Perils from without assail the Catholic Church openly throughout the centuries. Perils from within threaten more insidiously.

At the close of the Middle Ages the invading armies of Islam threatened continually the faith of Christendom, and the good estate of the Holy See; while within the seeds of disaffection, neglected because unseen, ignored so blandly and when visible so virulently denounced, germinated in every land of Europe north of the Alps and Pyrennees. The Mohammedan hosts were driven back. Rome was sacked by the Lutheran troops of the Catholic emperor, the success of Protestantism accomplished the break-up of the Catholic unity of Christendom.

The peril from without, quite a real peril, failed to overthrow Christendom, and in Europe (though hardly in Asia, and certainly not in Africa) the faith of Islam has steadily diminished. But Protestantism, the peril from within (for the men who made the Protestant Reformation were all Catholic priests or Catholic laymen), survives throughout the world, and is for ever threatening the faith and morals of Christian people.

The body politic is sick, and physicians crowd to the bedside. We must surely still be very rich, for only the rich ever have so many doctors. It is the paradise of the diagnostician. Take up any paper or review, and you will find some symptom of the general disease explained: get this right, they say, and health will return. Unfortunately, the doctors do not agree, and this is not really surprising. If you are ill, the doctors may disagree about the treatment, they may even diifer in their diagnosis, but they are at least agreed about one thing, and that thing is health. Here the parallel breaks down hopelessly; there are nearly as many different ideas of social health as there are diagnoses. The patient may sometimes be excused for feeling that he prefers the disease he already has to the other disease that he is promised as a cure. And it is not as if the notion of health were always a reasoned thing. All kinds of preferences based, however unconsciously, on prejudice or personal taste and convenience have their say in it. If you doubt this, read Mr. Clayton’s article in the December Blackfriars, apply the method to yourself, and then plead Not Guilty, if you can. This is, in brief, the case for Catholic diagnosis of the public disease, for Catholicism knows what health is, and therefore knows what is disease and what is not. Not that individual Catholics may not be mistaken; failure to apply their own principles to themselves will make them as liable to prejudice and selfinterest as other men. But the principles are there, clear and ascertainable and constant, and for this reason alone Catholic diagnosis would be irreplaceable.

If the poorer classes were to regulate the expansion of their families, as the middle and upper classes have long been doing, the hideous poverty now so widely rampant would disappear; throughout the world there would be a higher standard of living, and machinery would no longer dominate a large section of the population, but would usefully minister to the expanding wants of man.—Mr. Harold Cox, in a letter to The Times.

Wycliffe was no Friar but a practical reformer.

—Sir Charles Mallet, in the Oxford University Handbook.

On the occasion of my visit to the radio station, Father Gianfranceschi took from the folder in his desk an excellent photograph of a beautiful German moving-picture actress and displayed it with evident pride. ‘This just came from Berlin by wireless,’ he explained.—From an article, Modernizing the Vatican, in The Commonweal.

Like The Tablet, our French contemporary (La Croix) endures obloquy from its adversaries, which is a Note or Mark of Catholic faithfulness.—The Tablet.

Those who are familiar with the writings of M. Jacques Maritain will remember his summary of the ancient and mediaeval teaching upon art. The foundation of these doctrines was tha distinction between the speculative and the practical reason. In the first category were placed philosophy and pure science, in the second, action and making. Any man seeking knowledge, directing his actions or making objects, was equipped for his task by a habitus, a virtue which (perfecting and directing his natural gifts) could be perfected itself by correct training and right use.

The maker, artist, or artisan, working in matter, gave it a shape or form already conceived in his mind. The genesis and perfection of this spiritual form depended upon the end in view, the degree of habitus in the artist and his sincerity in the use of his gift. The form once achieved, the difficult work of individualising it in matter demanded skill, discipline, technique. The end and principle of the whole operation, however, was the intellectual form without which no art was possible. The genesis of the form requiring a true intellectual habitus, a right appreciation of the end in view; the shaping of the matter demanding a just estimate of its possibilities and an adequate ordering of the means to the end, it is clear the basis of the classical theory of making is the reason. Reason being the distinctive mark of man, we may qualify this doctrine as essentially human.