Hope, Charity and the rest; or it is intended to express these acts in the external world of sense. Men will sing to keep up their spirits under depressing conditions; but they will also sing for the very joyousness felt in their hearts. A sculptor may carve a statue of Our Lady because he venerates her deeply and wishes to express his devotion, or because the priest requires one in the village church to encourage among the villagers devotion to Our Lady. These may be termed the inward and the outward movements of religious art; for the one leads in from sense perception to prayer, the other goes out from prayer to the visible manifestations of prayer. In other types of art these movements may be quite accidental. In religious art they follow its primary purpose.

The above title may cover a wide field of social problems and of social legislation. Indeed, modern society, faced with a very complex social situation arising from a highly developed economic structure, has built up a system of laws, hardly less complex than the social conditions they were intended to deal with. Yet despite factory acts, social insurance schemes, and trade union law, the existing English law is insufficient to deal with the industrial problems of the present time. Some measures are necessary to alter the legal status of labour and of industrial relations. Although practical steps along these lines have beert frequently discussed at the meetings of Royal Commissions, and although some proposals of this nature have actually been realized in various English industries, the subject is still unfamiliar to the English public. Yet great importance is attached to such a way of social reform in other countries and considerable success has been achieved by it in Italy and Germany. While in the former of these two countries trade unions and employers’ organizations have become mere instruments of the State—a solution hardly acceptable in a country like England—in Germany there developed after the war a well-balanced Labour Law of whose particular characteristics many may recommend themselves to people in this country. We will therefore describe the status of Labour and of industrial relations as created by the new German Labour Law, comparing it with conditions in England.

Dr. Kidd’s book on the Counter-Reformation is at once a delight and a disappointment. It is a delight because of the skill with which a wealth of knowledge and historical insight, together with a strong sympathy with the Catholic mentality of the sixteenth century, have been compressed and woven into the lucid, scholarly narrative of 262 pages. It is a disappointment because the author's strict following of the conventional treatment of the Counter-Reformation and his attempted adherence to an artificial chronological terminus ad quem, have prevented him from seeing all round his subject and from shedding any really new illumination upon it. Like most of his predecessors he begins with spirituality and ends with politics. At the beginning it is the Oratory of Divine Love, the new Orders, the Exercises, that confront the reader; at the end it is the details of wars, plots, and dynastic policies that hold the attention. The inevitable implication is not wholly justified. Though Dr. Kidd naturally sees that the Counter Reformation was more than a mere reaction of medievalism against Protestantism, he is writing at the end as if the classification of territories lost or won, and by what external agencies, were the whole of his business. On any adequate interpretation of the Counter-Reformation— by which I mean one that recognizes in it a positive and potentially self-sufficient internal development of Catholicism, in touch with all the new forces of the sixteenth century, though undeniably much stimulated and indeed gravely modified by the fight against Protestantism; on any such interpretation, surely, for example, that wonderful and much studied flowering of French Catholicism in the early seventeenth century is as much, if not more, of its essence than the Wars of the League?